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Wuhan is a key node in China’s tech and electric car revolution and a testing ground for driverless fleets of suspended skytrains, buses and taxis. Parts manufactured in Hubei are linked to everything from one of Europe’s favourite electric vehicles to London’s black cabs. Thousands of cars ship out of factories every day.

But at the other end of the production line, workers are shipped in – thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz every year – from Xinjiang, the western region at the centre of a long-running human rights crisis.

Moved as part of a labour transfer scheme that experts call forced labour, these ethnic minorities are coercively recruited by the Chinese state to travel thousands of miles and fill the manufacturing jobs that recent Chinese graduates have spurned. An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found more than 100 brands whose products have been made, in part or whole, by workers moved under this system.

At least 30 major car manufacturers are potentially implicated – including heavyweights in electric vehicles like Tesla and BYD […] Mercedes, BMW, Volvo and Citroen.

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China’s largest LED chipmaker, Sanan Optoelectronics, has two factories in Fujian and Hubei that take Xinjiang workers transferred by the government. The company makes car lighting for premium brands like Rolls Royce, according to its website. A new partnership in Chongqing manufactures chips for Tesla.

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China’s drive to the top

Since the start of the 2010s, China has funnelled more than $200bn into carmakers, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Spending rose dramatically in 2018 and has stayed high.

Car Valley has been a vital centre for the rise of China’s automotive industry, especially for electric vehicles. Despite its location deep within central China, Car Valley’s international exports have grown steadily in the past five years — reaching more than 100,000 vehicles last year, according to state media.

Cars travel east via river to China’s bustling seaports, and westwards overland by the China-Europe railway. Trade by rail has been buoyed by the Red Sea shipping crisis. A car can roll off the production line in Hubei and arrive at the border of Europe in about two weeks, faster and cheaper than most sea and air freight.

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But Car Valley also “welcomed” at least 1,500 Xinjiang transfer workers in 2022, according to state media reports. The following year, the provincial government said it “helped” more than 4,000 people from Xinjiang into work at 65 Hubei companies.

More followed in 2024. In February that year, Abdulrahman* posted a clip to Douyin, Chinese TikTok, showing himself among a group of ethnic minority workers travelling by train through Xinjiang. All of them were wearing red hats bearing the logo of Xinjiang Zhengcheng Minli Modern Enterprise Services, a labour dispatcher owned by the Xinjiang government.

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The most prominent player in Car Valley is Dongfeng Motors. Founded in the late 1960s by order of Chairman Mao, the state-owned carmaker now builds Europe’s cheapest EV model — Renault’s Dacia Spring — in Hubei. It also produces its luxury EV brand Voyah, available in Europe, in the valley.

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However, China’s EV juggernaut is BYD. Relatively unheard of overseas until recently, the brand has wrested dominance of the global EV market from Tesla and is on a major expansion drive. The maiden voyage of its 7,000-car carrier in January 2024 took thousands of vehicles from China to the Netherlands and Germany. BYD has been endorsed by Leonardo DiCaprio and the footballer Ollie Watkins and nabbed slots on primetime British television to promote its brand.

Evidence gathered during the investigation indicates that at least nine factories tied to BYD – in Hubei, Guangdong, Jiangsu and Tianjin – are also participating in the Xinjiang labour transfer programme.

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Amid a collapsing property market, Chinese consumers have pared back spending, prompting fears of stagflation. The government responded with stimulus packages that incentivised trading in old vehicles for new EVs. “Consumption is an important engine of economic growth," said Liu Ziqing, top official in the Wuhan zone in 2023.

But expanding international exports remains China’s go-to strategy.

In late 2019, the state-owned SAIC Motor was the first to ship electric cars — the re-launched, formerly British MG marque — to Western Europe. The first Polestars, a Geely/Volvo collaboration, arrived the year after. Car exports almost quintupled in the following years to 2023, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. That same year, China claimed the mantle of the world’s top car exporter, and it now builds about double the number of vehicles it sells domestically, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And it’s not just Chinese brands now selling Chinese cars. With overproduction, rising competition and a vicious price war in the Chinese market, foreign car brands with factories in the region have switched from serving local consumers to shipping worldwide. Tesla started shipping cars to the EU from China in 2020.

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The UK is the largest European market for Chinese cars, say analysts. One in ten cars imported is now from China. Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, has said that the Chinese market share for EVs is even higher: accounting for China-built cars, like Teslas, roughly one third of all EVs on UK roads are Chinese.

The UK government has signalled that it won’t levy tariffs on China’s EVs — as the US and EU are doing – a decision that was warmly welcomed by BYD. That means Britain has become “a safe haven market for Chinese manufacturers”, said Schmidt. The government’s energy strategy includes significant commitments on pushing EVs, which it sees as “a crucial step towards achieving the UK’s net zero target”. In early 2025, BYD urged EU lawmakers to “copy the UK”.

Last month, the chancellor Rachel Reeves said she would be happy to ride in a Chinese-made EV. But concerns over forced labour were highlighted later that month when the government said that legislation creating a new state-owned energy company would specify a slavery-free supply chain for its solar panels, largely due to concerns over Xinjiang.

“The UK is increasingly a major dumping ground for products made with forced labor,” said Chloe Cranston at Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest international human rights organisation. Seen a decade ago as at the forefront of legislation to tackle modern slavery, the UK’s approach is now widely seen as obsolete.

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