Under the colossal chimney stacks of coal-fired power stations and their billowing white smoke, the uniformed employees arrive for work.
They clock in at factories dotted along the bleak fringes of the Gobi desert in northern China to make a material that has been essential to the world’s green revolution.
The silicon they help to produce will later begin a journey around the world. It will end up on millions of solar panels that line the roofs of British homes and state buildings. They will be stacked in rows to create solar farms.
Yet many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.
They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.
At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.
The issue took centre stage in British politics this week when MPs were asked to vote on a measure to prevent a new state-owned energy company from buying solar products linked to slavery. Labour MPs were whipped to vote against the proposed amendment to the Great British Energy Bill.
For Kearns, who has spent years campaigning on the issue, the situation was beyond depressing. “To see not a single Labour member vote for the amendment was extraordinary,” she said.
It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.
But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.
It poses a conundrum for Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, whose Great British Energy (GBE) is poised to invest £180 million of taxpayer money in solar products for schools and hospitals.
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How exactly Xinjiang’s factories use forced labour to supply the solar industry remains shrouded in secrecy under China’s oppressive state controls. Despite increased scrutiny in recent years, the situation for the Uighur community is worse than ever. Analysts believe the use of these labour programmes has increased and espionage laws introduced in 2023 mean that exposing oppression is even more challenging.
‘Poverty alleviation scheme’
Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.
While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.
The industrial processes most reliant on forced labour in Xinjiang are the extraction of quartz and its conversion into metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS) in electric arc furnaces. MGS is converted to polysilicon at sprawling production plants where the refining towers and futuristic lattices of metal piping stand in stark contrast to the barren Xinjiang landscape. It is this material that is manipulated and sliced to form solar cells.
The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.
One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.
Hoshine Silicon was blacklisted by the United States in 2021. China has insisted its programmes in Xinjiang are to prevent terrorism and that camps are for “re-education” purposes. Some prominent producers have insisted they do not take part in labour programmes.
Yet the expert whose research has helped to expose the solar industry’s links to the abuse of Uighurs believes those promises are hollow. “Even if a polysilicon plant itself is not using forced labour in Xinjiang, they are very highly likely to be sourcing forced labour-mined quartz or metallurgical-grade silicon,” Laura Murphy said. “It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.”
Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.
In January the US Department of Homeland Security added another five solar supply chain companies to its prohibited list. Crawford, who has worked with Murphy, said he would “bet large sums” that solar cells from three of those producers are appearing in UK products.
The hardline US approach has forced the industry to respond. Companies are racing to move their supply chains away from Xinjiang and production is springing up in Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. Having accounted for 45 per cent of world’s polysilicon in 2021, Xinjiang now produces an estimated 18 per cent, according to the industry expert Johannes Bernreuter.
Despite solar firms seeking to break ties with Xinjiang, output from the province remains steady and new factories are appearing. Somebody, somewhere, is buying their goods.
‘Morally outraged’
It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.
Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.
In blocking the amendment, the government insisted that GBE will have its own rigorous supply chain checks. The industry body Solar Energy UK has developed a certification scheme, though critics question its rigour.
For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. Pointing to the success in America, she said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.
“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”
