China's new cotton law deepens control over Uyghur farmers' land and labor

A new regulation in China's Uyghur region requires Uyghur farmers to transfer their labor and land to the state, further automating the cotton industry. The law creates a legal framework for supervising the entire production chain, from farmer to final point of sale, and gives authorities extensive supervisory power. This system may cause irreparable harm to Uyghurs and other Indigenous peoples, as UN human rights experts warned. The regulation builds on an earlier restructuring of rural land, which shifted practical control over cultivation, machinery, inputs, processing, and marketing toward cooperatives and companies. The connection between cotton, land transfer, and political control is explicit in official reporting, with the government celebrating the transformation of farmers from cultivators to land-transfer recipients and potential workers inside a state-directed industrial system.