The workers in standard-issue blue jackets stitch and glue and press together about eight million pairs of Nikes each year at Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co., a Nike supplier for more than 30 years and one of the US brand’s largest factories.

They churn out pair after pair of Shox, with their springy shock absorbers in the heels, and the signature Air Max, plus seven other lines of sports shoes.

However, hundreds of these workers did not choose to be here: they are ethnic Uighurs from China‘s western Xinjiang region, sent here by local authorities in groups of 50 to toil far from home.

After intense international criticism of the Communist Party’s campaign to forcibly assimilate the mostly Muslim Uighur minority by detaining more than a million people in re-education camps, party officials said last year that most have “graduated” and been released.

But there is new evidence to show that the Chinese authorities are moving Uighurs into government-directed labour around the country as part of the central government’s Xinjiang Aid initiative.

“We can walk around, but we can’t go back [to Xinjiang] on our own,” said one Uighur woman in broken Mandarin as she browsed the street stalls at the factory gate on a recent afternoon.

Nervous about being seen talking to a reporter, she quickly scurried away.

When their shifts end, the Uighur workers – almost all women in their 20s or younger – use hand gestures and rudimentary Mandarin to buy dried fruit, socks and sanitary pads at the stalls.

Then they walk around the corner, past the factory’s police station – adorned with Uighur writing telling them to “stay loyal to the party” and “have clear-cut discipline” – to dormitories where they live under constant supervision.

The Uighur workers are afraid or unable to interact with anyone in this town, north of Qingdao, beyond the most superficial of transactions at the stalls or in local stores, vendors have said.. But the catalyst for their arrival here is well understood. Read more

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