How the Weaker-Forced Labor Prevention Act became law.

Introduction.

Guzerra Alcon sat in a room in Midland, Texas with the people who helped her escape a genocide.

Across from her were American federal law enforcement agents.

They had traveled to her new Texas hometown to ask about the roughly 15 months she spent in 2017 and 2018 in concentration camps in Xinjiang, a Northwest region of China.

They also wanted to know more about her experience being forced to work in a textile factory by Chinese authorities.

With Kazak activist Serik Zhang Bilash translating, Alcon, an ethnic Kazak, told the Americans about the horrors she faced in the camps.

She told them about the gloves she and hundreds of other women had to sew for long hours each day under harsh working conditions.

She told them about being driven to the factory early each morning when it was still dark outside.

They were expected to sew 20 pairs of gloves each day, she told them, with the threat of punishment looming if they could not meet quotas.

She spoke about how women at the factory had only 40 minutes in the day to eat meals and were otherwise under close scrutiny, without the freedom to get water or leave their work.

She told the Americans about how she wasn't paid what she was promised for her labor.

She recognized the name of the textile factory, a short bus ride from the camp, and gave other details to the agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

They were very deliberate, very intentional, says Bob Foo, the Chinese American founder of China Aid, who contributed to the rescue effort that culminated in Alcon and her family coming to the United States in early 2021.

Just a couple of months after arriving in America, she was assisting investigators who wanted to eradicate forced labor products that were flooding US markets.

Foo was present for the interview, which he says happened at China Aid's office in April 2021. It lasted hours.

Alcon is far from alone in her experience of forced labor in Xinjiang.

Her testimony, research from experts around the globe and reporting from news outlets in recent years have laid bare the facts.

China's genocide in Xinjiang has another purpose beyond cultural extermination, profit.

Since 2014, the Chinese government has forcibly detained more than 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhstan's Kurgis, and other Turkic Muslim minorities in concentration camps in Xinjiang.

These camps and the larger region, which is now a suffocating police state built around advanced surveillance technology, are home to unspeakable horrors according to survivors.

The Chinese government has subjected Uighurs to forced abortions and mass forced sterilizations, slashing birth rates.

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