Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo: Profiting off Chinese Forced Labour (Uyghur Internment!)

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Will anything ever change?

The mainstream media has not been reporting this as loudly as they should be (and you can speculate in the comments section for the reason why, though there will be many other things you'll find yourself wanting to comment on by the time you read through this whole article), so I'll do it: China has transferred tens of thousands (some sources say a million—it's hard to have exact counts on anything when it comes to China) of ethnic minorities into “re-education camps”, including Uyghur/Uighur Muslims—where the humans are locked up and are forced to labour in factories that produce familiar products.

KoopaTV shouldn't normally be your source for anything relating to human rights, since we tend to care mostly about Koopas and not humans, but this actually directly impacts the videogame industry. ...Though even if it didn't, we'd want to talk about it, if only because we're sick of, and disgusted by, the actions of the Communist Chinese Party.

For this article, I'm going to summarise the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's lengthy and dense report on the topic. (If you're wondering what that is, the ASPI was founded by the Australian government and partially funded by their Department of Defence. See their full list of funding sources here, which includes some of the companies with problematic supply chains.) Refer to the source if you want more detail, but I'm gonna try to make it more approachable for the audience that reads the site, just so you can understand what's going on. There's also a complete list of companies that benefit from the labour camps in that report, but since this is KoopaTV, the names I'm writing here are familiar entertainment giants like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Oculus, Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Starting a few years back (perhaps 2017), the Chinese Communist Party has been relocating (via TRAINS!) Uyghurs and other minorities from the Xinjiang region of China, which borders the “stan” countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. The majority of the people living in this region are Muslims of one denomination or another. They're culturally different than the average Chinese person, so they're seen as an “other” ethnic minority that may have their own values than what the Chinese Communist Party espouses. (Islam has quite different traditions than the secular Chinese.)

As a result, China wishes to “re-educate” the people. The government doesn't deny that they have a bunch of Uyghur workers, but they do deny that the re-education is mandatory or that it is violating anyone's rights. Instead, the government claims it's a voluntary value-add for the Uyghurs involved, where they can apparently “become ‘more physically attractive’ and learn to ‘take daily showers’.” But the report then provides details that if re-education camp detainees disobeyed the Chinese Communist Party's work assignments at the factories or were found with a Quran (holy Islamic scripture) on their person or their phones, they would be detained for more years. They're also constantly monitored in other ways. They were forced by the government to participate in work and re-education designed to eliminate their religious identity.

The report goes into three case studies, one involving a shoe factory that primarily serves Nike, the second involving faraway Chinese clothing manufacturers that are “fully enclosed by perimeter fencing”, and the third involves Apple. They describe workers being shipped from Xinjiang to the other side of China, where they don't know the language and can't interact with others. (There is a financial award for transferring labour outside of Xinjiang that is 15x the financial award of transferring labour within Xinjiang.) The factories are signing up to receive the workers and pay them a minimal amount of money, but are also compensated by the government.

Famous abusive factory Foxconn also accepts transferred labourers from Xinjiang, and they manufacture electronics for all of the major gaming players, as well as many other electronics companies.

Here is a figure from the report showing Hubei Yihong, a subsidiary of Dongguan Yidong Electronic Co. Ltd.
They supply backlights and battery covers for companies like Apple, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.
105 Uyghur labourers were transferred there in 2018. Hubei Province is over 2000 miles away from Xinjiang.
To compare, that's just slightly less than the distance of many Africa to Americas slave-trading routes,
which also featured forcibly taking people seen as inferior by those in power, and transferred to an unknown location and made to toil for someone else's financial gain.

When I once wrote (as recently as the start of July 2020) that Nintendo investors should be asking the company real questions, their supply chain reliance on China (and their slave labour) would've been a great one to ask. Unfortunately, investors only seem to care about how many Nintendo Switch units that Nintendo will be able to sell in China. No one seems concerned about human rights.

Granted, Nintendo's name doesn't come up as often as many other companies. But you generally (for moral or even legal reasons) don't want your products and brand to be associated with modern-day slavery. The report notes that suddenly removing your company from these Chinese supply chains could have very unintended consequences. What do you think happens to the livelihoods and safety of the Uyghur people when the Chinese Communist Party is told that their labour is no longer desired? The Chinese communists do have the ability to hold the Uyghurs’ well-being hostage. They have a history of massacres and cultural cleansing, you know.

...Still, the status quo isn't good. Global companies NEED to be excluding China from their supply chains. It's good for human rights. It's also good for managing geopolitical risk. It might hurt the people you're trying to help in the short-term, but dealing economic blows to the Chinese Communist Party and isolating them on the world stage will ultimately help everyone.


Ludwig is sometimes asked why he dislikes the Chinese Communist Party so much, as if it isn't obvious already. Well, forced labour is a big no-no, as is shutting down free speech and any form of dissent, as is taking away people's livelihoods and freedoms, as is spreading a plague across the planet. Don't forget all of the intellectual property theft they do. The Chinese Communist Party's values are quite antithetical to almost any other civilisation, be it Western-style democracy, Koopa Kingdom monarchy, or however the Uyghur Muslims would be governing themselves if the Chinese weren't whisking them away for “re-education” and cleansing their culture. Unfortunately, they hold a bunch of economic power predicated on having a population of hundreds of millions of low-wage peasants, and multinational corporations, including the gaming industry, are perfectly happy to take advantage of that if it means saving a few cents per unit. It's disgusting, even for a depraved Koopaling like Ludwig. Don't you agree?


Nintendo has gotten in trouble for profiting off slavery when it came to conflict minerals.
A previous KoopaTV article published on September 11 said to never forget that Jihadists attacked the United States. There's no reason to believe that Uyghur Muslims are classified as Jihadists.
The next time Nintendo investors get to ask Nintendo questions, they continue to avoid asking about this subject. Their complicity makes the situation get worse.
At the July 2021 shareholder meeting, Nintendo was finally asked about Chinese forced labour. Their answer was to deny the report.
The Chinese Communists want to secularise the Muslims by forcing them to eat pork products.