UK foreign aid helped to develop Chinese fossil fuel extraction in a region where the oil sector is associated with forced labour risks, a new investigation has found.
The UK funded the regional government in Xinjiang, China to develop carbon capture technology during the height of its mass internment of Uyghur Muslims, a new investigation has revealed.
The investigation was conducted by Land and Climate Review [...] uncovered data from deleted UK government webpages that show quarterly Foreign Office payments between 2016-2018 “to support the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission to systematically assess and identify regional Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) development opportunities, and build capacity for CCUS development in Xinjiang”.
CCUS is a technology designed to reduce pollution from power plants. It uses chemical filters to remove carbon dioxide gas from smokestack emissions. Xinjiang is a major fossil-fuel region for China, containing approximately a third of the country’s onshore oil and gas reserves.
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Laura Murphy, whose research into Uyghur abuses led to a Chinese intimidation campaign now being investigated by counter-terrorism police in the UK, said that the internment of Uyghurs “really ramped up” in 2016. “For the years between at least 2016 and 2020, there was a system of mass internment and arbitrary detention that affected upwards of a million people in the Uyghur region.”
The academic at Sheffield Hallam University said the UK government “absolutely should have known” about this before the aid scheme ended in March 2018.
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Labour transfer schemes – where Uyghurs from rural villages in Xinjiang were forcibly relocated to work across China – were headed by Xinjiang’s Development and Reform Commission as it was receiving UK funding to develop its energy sector. China denies such practices occur.
Zumretay Arkin, Vice President of the World Uyghur Congress, described the investigation findings as “deeply alarming”. She said “the Xinjiang Development and Reform Commission played a central role in the policies that enabled the mass transfer of Uyghur labour. Any cooperation with regional authorities should have been subject to the highest level of scrutiny.”
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