Yes, I'm happy to do that.
What we know about poverty alleviation is taken mostly from public documents, but a little bit is based on our interviews as well. It's a program which, on its face, sounds quite benign, but it's the idea of, with all of these minorities who are backwards and poor, living in rural areas, moving them into factory jobs, with the assumption being that that's what they want. There are quotas, so government officials are expected to meet certain quotas.
Typically, as a human rights lawyer, I would say when quotas like this are imposed and there are punishments for not meeting them, you end up with some really bad situations. In this case we're concerned that people are being forced to be part of poverty alleviation, transferred to work, when they don't want to, because the government officials are trying to meet their quotas.
Some of this was confirmed through our interviews. We weren't looking at the time for people who had been in poverty alleviation programming, but we happened to talk to people who had been working side by side with people who were part of the program and had been transferred to factories. It was just like the former detainees were being paid, again, minimum wage for a month over the the course of a year, having to live in dormitories separated from their family, watched at all times, not there by choice. They'd been told that if they didn't engage in this programming and go to work, they would be sent to a detention centre.