The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) highlighted China’s role as a world leader in human trafficking, as revealed in the U.S. Department of State’s newly released 2025 report on worldwide human trafficking.
“China’s genocide of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang is a human trafficking nightmare under which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are arbitrarily imprisoned and forced into labor camps. Last year, China made billions of dollars off of these heinous acts. That’s why American companies must do more to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and make sure their supply chains are not using products made with forced labor,” said Select Committee Chair Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.)
China was one of 13 countries to receive a Tier 3 ranking that displays a “policy or pattern” of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or the employment or recruitment of child soldiers.”
Other Tier 3 nations included:
- Afghanistan
- Belarus
- Burma
- Cambodia
- Cuba
- Eritrea
- Iran
- Korea, Democratic People’s Republic Of
- Russia
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Syria (Assad regime)
The report on China specifically highlighted the nation’s oppression and forced labor of ethnic minorities, as well as its failure to take action to eliminate human trafficking activities.
“There was a government policy or pattern of widespread forced labor in government-affiliated sectors, including through the continued mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups,” said the report.
According to the report, China disguises its slave labor by calling it “poverty alleviation” or “labor dispatch,” and refers to its forced labor camps as “Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers,” which are actually intended to erase the ethnic and religious identities of the minorities interred there.
The report shows that human traffickers also use China as a transit point for operations throughout Asia.
Chinese-linked human trafficking and slave labor appear to be taking place in Maine at some of the state’s illegal Chinese-operated marijuana grow sites.
[RELATED: Chinese Man Found at Marijuana Grow Says He Was Kidnapped and Forced to Work Against His Will…]
One Chinese man found during a raid on a Passadumkeag marijuana grow house in 2024 told authorities that he had been kidnapped from New York by another Chinese national and forced to work against his will at the illegal marijuana facility.
