Today, the international human rights foundation Global Rights Compliance has released an expert analysis of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, examining its reliance on Xinjiang’s resources and the associated risks of forced labour.
Read the analysis here
Read the press release here
China’s Five-Year Plans are a central instrument through which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the central government govern the country. On March 13, the Chinese government released the 15th Five-Year Plan, outlining its policy agenda for the next five years (2026–2030). The Plan’s overriding priority is to position China at the “forefront of global science and technology”, by eliminating critical technological dependencies and ensuring that its development trajectory cannot be disrupted by external pressure or supply chain coercion.
This self-reliance shift ultimately relies on material foundations. The success of these goals depends on securing reliable access to raw materials at scale. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) is central: the region holds the majority of China’s beryllium reserves, a material with no substitute in semiconductor manufacturing, and provides the cheap coal-based energy that makes energy-intensive mineral processing.
Xinjiang’s advantage in minerals doesn’t just come from what is in the ground: it comes from how cheaply those resources can be processed from systemic reliance on state-imposed forced labour programs and expansion of cheap, coal-fired power.
Our analysis concludes that the system of coercive labor allocation applied to minority communities in Xinjiang will continue under the 15th Five-Year Plan at greater scale, with deeper institutional foundations, and with more sophisticated technological enforcement – through a mechanism explicitly designed to be permanent and irreversible.
Key findings include:
- China’s goals in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing all depend on upstream raw materials, and Xinjiang is being deliberately positioned to supply them.
- Industrial electricity in Xinjiang costs about 2.7 cents per kWh, far below roughly 7.5 cents in the U.S. and 22 cents in the EU. Given that power accounts for 40 to 60% of processing costs for materials like titanium, magnesium, and lithium, this price disparity creates a significant competitive barrier for Western producers.
- A stated priority for the 15th Five-Year Plan period is to concentrate industrial development and employment absorption in southern Xinjiang – the area with the highest Uyghur population density and the most extensively documented record of forced labour. Every policy applied to Xinjiang, such as employment, economic development, education, culture, becomes an instrument of social control and ideological re-engineering.
- At the technological level, traditional job matching has been replaced entirely by a data-driven system that continuously tracks and classifies the workforce. The 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly calls for a permanent mechanism to prevent any return to poverty, meaning that close monitoring, surveillance, and re-intervention for those who refuse to participate will continue throughout the 2026 to 2030 period.
- The CCP also adopted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which pursues assimilation practices for ethnic minorities to strengthen the “cohesion” of Chinese culture and identity. When combined with the industrial ambitions of the Five-Year Plan, this Law facilitates the continued eradication of Uyghur identity and culture alongside the strategic resource exploitation of their homelands.