Innovating Penal Labor: Reeducation, Forced Labor, and Coercive Social Integration in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

Abstract

This article argues that China’s campaign of reeducation and forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region through so-called Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers (VSETCs) represents a significant conceptual innovation over prior labor reform. Beijing’s erstwhile penal labor systems treated labor as an integral part of reeducation but suffered from limited reeducation results, low work productivity, and poor resocialization outcomes. In contrast, the VSETC system pragmatically eschews Maoist tenets of labor’s transformational power: its internment camps prioritize intensive reeducation, followed by a process of gradual release into potentially more efficient nonprison enterprises. The resulting potential profitability gains translate into higher economic sustainability—an essential prerequisite for the system’s primary goal of long-term assimilation and coercive integration of resistant ethnic groups into Beijing’s social order. However, VSETC’s and the region’s focus on control and disintegrating ethnic social capital undermines its integrative efforts, replicating a long-standing weakness of prior labor reform.