A March 9 Hudson Institute talk has drawn renewed attention to the role of Uyghur forced labor in the Chinese-dominated supply chain for solar panels and related technologies. Nury Turkel, a Hudson Institute senior fellow and Uyghur-American human rights activist, spoke with Laura Murphy, a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the United Kingdom’s Sheffield Hallam University. Murphy coauthored a 2021 report, “In Broad Daylight,” that has shed more light on the solar energy industry’s great vulnerability to forced labor. It found that China’s Uyghur region, also known as Xinjiang, is the source of 45 percent of the world’s polysilicon, the material used in 19 out of 20 solar modules. The report explained that China’s polysilicon industry shifted to Xinjiang roughly five years ago, lured in part by cheap coal energy but also financial and tax incentives, including subsidies for the use of coerced “surplus laborers” belonging to …
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