Summary

The car industry is fulfilling Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2014 ambition to transform the country into “an automobile power.” Domestic and foreign manufacturers in China produced and exported more cars than any other country in the world in 2023. Chinese companies also produce and export billions of dollars of parts used by global carmakers, from electric vehicle batteries to alloy wheels. Many of the industry’s biggest brands, including BYD, General Motors, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen, use China as a manufacturing and supplier base, a vital sales market, or both. Cars made in China are increasingly on the streets of Brussels, London, Mexico City, Sydney, and even New York.

But while the Chinese government has welcomed car companies’ investments on its own terms, it has so far shown hostility to the human rights and responsible sourcing policies many carmakers profess to apply across their businesses. Almost a tenth of the world’s aluminum, a key material for car manufacturing, is produced in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang or XUAR), a region in northwestern China, where the Chinese government is conducting a long-running campaign of repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have perpetrated crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, including arbitrary detentions of an estimated one million people at the height of the crackdown, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, separation of families, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights, as well as subjecting Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities to forced labor inside and outside Xinjiang.

Despite the risk of exposure to forced labor through Xinjiang’s aluminum, some car manufacturers in China have succumbed to government pressure to apply weaker human rights and responsible sourcing standards at their Chinese joint ventures than in their global operations. Most companies have done too little to map their supply chains for aluminum parts and identify and address potential links to Xinjiang. Confronted with an opaque aluminum industry and the threat of Chinese government reprisals for investigating links to Xinjiang, carmakers in many cases remain unaware of the extent of their exposure to forced labor. Consumers should as a result have little confidence that they are purchasing and driving vehicles free from links to abuses in Xinjiang.

Aluminum is used in dozens of automotive parts, from engine blocks and vehicle frames to wheels and battery foils. Carmakers accounted for approximately 18 percent of all aluminum consumed worldwide in 2021, according to the International Aluminum Institute (IAI), an aluminum industry group. Aluminum is particularly important to electric vehicles, with its light weight increasing the distance a car can travel before being recharged. The auto industry’s demand for aluminum was projected to double between 2019 and 2050, according to the IAI, with China, which produced almost 60 percent of global supply in 2022, poised to benefit from the increased demand.

The Chinese government has made Xinjiang a hub for heavy industry, including aluminum production, even as rights violations against Uyghurs have increased. Xinjiang’s aluminum production has grown from approximately one million tons in 2010 to six million in 2022. More than 15 percent of the aluminum produced in China, or 9 percent of global supply, now comes from the region.

Xinjiang produces more aluminum than any country outside of China. Xinjiang’s aluminum smelters use the region’s abundant coal supplies to produce the large quantities of electricity needed for aluminum production. Xinjiang possesses none of the bauxite ore needed to make aluminum. Instead, alumina, an intermediate product produced from bauxite, is shipped thousands of kilometers to the XUAR from elsewhere in China for conversion to aluminum using cheap coal power. Globally, the aluminum industry emits about one billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent each year, around 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, in large part due to its heavy reliance on coal-fired electricity. Chinese producers emit 23 percent more CO2 equivalent than the global average.

The link between Xinjiang, the aluminum industry, and forced labor is Chinese government-backed labor transfer programs, which coerce Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim communities into jobs in Xinjiang and other regions.

Independent field research on labor transfers in Xinjiang is not currently possible due to Chinese government restrictions across the country and within Xinjiang specifically. However, Sheffield Hallam University and NomoGaia, a nongovernmental organization, and Horizon Advisory, a consultancy group, issued reports in 2022 that used online Chinese state media articles, company reports, and government statements to document aluminum smelters’ participation in labor transfers. Between January and November 2023, Human Rights Watch reviewed the source material referenced in the reports as well as additional media reporting and company and government statements to verify and assess the links between Xinjiang’s aluminum industry and labor transfers.

This research provided credible evidence that aluminum producers in Xinjiang are participating in labor transfers. Xinjiang East Hope Nonferrous Metals, for example, a major aluminum smelter, received labor transfers targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities in 2017, 2018, and 2020. Another two of Xinjiang’s largest aluminum producers, Tianshan Aluminum and Xinfa Group Xinjiang, are closely linked to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a military-economic entity that plays a key role in the region’s repression of Uyghurs. The XPCC holds stakes in thousands of companies in Xinjiang that frequently both participate in and facilitate labor transfers. Both Xinfa Group Xinjiang and Tianshan Aluminum are located in XPCC-controlled industrial zones.

The aluminum industry’s reliance on Xinjiang’s coal creates other links to forced labor. Xinjiang Energy (Group), for example, a state-owned energy company that supplies coal to Tianshan Aluminum and co-owns a coal mining company with Xinjiang East Hope Nonferrous Metals, has received labor transfer workers at its coal mines. In a 2020 report that typifies the way company and media documents describe labor transfers as benefitting Uyghurs, Xinjiang Energy (Group) provides a glowing account of the life of one labor transfer worker, praising the company’s efforts to tackle his homesickness and separation from his family. Another Xinjiang smelter, Xinjiang Zhonghe, co-owns a coal mining company, Tianchi Energy, which participated in labor transfers in 2019 and 2023.

Compared to other areas of China, Xinjiang possesses relatively little capacity to process the metal produced by aluminum smelters into more sophisticated alloys or to produce the semi-fabricated products, like aluminum sheet or foil, that car companies and other industries use in manufacturing. As a result, most of the aluminum produced in the XUAR is transported to other provinces in China as “unalloyed” ingots, blocks of unprocessed aluminum metal that can later be remelted to make a desired alloy. Once an aluminum ingot has been melted and mixed with other materials, it is impossible to determine whether or how much of it came from Xinjiang, enabling tainted aluminum to enter domestic and global supply chains undetected.

Read or download full report here.