Posted on Friday, November 28, 2025
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by Ben Solis
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A new State Department report has confirmed that China is still among the worst offenders when it comes to human trafficking, ranking alongside nations like Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Russia, and South Sudan.
The Chinese government itself is involved in the trafficking operations, most infamously through the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region. According to the State Department’s findings, “3.9 million individuals are exploited by state-imposed forced labor in China and several other countries. That exploitation generates an estimated $236 billion in illegal proceeds annually and, through complex supply chains, can connect legitimate companies and unknowing consumers to this human rights abuse.”
China has recently rolled out new forced labor operations under the label of “poverty alleviation” programs. Uyghur Muslims and other minorities long persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are compelled to participate in these programs as de facto slave labor.
“China’s genocide of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang is a human trafficking nightmare under which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are arbitrarily imprisoned and forced into labor camps,” John Moolenaar (R-MI), Chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said in response to the report. “Last year, China made billions of dollars off of these heinous acts. That’s why American companies must do more to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and make sure their supply chains are not using products made with forced labor.”
North Korean refugees, particularly women, are also especially susceptible to traffickers. Many have been forced to work in brothels or even kidnapped and sold into forced marriages.
In some cases, CCP-linked entities have also set up trafficking operations abroad in Western countries. This past June, a coordinated Interpol operation dubbed Global Chain uncovered a human trafficking web involving 43 countries. 1,194 victims were identified, leading to 158 arrests and the identification of an additional 205 perpetrators. The majority of reported victims were Chinese nationals.
Earlier this year, Europol also dismantled a “sophisticated Chinese criminal network” that operated throughout Europe profiting from sexual exploitation. The gang was involved in facilitating illegal immigration through forgery of documents and money laundering. Europol raided 14 properties in four countries, including Spain and Croatia.
The image of the Chinese criminal underworld that has emerged through these and other law enforcement investigations, as well as the State Department report, increasingly suggests that even where Beijing is not actively involved in human trafficking, it is doing little to stop it.
In many Chinese diaspora communities abroad, victims are lured by promises of high-paying jobs only to end up trapped in backbreaking work or even criminal enterprises with little or no pay. This abuse became particularly lucrative for traffickers during the Biden administration as migrants flooded across the U.S.-Mexico border by the millions. Many young women lured across the Pacific were forced into prostitution, while others had their passports and documents seized and were compelled to work in the illegal drug trade.
The propensity for human trafficking among CCP-linked entities is not unique to China but stems from the traditions and philosophy of communist governments throughout history. Chinese dissidents I interviewed for this column all agreed that, despite claims of a unique political system, the CCP has adopted totalitarian policies akin to those of the Soviet Union.
As former Soviet Army General Dmitri Volkogonov pointed out before his death in 1995, quoting Lenin, “The criminal world offers methods that the Party must adopt to increase its effectiveness.” Volkogonov was a historian and biographer of Lenin, along with serving as an advisor to President Boris Yeltsin.
Additionally, former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky shared in an interview with this author in 2003 that the Soviet Politburo had instructed the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, in 1968 “to expand and deepen ties with organized crime groups worldwide and to infiltrate them further.”
The CCP now seems to have adopted this strategy. “The only Chinese characteristic of the CCP is that they are Chinese who replicate Soviet models, which resulted in a moral disaster,” a former CCP high-ranking party official from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s top internal prosecutor, told this author in an interview. “Since the CCP implements these practices on a much larger scale than the Soviets did, the resulting catastrophe is far greater,” the official, who defected to the West in 1989, added.
Taken together, the State Department’s findings and the mounting evidence from Interpol and Europol make one thing unmistakably clear: human trafficking is not a peripheral problem for Beijing, but a feature of how the regime consolidates power and extracts wealth. Whether through state-directed forced labor in Xinjiang, criminal networks operating abroad, or the exploitation of vulnerable migrants, the CCP has built an ecosystem in which human lives are commodified for political and economic gain.
Shining a brighter light on these abuses — and demanding accountability from both Beijing and the global companies that enable them — is essential to curbing one of the world’s most pervasive crimes.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
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