S2 E7: The unspoken cost of seafood (China Pt. 2)

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When we embarked on this project looking at the Chinese fleet, we realized that if we really want to understand seafood as a product, we need to understand it as a thing that traverses two distinct universes.

One is at sea and the other is on land.

So in the previous episode, we told you about Daniel Ertenong, a young man from Indonesia who had been working on a Chinese squid jigger called the Zenfa 7.

Daniel was beaten, starved, and held against his will.

He was brought to shore in Uruguay, where he died from beriberi, an easily preventable disease caused by a lack of vitamin B.

Daniel's story is just one instance of the rampant human rights abuses we found when we looked into the Chinese fleet.

Workers we spoke to told us in some instances they were forced to stay at sea for as long as three years at a time.

They told us that what little wages they earned were often garnished for basic needs like food or drinking water, safety equipment or medicine.

We also found that access to health care on board was tenuous at best.

Sometimes when workers get injured or sick, they're not even allowed to be offloaded to another ship and taken back to port.

The result, especially when it comes to diseases diseases like Beriberi, is that far too many seafarers are dying.

With all that in mind, we wanted to look at what happens once the catch leaves fishing vessels and heads to land.

What are the conditions like inside these plants?

Is there child labor?

Is prison labor being used?

Are trafficked workers being used?

Are there environmental issues?

These are the same questions you'd ask if you were doing this investigation in Bangladesh or Venezuela or the US.

These questions are much harder to answer when it comes to China, but still, we just sort of went down the list.

We did not find child labor.

We did not find prison labor.

But when we started digging into the issue of traffic labor and Uyghur labor in particular, that's when things really opened up.

Our investigation uncovered a massive state-run system of forced labor, where the Chinese government is relocating thousands of Uyghurs from their homes in Xinjiang and putting them to work in seafood factories on the other side of the country.

If these people say no to these jobs that the government assigns to them, they're arrested and sent to internment camps for, quote, re-education.

Our groundbreaking reporting is the first to show this connection between Uyghur labor and the Chinese seafood industry.

And in this episode, you'll hear how we did it.

I'm Ian Urbina, and this is the Outlaw Ocean.

A word you're going to hear a lot in this episode is Uyghur.

That's the name of a Muslim ethnic minority in China, most of whom live in a remote western region called Xinjiang.

Xinjiang shares borders with Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan.

It's completely landlocked.

In fact, it's the furthest place from the ocean on Earth.

And by contrast, most seafood processing in China happens in coastal Shandong, which is a province on the other side of the country.

Shandong is thousands of miles from Xinjiang, so it's not a place you'd think to find Uyghur labor.

But once we started looking, that's exactly what we found.

Okay, yeah, my name is Daniel Murphy.

My background is in investigations, research, and advocacy, focusing on forced labor in the fishing sector.

As part of our investigation into human rights abuses in China's seafood supply chain, Daniel and others on my team spent countless hours combing through Chinese websites, social media apps, and company communications.

In some cases, it didn't take much effort at all to find hints that China is not playing by the rules.

I typed the name of a Chinese company into Baidu, which is a Chinese search engine, and within two minutes, I'd found our first indication that seafood processing plants were taking Uyghur workers.

It was not difficult, which for me underscores one of the main problems here.

The fact that we could do this in such a short amount of time with relative ease really

highlights the importance importance of just basic human rights due diligence in global supply chains.

And that is something that the companies, the large global companies sourcing from these factories and China as a whole, are simply not doing.

Nowhere is more difficult to report than China, especially on things like this.

And seafood is an unusually tough product to investigate, partially because it's typically fished on the high seas, on a ship that's inaccessible, but also because there are all sorts of handoffs of the catch.

And so once we targeted specific ships and were monitoring what they were pulling on board, the next challenge was to follow the catch from the ship all the way back to shore.

You do that through a combination of means.

One is direct surveillance.

So you're actually on the boat and you follow the fishing fleet or the fishing ship and you see where it goes.

The second, more common, more feasible approach is you identify when a certain catch is pulled from the water and then you keep watching that ship to see if a mother ship, which is a refrigeration vessel, comes to pick up that catch.

And then you follow the refrigeration vessel by satellite back to shore.

A third way is by accessing the traceability documents that the companies keep.

Those will indicate that this ship handed off this catch to this other ship, then that ship brought it back to shore.

But those documents are sketchy.

They're often really hard also to access.

And then the final method to find out where a catch is headed is to interview the crew and ask them what was going on.

So those are the various various tactics that you can use to trace seafood all the way back to shore.

They're all very slow.

It's a tough process to get all that information, and you usually have to cobble together multiple sources to figure it out.

But once the seafood gets to the shore, you have a new set of challenges.

If you're trying to connect the crimes on a ship all the way to, say, Walmart or Red Lobster or whatever company that sells the seafood to the end consumer.

The link from the refrigeration vessel to the processing plant is the toughest link to monitor.

A crane lifts the catch out of the ship, guys with forklifts pick up the catch, they put it in the back of a truck, the truck leaves the port and drives to a processing plant.

Making the connection from ships to plants is so difficult because you need to get eyes inside a port and trying to get inside a Chinese port is almost impossible.

There typically isn't paperwork that you can use or satellite monitoring capacity you can use to figure out that one link in the chain.

So you need boots on the ground.

You need direct surveillance.

You need someone essentially with a telephoto lens who's either at a high-rise building next to the port or standing somewhere where they can see what's going on.

And what those guys are looking for specifically is that catch went into this truck with this license plate and then we followed, usually in a car with tinted windows, that truck to this processing plant at this address.

You do that legwork, that gumshoe reporting, then you can probably connect the entire supply chain all the way back to the end consumer.

Because once you know the processing plant and you know its address, then there are paper records that allow you to figure out who the buyers on the other side of the world were that were connected to that processing plant.

Once you figure out the connection between the ship, the port, and the processing plant, you hit another brick wall, which is the plant itself.

These are huge industrial scale factories, and they supply most of the world's supermarkets and restaurants with the product that is seafood.

There are trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, and billions of dollars at play here.

So security at these plants is unbelievably tight.

And that's where the connection to Uyghur labor comes in.

So, why does finding Uyghur labor in a Chinese seafood plant matter?

Well, because China has a track record of human rights abuses and forced labor, especially when it comes to Uyghur workers.

And in the U.S., there's legislation that recognizes this.

In 2020, the U.S.

passed a law that bans the importation of basically any product that's connected to Uyghur workers.

So in the short time that the law has been on the books, it's had a massive effect on industries like electronics, textiles, tomatoes, other types of produce.

Things that are grown or manufactured in and around Xinjiang.

The law has stopped over a billion dollars of these products from entering the U.S.

So connecting Uyghur labor labor to the seafood industry could have massive repercussions on Chinese companies that supply seafood, as well as the international consumers that purchase it.

This means that since 2020, Uyghurs have become a central part in the trade war between the US and China.

So to unpack all this, we need to take a minute to explain how Uyghurs fit into broader Chinese culture and history.

My name is Susan Roy, and I'm a research and investigations editor at the Outlaw Ocean Project.

My name is Joe Galvin.

I'm the OSIP editor for the Outlaw Ocean Project.

There are loads of different ethnic groups in China.

I mean, it's over 50 at least that are officially recognised by the Chinese government.

So the Uyghur people are an ethnic minority based predominantly in China in the Xinjiang region.

predominantly Muslim.

They have their own language, own customs, which make them somewhat unusual in the Chinese context and certainly seen by China in recent years, particularly beginning around the early 90s, as a group that they wished to assimilate or re-educate,

whatever euphemism you'd like to use, into the predominant culture of the Han Chinese and the Communist Party.

And the recent history has kind of been, I suppose it's been centered on clashes between the Han Chinese and ethnic Uyghurs.

and things sort of boiled over 2008-2009.

There was an incident at a factory where there were allegations of sexual assault, and they involved people of one ethnicity making a complaint against those of another.

And it sparked enormous riots, and things really took off at that point, kind of led to much, much wider riots.

And a lot of people were killed.

And a lot of those who were killed in those riots, I believe they were Han Chinese.

So it encouraged this sense of, you know, Uyghurs and the Muslim ethnicities in Xinjiang of being terrorists, being difficult, being troublemakers, and the government set out to quell that very forcibly.

And that's when you had the so-called Uyghur genocide horizontal.

The first indication or the first kind of major allegation was that China was engaging in the mass internment of Uyghurs, other ethnic minorities too, but predominantly Uyghurs in camps to re-educate them,

to change the culture and integrate it into the predominant Chinese culture.

The UN had said it received reports that up to a million people were being held in internment camps in Xinjiang in 2018.

So you had a lot of ancillary allegations following that, including allegations that China had been forcibly male sterilizing Uyghur women, aiming to reduce the population in Xinjiang, make it more Han Chinese.

And there was lots of reports in addition to that of physical abuse, mental abuse, sexual violence, torture, and so on.

So really horrific crimes being alleged and all focused on the Uyghur minority group.

There are several different ways to look at the Chinese agenda when it comes to the Uyghurs.

One way to think about it is China is engaged in an ongoing state-building project where it's attempting to bolster its middle class.

It's attempting to solidify its position as a global superpower.

And for the country to succeed, it needs to consolidate its territory, its regions, its provinces.

So there's a lot of difference in Xinjiang, culturally, linguistically, religiously, and the state needs to solidify its control over that population if China is going to succeed as a unified, centralized nation.

There's also economics.

So the economics of wealth disparity in China is a big concern for the government.

And Xinjiang is a very poor region.

And Beijing wants to attempt to get that region caught up economically.

And so there's a genuine effort by the government to economically integrate the people of this region into the rest of the population.

There's also the economics of what's underground in the region, oil, gas, minerals.

And if Beijing wants to really tap into those resources, it needs to have control, more control, over the autonomous region that is Xinjiang.

And thirdly, there's also the extent to which Xinjiang is a gateway to the rest of Eurasia.

Pipelines and migration flows and military concerns all come to play in that border region.

Lastly, I'd point out that Xinjiang is a predominantly Muslim region in the context of of a decidedly secular country.

And not only that, Xinjiang shares borders with other Muslim nations.

So if Xinjiang were really to declare and exert its autonomy, Xinjiang would have a lot of potential to break away and join its Muslim neighbors.

And that's a serious concern for the Chinese government.

Here's Joe Galvin again.

China don't necessarily see this as

that they're doing anything wrong, or at least your average Chinese person, I think this is something we encountered in our investigation, is that there's a view that this is a kind of cultural crusade, perhaps, that

we're helping these poor Uyghur people to join into the modern society.

helping them to get jobs, helping them to find work in factories and these far-fun places from Xinjiang.

So it's viewed differently internally, and the allegations that China is conducting mass torture, mass internments, and these kinds of things.

Well, they deny the accusations that crimes are taking place.

As much as the Chinese government would have liked to have kept its treatment of Uyghurs a secret, word still spread throughout the international community.

A lot of that was because of advocacy work done by Uyghurs who had emigrated out of China.

And in 2019, the Chinese government announced to the world, after a lot of pressure, that they were closing the, quote, re-education camps.

On the outside, when you look at the numbers of the re-education camps and the detention facilities, they have dropped in the past few years.

They have come down.

And on the surface, that looks like a success for human rights.

It looks like...

you know, the message has come through, that people have been heard, that they're being treated with greater respect, but those people are just being put in different places.

When the news got out that the Chinese government was housing and detaining, re-educating huge numbers of Uyghurs, the government in Beijing pivoted and began instead transferring tens of thousands of them from Xinjiang to other provinces.

Sometimes they were transferring them to farms and factories within Xinjiang, but most often they were transferring them to provinces around Xinjiang that had various types of factories that needed more workers.

The effect was enormous.

Between 2017 and 2019, according to the Chinese government, birth rates in Xinjiang declined by almost half.

And that was because all these families were being broken up and the men and women were being relocated.

Uyghur people and other minority groups were given a false option.

You know, you can go work in Shandong, 3,000 miles away or wherever else, thousands of miles away.

And that's your choice.

But if they say no, they're moved back to the internment camps.

So of course, a lot of people said yes.

I mean, better to chance it out in a factory someplace, even in a kind of military-managed, as they describe it, environment than to go back to an internment camp.

To me, it's forced labor if you can't refuse that.

If you're being told, oh, you have an opportunity to be sent somewhere or be taken somewhere to work and you cannot say no, if there are repercussions for you saying no, then that's not free.

That's not free labour, that is forced labour.

If there is, you know, if you're at risk of being put in a detention facility, if your family are at risk of being arrested because of your refusal, if you are being told that your refusal to take that job means that you will get nothing, then those are free decisions.

By 2020, there were congressional hearings in the U.S., and out of those hearings came this very unusual law called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

This law essentially says that no products are allowed to come into the U.S.

that have been worked by Xinjiang labor.

So not just Uyghurs, but any workers from Xinjiang.

And that applies not only to complete finished products, but to the ingredient parts as well.

So if you have a frozen pizza and the sauce was made from tomatoes that were harvested by Uyghurs in Xinjiang, then that frozen pizza is not allowed to come into the US.

But the thing that is really unusual about the Uyghur law is something called rebuttable presumption.

It's a legal term that basically put the onus on industry.

And what it means is that if an NGO or a journalist brought credible evidence forward that a product is tied to Uyghur workers, then suddenly the burden shifts to the specific company, the specific importer, the specific industry to prove that in fact, no,

there isn't any tie of Uyghur workers to that product that they've been importing.

And until the industry or the company could prove that that was the case, that indeed their supply chain was clean of Uyghur workers, that product had to be stopped at the port.

It could not be brought all the way into the U.S.

The result of the law is that in the short window of time that it's been on the books, over a billion dollars worth of goods have been stopped at the port in the U.S.

Tomato, solar panels, electronics, cotton, these are the biggest industries that so far have been impacted.

But seafood was totally off radar.

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No one ever assumed or suspected that seafood would be a product that would have any tie to Xinjiang for one big reason.

Xinjiang is the most landlocked spit of earth on the planet.

It's the furthest from the ocean of any place you can find.

It's over 2,000 miles from the coast.

The seafood infrastructure in in China is on the other side of the country, largely in Shandong province along the coast.

So you wouldn't intuit that Xinjiang workers would be in seafood over on the other side of the country.

But what happened was that after COVID, there was a huge labor shortage in many industries, seafood included.

And because of the lockdowns that were occurring in China, it was very tough to leave your city, your province, your neighborhood, much less travel across the country.

And so a lot of factories were short on workers.

So the Chinese government got involved and began stepping up the labor transfer program, in which it was moving Xinjiang workers in the thousands wherever they needed to be moved.

They moved them by planes, trains, buses.

And Shandong and the seafood industry in China said, hey, look, we need workers bad, or else we're going to fall behind here.

And so over a thousand of these workers, of these Xinjiang workers, were moved forcibly by the state across the country and put in seafood factories in Shandong.

I think it's useful here to recap for a second and to give a sense of the scale of this entire reporting project.

I mean, it's really remarkable.

So, we wanted to map out the entire seafood supply chain from bait to plate, and that meant our first step was traveling to some of the most remote spots on the planet to see the chinese fleet in action we got on board the ships saw the conditions talked to the guys working and got a sense of

yeah absolutely there's severe labor abuses happening here people are dying on these ships and we can take that evidence to the companies here in the us and europe and canada or wherever and say hey look See what's happening on these ships.

Look at these labor abuses.

This is against your corporate policy, right?

But a lot of these companies lean into their ability to claim plausible deniability so the supermarket or the restaurant or whoever can come back to us and say well look we followed up and our suppliers in china have told us that they don't purchase from these ships thank you leave us alone so what that meant for us as reporters was that we needed to connect the ships that pull the fish out of the water the ones we saw in person to the refrigeration ships that carry the catch back to shore and we did that largely through satellite tracking.

This got us all the way to the ports, which is where we had to hire direct on-the-ground surveillance teams, pretty dangerous stuff, to film the cargo being moved off the refrigeration ships, put on trucks, and driven to the processing plants.

That gave us even more evidence to take back to the companies and say, okay, look, we followed up.

on this stage too and you're either lying to us or your suppliers are lying to you but clearly the catch we're pointing at from these ships engaged in criminal behavior are tied to your product, your brand, your consumers.

But look, I mean, again, the companies can continue to deny and this only gets us so far.

It's still, for us, as reporters, a game of whack-a-mole, where you're constantly one step behind the companies and their factories.

The thing that would really, truly, in my view, move the needle needle in terms of this issue would be to stop the seafood that's tainted by labor abuses before it ever reaches U.S.

soil.

And because of the 2020 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, documenting the presence of Uyghur labor in the supply chain would trigger that law and would allow for just those blocks, just those barriers at port to come up.

So to connect the final dot, we needed to use a set of tactics that would allow us to get inside these factories, even though we were situated on the other side of the planet.

And that's where we turned to OSINT, or open source intelligence.

In my view, OSINT is the front edge of where journalism is heading.

This is material that's sort of out there on the internet.

This is TikTok, Facebook.

This is cell phone footage.

For example, the parent company that owns many of the plants that we were focused on has its own newsletter.

Those newsletters are really candid and open because they assume that the only people reading the newsletters are their own staff and industry professionals in China.

These are public documents, these newsletters.

So we just needed to know how to get our hands on them and see what they said.

My name is Austin Brush, and I'm a research and investigations editor at the Ally Ocean Project.

So we relied on a combination of Chinese state media reports, government press releases, seafood company press releases and statements, as well as corporate newsletters, all publicly available and accessible through online research.

And so within these corporate newsletters, we found that these companies were outlining strategies to employ labor from outside of the provinces which they were based, including migrant labor or Uighur workers based out of Xinjiang province.

And in many cases, they cited these migrant workers as a mechanism to fill

or address the issue of labor shortages, again, caused by COVID as well as other factors.

A lot of what Austin and others found are things that the Western seafood companies that sell the seafood to consumers should have been looking for themselves.

Daniel Murphy, who you heard from at the start of this episode, also worked on our team of OSINT researchers.

We're still at a stage where many companies don't know how to do this.

At least they don't know how to conduct effective human rights due diligence.

To me, that just speaks to the fundamental failure of the prevailing modes of verification and assurance, which is based on a tool called social audit.

Audits are the primary tool that the seafood industry uses to police itself.

On paper, at least, their way of using third-party investigators to make sure that there aren't any labor or environmental abuses happening in their supply chains.

There are two types of audits that exist within the seafood industry.

One is marine audits.

These are audits that are primarily focused on the environmental and ocean concerns.

Things like, did that seafood come from someone's waters where that ship wasn't allowed to go?

Did that catch come from a ship that was using nets that were the wrong size and illegal?

Did that seafood come from a ship that went dark and turned off its transponder and disappeared and therefore broke the law?

Those marine audits are deeply flawed.

It's a paperwork exercise that gives some seal of approval, but there aren't real penalties and methods of correcting the problems, but they exist.

The audits at least exist.

The other kind of audits are social audits, And these are audits that focus on human rights and labor issues.

Social audits in the seafood space are nascent.

They're younger.

It's much less developed.

And there are some firms that do social audits, but they're primarily focused on the processing plants.

In other words, not on the fishing vessels.

In other words, spot checks of labor conditions on fishing vessels simply don't exist.

And this is a huge blind spot for the global seafood industry.

This is why the problem of sea slavery is pervasive and difficult to counter, because so far, the industry has not been forced to figure out how to deal with the issue.

Labor and human rights are sort of a third rail in China.

So social audits of factories in China are a bit of a scam.

First of all, they're announced visits.

Hey, you know we're going to come and check your plant on Tuesday, so that's already deeply problematic because everyone can clean things up because they know the inspector is coming.

And number two, these social audits are really flawed because they're only looking for certain things.

And that's by their own admission.

When we presented our evidence to some of the main firms that do these social audits of the processing plants, we knew that these inspectors had been in a certain factory.

the day before we documented Uyghurs on site.

We had footage of Uyghurs posting selfies in the plant, but the social auditor didn't note the presence of Uyghur labor in the plant.

Why?

They weren't checking for that issue.

They were looking for things like child labor or locked fire doors and fire hazards.

So, for so many reasons, this industry, this seafood industry, has a big problem when it comes to whether it's going to be able to check labor concerns on the fishing ships or in the plants.

And that's hopefully what our investigation will change.

Social media was a very useful tool for us to confirm some of these reports we were able to find online, including from companies and the Chinese government as well as state media.

We primarily relied on Duyin, which is TikTok's mainland China counterpart.

In an almost identical manner to TikTok, users are able to post short video content or in some cases photoreels depicting whatever the user might choose.

Xinjiang workers who are transferred by the state are often filming themselves, taking short selfie videos as they're being relocated.

That footage is amazingly useful and it often can take you all the way inside the processing plants because workers at these plants are just like anyone else.

They're filming themselves, they're taking selfies, you know, doing average things.

They're sending messages back to family, you know, to their friends.

We initially identified one Uyghur user who was uploading videos to Goyin, the Chinese TikTok.

And from that one individual, we conducted a social network analysis to identify other Uyghur users who were also working in Shandong and posting from seafood processing facilities.

We were able to identify and verify that they were Uyghur by drawing on a few different indicators and we were able to identify specific seafood processing facilities by using geospatial analysis and comparing imagery, satellite imagery and

photographs of factories, as well as comparative analysis.

So looking at pictures on corporate websites of company uniforms, for example, and comparing those uniform styles with the uniforms that we saw in videos.

In the background of the videos, the ones shot at the factories, there are boxes that are in full view.

And those boxes that you can zoom in on have really useful information on them.

Oftentimes, the workers are filming themselves in front of the buildings as well.

And it shows you the name of the plant where they're working.

You can pinpoint exactly where the workers were and when.

And when you piece all that together, you start getting eyes into a place that otherwise you wouldn't be able to access.

And you can do it all from 3,000 miles away.

You know, workers are often friends with other workers.

So you sort of navigate your way through an entire community of people by looking at the links online.

We were able to identify hundreds of videos posted by Uyghurs working at factories across China.

And this included many workers at seafood processing plants we had earlier identified as the recipients of labor transfers out of Xinjiang province.

The videos these workers posted included many things, but it showed what working conditions were like.

It showed these workers on

fish processing lines.

It showed them in workers' uniforms, showed them at the processing facilities, both inside and outside.

This includes showing them sorting seafood, packaging it, putting it into trucks, in some cases cleaning and gutting fish, you know, all the key kind of components of what it means to work on a seafood processing line in a Chinese factory.

All important ways in which we're able to kind of further corroborate the fact that Uyghur laborers are present across a multitude of seafood processing facilities, including those exporting outside of China.

Like I mentioned earlier, Xinjiang is the most landlocked place on earth.

So most of these people that are moving across the country, that are being moved by the state to Shandong province, which is a coastal province, have never seen the ocean.

And one of the first things they do when they get there is they film themselves in front of the water, sort of sending a video back home saying, look, here's the ocean, here's the sea.

Just that sense of awe, that sense of remove, that sense of distance from their loved ones gets really clearly conveyed in the videos as well.

So bottom line, these videos are an incredible resource for us as journalists, but they also allow us to look for more subtle pathos, sort of the anthropology of this forced labor transfer experience.

The video content uses a variety of different types of media to convey a message in our opinion.

In some cases, it's text that they might be pulling, such as poems or religious text either in Arabic script or in Uyghur that might be

sending a message of melancholy or celebration.

In all the cases they're using music from Xinjiang and they're overlaying that over their videos.

In some cases those songs are melancholic and represent a longing for home and a family.

In these videos you have a lot of quiet resistance occurring from Xinjiang people who are posting songs that are mournful, deeply sad.

But it wasn't until we brought on two independent Uyghur researchers to review these videos for us that we started to understand that some users were uploading videos that could only really be described as subversive.

I was watching a video of a man cutting a white fish on a processing line.

And the music that he had uploaded to that video,

it was powerfully full of sorrow.

It was music that just in the 20-second clip had an emotional impact on me just watching it immediately.

And at the end of the video, it cut to an image of a young girl who I presumed, you know, was this man's daughter after reviewing some of his other videos, which showed her repeatedly the use of these songs these sad songs allows Uyghur workers to say something without running afoul of the Chinese internet censors and without having that video removed or getting in trouble because what are they doing they're just posting a song innocently but the lyrics when coupled with the footage that they put up with the song conveys a pretty clear message of their sense of sadness

What these videos tended to revolve around were themes of separation, themes of loss, themes of homesickness.

And the users are uploading footage accompanied by songs, often with very precisely selected lyrics or excerpts from songs and poems that were speaking to these feelings of loss and heartache and homesickness.

They were providing people's thoughts and feelings as they went through the experience of being taken from their homes, transported almost 4,000 kilometers, and in some cases forcibly integrated into a factory wage labor system.

As a result of this long-term investigation into China's seafood supply chain, We found that at least 10 large seafood companies in China used more than a thousand Uyghur workers between 2018 and 2023.

During that same period, those companies shipped more than 47,000 tons of seafood to the U.S., and that seafood was bought by major importers in the U.S.

and Canada.

In total, we identified seafood imports tied to labor from Xinjiang in more than 20 countries.

And the list of all the companies, the restaurants, the grocery stores, the plants in China that we're using forced labor, all the details of this global seafood supply chain and its problems are on the website, and you can see which companies are implicated there.

The website is theoutlawocean.com.

Next time, the final episode of our three-part series on China's dominance of the world's oceans and global seafood.

Beijing's refusal to play by the rules goes beyond using Uyghur workers.

We found clear evidence that Chinese plants are using forced labor from the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea, a clear violation of UN sanctions and US law.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano.

Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson.

Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh.

Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler.

For CBC podcasts, our coordinating producer is Fabiola Carletti.

Senior producer Damon Fairless.

The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Hoak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.