Almost all the workers had been deceptively recruited with promises of certain wages and legal work visas. Instead, their passports were confiscated right after they disembarked the plane, leaving them unable to leave unless they paid a heavy fine to the Chinese employer.... They were locked up in poor living and working conditions on the work premises, which were guarded by security guards.... They suffered excessive work hours of up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holiday allowance... Many workers were injured during work with no access to medical treatment.... After a worker from a Chinese mining company in Indonesia was diagnosed positive for Covid-19 in November 2020, he was put in isolation in an empty dormitory room for more than 20 days without any medical treatment. Later other workers found his dead body.

The Chinese embassy also seems to have actively worked to suppress... complaints.... "Several workers said they tried to call the Chinese Embassy to report that their passports were detained by their employing company. The embassy's reply was that it had no right to intervene and the workers were told to file a report at the local police station. However, these workers, cannot even get out of the gate of the work site, and they also face language barriers. It is quite unrealistic for them to call the local police. — "Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China's Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic", China Labor Watch, April 30, 2021.

Forced labor exists in two distinct forms in China. One form is modern slavery, not directly sanctioned by the state, as exemplified by the BRI workers mentioned above. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, "on any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China.... This estimate does not include figures on organ trafficking."

The other form of forced labor is systematic and legal under China's penal system. Communist China has used forced labor and labor camps, citing "reeducation", since the 1950s. In 2013, the CCP claimed that it was abolishing the practice, only to reinstate it again some years later to "reeducate" Uyghurs. A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, published in September 2020, found that the Chinese government had built nearly 400 detention camps in Xinjiang.

"Tens of thousands of former detainees are likely to have been transferred into forced labour programmes.... They contaminate the supply chains of hundreds of multinational companies with forced labour, and they implicate not only Chinese authorities, but much of the rest of the world in a concerted campaign of ethnic replacement that credible reports suggest may well amount to genocide". — Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The Guardian, September 24, 2020.

[A] much less known fact is that China also subjects Tibetans to forced labor on a large and organized scale. In the first seven months of 2020, China drove more than half a million Tibetans into forced labor according to a 2020 report, "Xinjiang's System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet," by the Jamestown Foundation.

We need to ask ourselves how "the system" -- our government -- facilitates this sort of racket without checks or oversight. Harvard University can be publicly shamed into returning COVID relief money, but a Soros group gets a pass? Why the disparity of treatment and accountability?

Those Americans would be repulsed at the idea [George Soros's East-West Management Institute] getting a PPP "loan," assuming they even knew about it -- 99.9% probably had no idea.

Think about it: a Soros-backed operation that manages a big chunk of the State Department's international development operations, pretending it is like any other American "small business," was seeking paycheck protection subsidies because of COVID. It is an insult. It is grotesque.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal on October 17, 2017, George Soros transferred $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations. EWMI is part of the greater Soros operation. Why are American taxpayers subsidizing any part of his operations?