From Urumqi, it goes to Salerno. Nobody knows what it really transports. A serious investigation is urgently needed.
by Marco Respinti
![The Urumqi-Salerno train. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-24.jpg)
![The Urumqi-Salerno train. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-24.jpg)
From the Sanping Container Center Station of China Railway Interconnection Corporation Urumqi Branch in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a freight train loaded with “82 containers of special agricultural products from Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment (Group) Co., Ltd.” is heading to Salerno, Italy. The company, incorporated on August 30, 2013, is owned by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The XUAR is the region were Uyghurs, and other Turkic people, are systematically persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“This is the first international train of self-produced agricultural products since the establishment of Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment Group,” and the first China-Europe rail-sea train between Urumqi and Salerno. It started its journey of around 8,500‒10,000 kilometers (depending on estimations and sources) on April 26, 2024, at 11:18. Adopting the rail-sea combined transport mode, when it will reach its destination is uncertain, but usually informed voices say sometimes next week. The “Global Times” saluted it as a “bridge to prosperity.” More likely, it is just another example of the People Republic of China’s (PRC) crimes and serious abuses of human rights.
All rests in fact on the nature of the “agricultural products” that the train is bringing to Italy. While it has proven impossible, so far, to ascertain which goods the convoy is transporting, all the world knows that in the XUAR the PRC has established a vast system of forced labor camps. In those facilities, thousands and thousands of Uyghurs, being guilty only of being Uyghurs, are obliged to work for the regime as modern slaves. They are mainly employed in harvesting cotton and tomatoes, two of the most important natural resources of the region. While about 20% of the world’s cotton comes from the PRC, 84% comes from the XUAR. If it carries products that come from slave and forced labor, a practice which in the PRC is notoriously continuing, the train Urumqi-Salerno must be stopped and should be the last one of its kind.
Table of Contents
Legislation against slave labor in XUAR
This concern and request is the core of a joint letter to the Italian Ambassador to the United States, Mariangela Zappia, sent by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Uyghur American Association, and Safeguard Defenders. Based on scholarly studies and investigative journalism reports, the joint letter urges the Italian government to further investigate. “At the end of last year, democratic allies and international media applauded the Italian Government’s decision to rescind its 2019 Memorandum of Understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative with the People’s Republic of China. Allowing this first-ever […] train—as boasted by PRC propaganda outlets—to enter Italian territory filled with products that are the presumed product of forced labor would send a very stark and opposite message.”
When dealing with the XUAR, that products come from slave labor is always possible. Incontrovertible findings, denied only by the propaganda of the Chinese regime and its allies, led in fact to important legislation. Aptly perfecting a September 2020 ban on some imports from the XUAR, on January 13, 2021, the US Customs and Border Protection halted XUAR cotton and tomato products from entering the United States. Then, the US Congress passed the “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” on December 23, 2021, and on September 14, 2022, the European Commission proposed a similar ban. Finally, on March 13, 2024, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on a regulation prohibiting products of forced labor from being sold in the European Union (EU) market.
In fact, no one wants to see the repetition, in America and in the EU, and elsewhere, of what happened when “American shoppers at Amazon, Walmart, Etsy and grocery delivery apps Instacart and Uber Eats may have unwittingly bought canned tomatoes and pastes produced by Uyghur forced laborers […] which are banned by the U.S. government,” according to “Forbes.” The finance, industry, investments and marketing magazine went on to say: “Tomato brands Nina, Gino, and Zehrat Safa, which have been stocked by third-party sellers operating on Amazon, Walmart and Etsy’s marketplaces, are produced by the Chinese company Hebei Tomato Industry. The food processor, which is based around 200 miles southwest of China’s capital Beijing, states on its website that ‘raw materials come from Xinjiang’ and boasts of the region’s sunshine and climate. Hebei Tomato did not respond to a comment request by press time.” All this was picked and repeated, on March 20, 2024, by “Tomato News,” a newsletter published since 1989 by the International Mediterranean Association of the Processing Tomato and World Processing Tomato Council.
![Tomato harvesting in Xinjiang. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-1-17.jpg)
![Tomato harvesting in Xinjiang. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-1-17.jpg)
Agricultural frauds
As to the Urumqi-Salerno train, no doubt the Chinese regime considers it a first-rate asset. Li Shuanping, director of the “One Belt, One Road” International Cooperation Department of the Development and Reform Commission of the XUAR, said that the launch of this railway line “provides a guarantee for the stability of the international industrial chain and supply chain,” in short, it is a “national trade ‘stabilizer’ and development ‘accelerator.’”
The train is in fact running on the track of the China-Europe Railway Express (CERE), a gigantic system of transportation started 2011‒2013 which is one of the flagships of the ground route of the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).
In mid-March 2024, the “Global Times,” the PRC’s state-run media outlet aimed at foreign countries, underlined that CERE “operated 2,928 trains in January and February, carrying 317,000 20-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers of goods, marking rises of 9 percent and 10 percent year-on-year, respectively. The network has expanded to cover 120 cities in China, and it reaches 219 cities in 25 European countries.” Some 20 days later, by the end of March, those figures had skyrocketed to “4,541 China-Europe freight trains” in the first quarter of this year, “delivering 493,000 TEUs of goods, a year-on-year increase of 9% and 10% respectively.” This brought the total of China-Europe freight trains, from the beginning to March 2024, to “more than 87,000 […], reaching 222 cities in 25 European countries.”
![A CERE train.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-2-14.jpg)
![A CERE train.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-2-14.jpg)
Now, in early August 2023, “Coldiretti” (the Confederazione Nazionale Coltivatori Diretti, the largest association representing and assisting Italian agriculture) and “Filiera Italia” (the joint-venture between the Italian agricultural world and the agri-food industry) denounced a 50% increase of tomato import from the PRC. This was partially due to the scarcity of Italian tomatoes for climatic reasons. However, Chinese tomatoes are connected with slave labor in the XUAR. And fraud is committed too when, in absence of a definitive Italian legislation on the subject, the label “made in Italy” is used for sauces manufactured in Italy but with Chinese tomatoes. Is the forthcoming train from Urumqi involved in the advancement of all this?
Salerno, province of Beijing?
But one wonders why, of all places, the train is going to Salerno, an important center in a region whose excellency for agricultural products surely does not need imports from the PRC (apart from situations of temporary emergency, which cannot anyway excuse frauds and violations of human rights). One also wonders why tomatoes coming from the PRC and used for label frauds can cost half of local Italian tomatoes.
Denunciations of frauds are as old as 2015. Based on research by Adrian Zenz, Director & Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., an investigation done by IrpiMedia and CBC Canada in the Fall 2021 noted that “business along the Sino-Italian route continues apace. Italy is by far the world’s top destination market for Chinese concentrate: more than 97,000 tons arrived in 2020, about 11 percent of Beijing’s total exports. Landings of Chinese concentrate in Italy more than doubled in 2021, with ships landing in the ports of Salerno and Naples almost every day. Traders have always sworn that the raw material is not used in products destined for the Italian market, but in tubes of concentrate and other derivatives sold abroad. [How this] exactly [works], however, is unknown.” Again, Salerno.
But it is not only about tomatoes. Curiously, in 2019 the Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria “San Giovanni di Dio e Ruggi d’Aragona,” the Salerno hospital complex strictly connected with the University of Salerno, signed a collaboration, called “Cross Sciences MediCina” (readers of the Italian language will immediately perceive the word pun between “Medicina,” or “Medicine,” and “Cina,” or “China”) with “Associazione Internazionale LongSha,” chaired by one Doctor Xiao Jian. The launch of the joint venture was sealed by the visit of nine doctors from the city of Xuzhou, located in the Jiangsu province.
![A Chinese delegation visiting the Salerno hospital “San Giovanni di Dio e Ruggi d’Aragona.” From X.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-3-9.jpg)
![A Chinese delegation visiting the Salerno hospital “San Giovanni di Dio e Ruggi d’Aragona.” From X.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-3-9.jpg)
This writer humbly confesses his ignorance, having been unable to find more information on both “Associazione LongSha” (sometimes spelled differently on the web) and its chairperson. I did not even find an English name for the association, which anyway seems to have signed similar agreements with other Italian medical structures in other regions. I would be grateful for more information. The most recent interaction between the Salerno hospital and the Chinese association is dated April 2024. In that occasion it was reported that around sixty Chinese medical doctors were hosted in the Salerno hospital so far.
While in July 2016 it published its first institutional video in Mandarin language, and in October 2018 signed an agreement of collaboration with yet another Chinese institution, the Shanghai University, in March 2024 the University of Salerno inaugurated its academic course in Chinese Law (the third in Italy, after those in the University “Tor Vergata” of Rome and University of Brescia).
Citizens of Salerno may also shop at “MegaCina” (a “gigantic China”), located in the industrial zone of the town, and proud of “displaying 100.000+ items at unequalled prices” in a superstore of 3,000 square meters inaugurated in late 2019. Of course all these Chinese records in a medium-level Italian city have no correlation with one another…
An investigation is needed
We strongly believe in free market and in the market of ideas. Yet, Italian journalist Gabriele Carrer and former minister and ambassador Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, now a Senator, called the attention on several doubtful commercial operations by the PRC in Italy, and now especially the Urumqi-Salerno train.
A careful supplement of investigation is thus needed, given precedents and the notoriety of the CCP’s rule in XUAR. The investigation should be done by the Italian police and by the government of the first ever country in the world to have left the “Belt and Road Initiative” after having suffered a heavy burden of Chinese pressure on its media and politics.