[Opinion piece by Samir Goswami, director of Forced Labor Programs at Global Rights Compliance, and Nyrola Elimä, researcher with expertise in supply chain tracing, forced labor and transnational repression.]

Here is the original paper: Strangling Supply, Exploiting Labour: Inside China’s Five-Year Plan in Xinjiang (pdf)

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China’s continued exploitation of Uyghur people is central to its ambition to dominate global critical mineral markets. With access to cheap energy and coerced labor in Xinjiang, this creates a structural advantage that U.S. companies cannot fairly compete with. When President Trump meets with Xi Jinping in May, he should take advantage of the vital opportunity to raise these concerns directly.

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The new [15th Five-Year] plan’s overriding priority is to position China at the “forefront of global science and technology,” by eliminating critical technological dependencies and ensuring that its development trajectory cannot be disrupted by external pressure or supply chain coercion. The success of these goals depends on securing reliable access to raw materials at scale. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is central to that.

For example, Xinjiang holds 83.5 percent of China’s beryllium reserves, a material with no substitute in semiconductor manufacturing. China controls 99 percent of global lithium iron phosphate battery production, much of it anchored in Xinjiang’s mineral wealth.

The Chinese Communist Party also exploits Xinjiang’s abundant coal reserves to provide subsidized energy that enables mineral processing. Industrial electricity in Xinjiang costs approximately 2.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. In the U.S., it’s roughly 7.5 cents, and 22 cents in the European Union. Since energy accounts for 40 to 60 percent of processing costs for materials like titanium, magnesium and lithium, this gap creates a structural competitive advantage that Western producers simply cannot match on their own terms.

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China is using artificial intelligence to monitor and profile Uyghur workers, classifying them in real time and directing them into forced labor. Non-compliance is not an option. Refusal can be viewed by the government as sympathizing with “extremist” ideologies, which could lead to incarceration.

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At this year’s two sessions, the Chinese government also passed the Ethnic Unity and Progress Law. This is a sweeping piece of legislation that establishes Mandarin-first policies across all official and educational settings and standardizes teaching materials to promote a single Chinese identity. The law turns the stated goal of “ethnic unity” into a legal requirement across society. It limits what people can say and see, while increasing surveillance and tightening government control.

This isn’t mere rhetoric — when policies are set in five-year plans, local governments move quickly to carry them out. On the same day the new five-year plan was released, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and 18 state owned companies signed 92 agreements across energy, critical minerals, computing and manufacturing. These developments point to a broader push to scale up Xinjiang’s role across the full industrial chain.

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[Edit typo.]