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Thousands of Muslims from China's Uighur minority group will work under coercive conditions at factories supplying a few of the world's biggest brands, a new report says.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute said this is the next thing in China's re-education of Uighurs.
China has recently detained in regards to a million Uighurs at internment camps, punishing and indoctrinating them.
Officials say the camps are targeted at countering extremism.
The ASPI report comes after a senior Chinese official told reporters in December that members of the minority group being held in the camps had now "graduated".
What does the report say?
Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that a lot more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of your far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps.
ASPI said the Uighurs were moved through labour transfer schemes operating under a central government policy referred to as Xinjiang Aid.
The report said it had been "extremely difficult" for Uighurs to refuse or escape the task assignments, with the risk of "arbitrary detention" hanging over them.
It added that there is proof local governments and private brokers being "paid a cost per head" by the Xinjiang government to organise the assignments, which ASPI describes as "a new phase of the Chinese government's ongoing repression" of Uighurs.
"Our report helps it be really clear that the dispossession of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also offers an extremely strong character of monetary exploitation," the report's co-author Nathan Ruser told the BBC.
"We've this unseen and previously hidden contamination of the global supply chain."
Reports of widespread detentions at internment camps in Xinjiang first emerged in 2018. Chinese authorities said the "vocational training centres" were being used to combat violent religious extremism. But evidence showed many persons were being detained for simply expressing their faith, by praying or wearing a veil, or for having overseas connections to places like Turkey.
Beijing has faced growing international pressure over the issue.
Chinese state media says participation in labour transfer schemes is voluntary. Officials have denied any commercial usage of forced labour from Xinjiang, according to ASPI.
Where are they working?
ASPI said it had recognized 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that were using Uighur labour transferred from Xinjiang since 2017.
It said the factories claim to participate the supply chain for 83 well-known global brands, including Nike, Apple and Dell.
At the factories, ASPI said the Uighurs were typically forced to reside in segregated dormitories, have Mandarin lessons and "ideological training" beyond working hours, were subjected to frequent surveillance and banned from observing religious practices.
ASPI said foreign and Chinese companies were "possibly unknowingly" involved with human rights abuses. It called on them to conduct "immediate and thorough human rights due diligence" on their factory labour in China.
The Washington Post visited a factory mentioned in the report, which produces trainers for sports giant Nike. It said it resembled a prison, with barbed wire, watchtowers, cameras and a police station.
"We can walk around, but we can not return back [to Xinjiang] on our very own," one Uighur woman told the newspaper at the gates of the factory in the town of Laixi.
Nike told the Washington Post it had been "focused on upholding international labour standards globally" and that its suppliers were "strictly prohibited from using any sort of prison, forced, bonded or indentured labor."
Apple also said it was "dedicated to making certain everyone in our supply chain is treated with the dignity and respect they deserve", while Dell said it would check out the findings.
