Investigation reveals Chinese seafood caught and processed using forced labor sold in U.S.

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• Amna Nawaz:

  An investigation into Chinese fishing fleets and processing centers has discovered that seafood produced with forced labor is making its way to American dinner tables.

  That's despite a U.S. ban on imports made by workers from China's Xinjiang province. The region in northwest China is home to Muslim minority Uyghurs, who have been the victims of well-documented human rights violations.

  John Yang has more. If you buy frozen seafood at the grocery store or order fish at a chain restaurant, chances are pretty good that it was caught by a Chinese fishing vessel or processed in a Chinese plant. China runs what may be the largest maritime operation ever known.

  An investigation by the not-for-profit journalism organization called The Outlaw Ocean Project has documented human rights, labor, and environmental concerns related to the Chinese fleet. As Outlaw Ocean founder Ian Urbina tells us in this excerpt from the group's reporting, Chinese fishing ships rely on forced labor.

• Ian Urbina, Executive Editor, The Outlaw Ocean Project:

  Foreign journalists are generally forbidden from reporting in Xinjiang. So the team of investigators had to rely on a range of publicly available materials, including company newsletters, local news reports, trade data, satellite imagery, and social media.

• Man:

  But the real kind of key to our investigation became the use of the Chinese version of TikTok, which is called Douyin.

• Ian Urbina:

  Videos posted by Uyghurs from seafood plants show that many live in military-style dormitories under the watch of security personnel.

  Uyghur workers' dorms are often searched, and if a Koran or other contraband is found, the owner may be sent to a reeducation camp. Uyghurs' social media posts are also closely monitored by Chinese online censors. Posting anything critical of the regime could quickly land them in a detention center. But it appears that many Uyghurs have found a way to include cryptic messages in their videos to convey their suffering while also bypassing the Chinese censors.

  Thousands of tons of seafood processed in China with forced labor continue to enter the United States and Europe. Importers sent their products to major supermarkets around the world, including Walmart, Kroger, Tesco, and Carrefour.

  The importers also sent seafood to Cisco, the global food service giant that supplies more than 400,000 restaurants in the U.S. alone. Over the past five years, the U.S. government spent more than $200 million to buy seafood from importers' linked to Uyghur labor for use in military bases, federal prisons, and public schools.

• John Yang:

  This investigation represents four years of work by Ian Urbina, the executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

  And how did you find that this labor, putting the Uyghurs to work in these processing plants, sort of fit in, in the Chinese overall strategy in dealing with the Uyghurs? The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority in China.

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes.

  I mean, there's this general policy from the Chinese government to try to relocate many of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and disperse them elsewhere in the country to sort of pacify the population, if you will. So there's a huge state-run labor transfer program with thousands of Uyghurs that are forcibly removed from this inland province, Xinjiang, and transported 2,000 miles away to the other side of the country to work in the factories.

  And it's all part of an effort to sort of bring this restive province under control.

• John Yang:

  Ian, you talked to about more than two dozen of the crew members, people who worked on these ships. What did they tell you about the conditions they worked under and the conditions of their employment?

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes, I mean, we found a lot of forced labor and trafficked labor.

  Before COVID, a lot of these workers are Indonesian, after COVID, largely rural Chinese. They're pretty nervous to talk openly when we were on board, but you could see the conditions. There are a lot of reports of violence on board and neglect, severe neglect.

• John Yang:

  And these ships often don't return to port for two years, stay at sea for two years. How did you manage to talk to these people?

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes, it was a process.

  Typically, it takes several days just to get out to the fishing grounds or on the high seas. Once we're out there, we make radio contact with the captain. We try to warm the captain up and see if he will let us on board. If not, oftentimes, the ships would flee and we'd get and board a faster vote called a skiff and follow the fishing ships.

  And, in those cases, we'd put messages in a bottle asking questions of the crew in Bahasa Indonesian, or Chinese and English, and throw the bottles onto the back of the ship and then follow them until the crew threw the bottles back with answers.

• John Yang:

  And not only answers, but some of them asking for help, some of them giving you phone numbers.

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes.

  The most useful thing were the phone numbers, because then we could contact families back home in Indonesia or China and ask those families how long they'd been gone and sort of what they knew of their lost family.

• John Yang:

  You also found violations of law and the way they fished and also environmental violations.

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes, many cases of shark-finning, of invasions of sovereignty. So this is a huge fleet, and often these vessels are aggressively going into waters where they're forbidden, Argentinean, Chilean, Ecuadorian waters, where they're not allowed.

  So, we documented those cases just to show how pervasive the problem is.

• John Yang:

  And how are they able to escape enforcement and escape inspection and that sort of thing?

• Ian Urbina:

  These vessels largely are on the high seas, and this is an area that's very hard to get to.

  The vessels are in constant motion. And most countries around the world don't have navies out there patrolling their own waters, much less the high seas. So these are working places that are largely out of reach of governments. And that's why they can do as they please.

• John Yang:

  And there were also signs that these ships were doing more than fishing or fishing for other things in a way.

• Ian Urbina:

  Yes, I mean, China's fishing fleet is in many ways sort of an arm of its geopolitical agenda. It's sort of a projection of power.

  And so, if you look at places like the South China Sea, contested waters in that area, the fishing fleet is essentially acting as a civilian militia. And you have enough fishing vessels there that they can crowd around other countries vessels and crowd around islands that are in contested waters and sort of establish sovereignty and show muscle.

• John Yang:

  It's an ambitious project, and you found out some very interesting things.

  Now, where can people read and see your reporting?

• Ian Urbina:

  With "The New Yorker" on their Web site.

• John Yang:

  Very good.

  Ian Urbina, the founder and executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, thank you very much.

• Ian Urbina:

  Thanks for having me.