Xinjiang

Xinjiang (officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) is China's largest administrative division by area, covering roughly 1.66 million square kilometres in the country's north-west and bordering eight countries including Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. It is home to approximately 25 million people, including the Turkic-speaking Uyghur population, alongside HAN Chinese, Kazakhs and other groups. The region holds significant oil, gas and coal reserves and sits on the overland routes of China's Belt and Road Initiative.

From around 2017, Chinese authorities constructed a network of detention facilities holding an estimated one million or more Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, documented through satellite imagery, leaked government documents and survivor testimony. The United States has designated the programme as forced labour and, since 2022, has enforced the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, creating a rebuttable presumption that goods made wholly or partly in Xinjiang involve forced labour.

In 2009, following ethnic unrest in Ürümqi, China imposed an almost total internet blackout on Xinjiang lasting roughly ten months. That blackout has since become the reference model cited by other authoritarian states building their own censorship infrastructure, and Xinjiang-linked supply chains remain a live reference point in Western forced-labour enforcement.