World Bank arm working with firms part of China’s anti-Uyghur campaign: Report

By Aysu Bicer

ANKARA (AA) – The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private lending arm and a leading global development institution, has been accused of dealings with Chinese companies linked to forced labor and land expropriation in China’s Xinjiang region.

The IFC has “several significant investments” in Xinjiang, “where indigenous peoples have been subjected to what international legislators, legal scholars, and advocates have determined to be a genocide,” according to a report published on Wednesday by the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

The report is based on a joint investigation by the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University and US-based nonprofit research organization NomoGaia, published in coordination with the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.

“Significant evidence suggests that several of IFC’s clients are active participants in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs, including through forced labor, forced displacement, cultural erasure, and environmental destruction,” the report said.

The UN and Western countries led by the US, along with global rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have repeatedly accused Beijing of oppressing 12 million Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslims, in Xinjiang.

Beijing, however, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, denouncing the allegations as a “political virus” used by the West to malign China.

It also slammed the latest report, saying it is “full of lies” and “maliciously fabricated.”

According to the report, the IFC has approximately $486 million in “direct loans and equity investment in four companies” operating in Xinjiang – Chenguang Biotech Group, Camel Group, Century Sunshine Group Holdings, and Jointown Pharmaceutical Group.

It accused the companies of directly participating in and benefiting from “state-sponsored forced labor programs” and “compulsory land expropriation.”

The firms “participated in programs that require minoritized citizens to take oaths to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and be subjected to indoctrination,” while also recruiting “workers through overtly racist/discriminatory hiring practices,” read the report.

It said the IFC’s “failure to adequately safeguard communities and the environment affected by its financing” in the region makes it “complicit in the repression of Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minoritized citizens.”

According to the report, the IFC and other development and infrastructure investment banks “cannot conduct the on-the-ground due diligence necessary … to ensure that their clients are adhering to the Performance Standards.”

As of March 2021, the IFC had “closed its investments in three Chinese companies engaged in or sourcing” from Xinjiang, but it “must divest from any companies that have proven to be complicit” in China’s “program of repression” in the region, the report added.

- China rejects allegations

Rejecting the “false” report, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it is “based on no evidence and maliciously fabricated.”

“As we have learned, the institution that wrote the report has no staff in Xinjiang. And before releasing the report, it did not conduct any field trips or carry out research in a real sense. The content, thus, lacks factual support and is full of lies and groundless accusations,” ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a news briefing on Thursday.

He asserted that Beijing “attaches great importance to protecting human rights and worker’s rights and interests.”

“For some time, certain countries have kept playing up Xinjiang-related lies, and extended their reach to multilateral development institutions,” said the official.

“China calls on relevant bodies to stick to multilateral rules, uphold the principle of objectivity, impartiality and non-politicization, and refrain from discriminating against any companies of the member countries based on false accusations that may undermine the reputation of the body itself and its members.”