An article defending the Uyghur region’s salmon industry cites higher incomes and modern technology. Official documents raise a different question: can workers refuse the jobs—or leave them?
by Asiye Uyghur
An article published on the Myanmar-based Chinese-language website Mianhua on October 15, 2026, attacks investigative journalist Ian Urbina over reporting on forced labor concerns in the Uyghur region’s salmon industry. Credited to “Buyidao,” it labels him a professional smear merchant, questions his organization’s funding, and presents the industry’s technological achievements and rising worker incomes as its defense.
Yet the article leaves the central questions unanswered. Could the workers refuse recruitment? Can they resign without adverse consequences? Can they return home?
Higher earnings matter. They do not establish that employment is voluntary. To assess that, we need to know what choices workers can actually make.
The strongest reason to ask these questions comes from the PRC’s own published accounts of its labor programs.
The “Buyidao” article claims that more than 600 farmers and herders became industrial workers in Nilka’s salmon industry, with annual incomes rising from approximately 20,000 to 80,000 yuan. Some, it says, acquired technical qualifications or became company shareholders. It also celebrates automated feeding, underwater cleaning robots, exports, and blockchain traceability.
Even if every claim is accurate, none answers whether workers can reject the employment arrangement or end it.
A technologically advanced company can still operate within a coercive recruitment system. A worker can earn more than before while lacking meaningful control over where they work. These possibilities must be investigated through evidence about recruitment, employment conditions, and freedom to leave.
Product traceability answers another set of questions. It may identify where a fish was raised and how it reached the market. It does not establish whether the person raising or processing it freely chose the job.
An official report published on August 24, 2017, describes the organized transfer of workers from Kashgar and Hotan. Its stated objectives include using employment to manage people, settle them, and maintain stability. The report explicitly identifies the program as a political task requiring the direct attention of senior officials.
The same report lists training in gratitude to the Party, Mandarin, labor discipline, military drills, and occupational skills. It describes officials accompanying transferred workers and a requirement to maintain a stable employment rate above 90 percent.
These statements do not prove that every participant was compelled to work. They do establish that the program served political and administrative purposes extending beyond matching jobseekers with employers.
That distinction matters. When retaining workers becomes an official target, what happens when a worker wants to leave? Does the administration respect that decision, or treat it as a problem to be corrected?
An income figure cannot answer this.
A January 30, 2018, report on the official employment website ChinaJob sets out seven measures for organizing labor transfers from Nilka—the county highlighted in the salmon defense article.
The measures include real-name employment registers and a household information-gathering application. They require officials to track workers’ destinations and update their employment information monthly. They also call for temporary Party and Communist Youth League branches and the placement of personnel inside enterprises to provide follow-up services and management. The county’s annual target was to transfer more than 2,500 workers into stable employment, with a retention rate above 90 percent.
The document also promises legal assistance, protection of workers’ interests, and help for their families. Those provisions deserve acknowledgment. Their inclusion, however, does not resolve how the system responds when an individual’s wishes conflict with an administrative target.
This document does not demonstrate that these measures were applied to a particular salmon producer. It does show why an account of Nilka’s labor conditions must examine the local administrative framework.
A categorical dismissal of forced labor concerns should address that framework. The “Buyidao” article offers no such examination.
Nilka’s measures also belong within a wider policy framework. The regional Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, issued in May 2016, calls for government-led, organized employment transfers to the PRC’s interior provinces. It links assistance from those provinces to social stability, political education, and closer integration, while promoting rural workers’ transformation into industrial workers. In its provisions on rural reform, it encourages land-management rights to move to larger farmers, cooperatives, and agricultural enterprises. Labor mobility and changes in land use were therefore part of the authorities’ planned restructuring of rural life.
The connection between material assistance and ideological objectives is equally explicit in official reporting.
A 2016 report on poverty alleviation in Hotan quotes then-regional Party secretary Zhang Chunxian calling for attention to people’s minds as well as their stomachs. His instructions included incorporating political identification, “de-extremification,” and gratitude education throughout poverty alleviation work.
Here, poverty reduction and political transformation appear within the same policy agenda. An assessment confined to wages omits a central feature of the program as its own leadership described it.
A later official account from the Korla Economic and Technological Development Zone illustrates how administrative involvement could extend into the workplace. Published on September 16, 2018, it describes officials visiting a garment company alongside personnel from a mobile-population management station. The account characterizes some transferred workers’ difficulties through the language of inadequate adjustment, attitudes, and discipline. These are management’s descriptions, rather than independent testimony from workers.
That distinction should guide the wider debate. Official claims that workers are grateful or well adjusted cannot substitute for workers being able to speak freely about their circumstances.
The question of freedom also reaches beyond the factory gate. For a farmer recruited into industrial employment, the ability to leave depends partly on what remains at home. If someone else now operates the household’s agricultural land, can the worker return to cultivation? Who decides, under what agreement, and after how long?
A June 2024 study in Economic Geography makes the connection between land transfers and labor mobility explicit. Drawing on data from 58 counties in the Uyghur region for 2012–2020, it identifies labor transfers as one of the channels through which land transfers promote urban-rural integration. Its recommendations include entrusted management, leasing, and shareholding arrangements, accompanied by training and organized employment transfers for farmers who have transferred their land. The authors describe land transfers and labor transfers as processes that often occur together and support each other.
The study presents these changes as development measures and calls for stronger protection of land rights. It does not investigate coercion. Its relevance lies in the relationship it describes: the movement of workers and the reorganization of agricultural land cannot always be assessed separately.
A March 31, 2018, Xinhua report offers a concrete example from Maralbexi, called Bachu in the report. It describes 100,000 mu of land across 27 villages in four townships being consolidated through land transfers and placed under unified enterprise management. More than 3,600 households participated. The report gives an average annual payment of 500 yuan per mu, with additional dividends if cotton yields exceeded a specified threshold. A farmer and other poor households were hired back to maintain the consolidated fields. The same report cites a county plan to transfer at least one worker from every household by 2020.
The change is substantial. A person who previously cultivated household land can become both a recipient of land-transfer payments and a hired worker within enterprise-managed production. A higher wage tells us about one part of that change. It does not tell us whether the person retains an effective choice over the livelihood that preceded it.
Terminology matters. Land transfers and entrusted agricultural services are not interchangeable. Leasing land-management rights to another operator differs from paying a service provider to plow, sow, manage, or harvest a crop. In the latter arrangement, outsourcing production tasks does not necessarily transfer the farmer’s management rights. The word “entrusted” alone cannot establish who controls the land. The contract, the powers it assigns, and what happens in practice must be examined.
The national Thirteenth Five-Year Plan itself supplies a benchmark. Alongside promoting land transfers and entrusted management, it calls for protection of the land rights of farmers settling in cities and for lawful, voluntary, compensated transfers. Nominal retention of a right is only the beginning of the inquiry. Can an affected farmer enforce the agreement, receive the promised proceeds, challenge its terms, and resume cultivation when entitled to do so?
A regional agricultural department response published in August 2025 describes model service contracts, oversight of service prices, quality, contractual deadlines and liability, and risk monitoring for land-management transfers. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that official documents describe no safeguards. What they do not establish is whether transferred workers can effectively use those protections when their wishes conflict with the demands of local officials or enterprises.
Neither the Maralbexi example nor the academic study establishes the land arrangements of Nilka’s salmon workers. They do establish why the inquiry must include workers’ practical alternatives. A formal right to resign is difficult to assess without knowing whether a person can return home, recover control of an earlier livelihood, or choose another job without administrative interference.
This is the gap in a defense built around prosperity. It describes the rewards of entering industrial employment while leaving the conditions of exit unexplored. Where land and labor arrangements are connected, the freedom to leave must be examined on both sides of that connection.
Urbina’s organization, like any investigative organization, can be questioned about its funding, methods, and conclusions. Scrutiny is legitimate. But a donor’s political connections do not establish that a document is false, a supply-chain link is mistaken, or a worker’s testimony is unreliable.
A substantive rebuttal would identify the disputed evidence and explain what is wrong with it.
The “Buyidao” article also emphasizes Urbina’s alleged lack of travel to the PRC. Yet investigations can draw on corporate records, government publications, trade data, and verified imagery. The relevant question is whether those materials support the findings. Geography alone does not decide their validity.
Instead of demonstrating why particular evidence fails, the article repeatedly asks readers to distrust the person presenting it.
The official documents discussed here make that approach especially inadequate. Whatever judgment readers reach about Urbina, the PRC’s own descriptions of political tasks, accompanying officials, ideological training, and worker tracking remain to be explained.
No particular company should be declared responsible for forced labor solely because it operates within this policy environment. Company-specific allegations require company-specific evidence.
But that standard applies equally to sweeping assurances. Higher wages, export success, and modern equipment cannot establish that workers recruited through organized programs are free from coercion.
A credible response would explain whether workers can refuse recruitment without punishment or administrative pressure; whether they can resign and return home; and whether they can speak to independent investigators without managers or accompanying officials influencing their answers.
These questions arise directly from the authorities’ published descriptions of their programs. Asking them does not deny that employment can improve livelihoods. It asks whether those improvements come with freedom of choice.
The origin of a fish may be recorded from farm to market. A worker’s pay slip may document higher earnings. Neither tells us whether that worker can say no.
Until that question is answered, the defense of the salmon industry remains an account of production and prosperity—not a convincing rebuttal of concerns about coercion.
Asiye Uyghur is a Netherlands-based Uyghur writer and political commentator. Before the closure of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service, she worked there as a political commentator. She currently publishes commentary and analysis in English, Dutch, and Chinese on Uyghur human rights, cultural repression, information control, and Chinese state policies related to Uyghurs through platforms including Global Voices, the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) as a guest contributor, and the Dutch publication “De Kanttekening.”
