Avary Holdings

Accepted labor transfers outside Uyghur Region

China

Printed circuit boards (PCB)

Avary Holdings (also referred to as Pengding Holdings, Avary Pengding Holdings; formerly Fukui Precision Components) was established in 1999 by Fukui Precision Component (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. and has grown into a multinational corporation with production bases in mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Avary Holdings is a subsidiary of Zhen Ding Tech Group in Taiwan and mainland China, focuses its production on printed circuit boards (PCB), and is expanding its manufacturing of PCBs relevant to automobiles. From 2017-2020 Pengding Holdings (parent company) was named the largest manufacturer of PCB products in the world. Pengding’s company mission as stated by the company chairman is “benefiting mankind, improving environmental protection, and making the earth a better place."

In an October 2019 effort to conform to the government-issued mandate to ensure that at least one person in every household in southern XUAR was assigned to work, representatives of Mungulkure County (Ili Prefecture, Ch: Yili) conducted household surveys to facilitate labor transfers. The local government Human Resources and Social Security Bureau organized a “job transfer fair” to transfer Uyghur laborers both within the Uyghur Region and further afield, at which 5 companies participated including Avary’s subsidiary Jiangsu Huaian Pengding Holdings (江苏淮安鹏鼎控股有限公司). This subsidiary produces PCBs for the automotive industry, among others, and has been praised in corporate publicity as the most important production base for the company.

That same Avary subsidiary conducted similar job fairs through its 2019 “cooperation mechanism for the transfer of employment.” The company participated in hosting fifteen different job fairs in Nilqa County. Jiangsu Huaian Pengding Holding “absorbed” 111 laborers in July of 2019 to work in its factory. At least two Nilqa (Ch: Nilke) County Human Resources reports indicate the concerted effort of the county to transfer people to Pengding Holdings. In one of them, there is a clear emphasis on poor laborers, but specifically the advertisement mentions a preference for Kazakh, Han, and Mongolian rather than Uyghur workers – a discriminatory effort to participate in the state-sponsored programs aimed at changing the ethnic dynamics of the region while still maintaining a racist attitude toward Uyghur. Transferred laborers were expected to be “civilized” and know Mandarin, have no criminal records and be able to “bear hardships and stand hard word, obey management.”

A March 2019 Ili Daily article indicated that 110 employees had been transferred to Jiangsu Huaian Pengding, as part of a “batch” of 406 Indigenous rural laborers transferred in the prefecture’s “Spring Breeze Action.” As reported by the Tech Transparency Project, a 2019 announcement of the Xinyuan County Fengling Labor Dispatch Company announced that it had “exported” 102 people to Jiangsu Huaian Pengding that year.

Avary’s participation in labor transfers continued into 2020. In an article that celebrated that Ili and Huaian are more than 4,200 kilometers apart from one another, Xiongmao Times described Avary Holding’s active participation in the transfer of laborers from the Uyghur Region. The article indicated that Jiangsu Huaian Pengding had “received and resettled” a total of 389 people from the Uyghur Region, 92% of which were from minoritized communities. The article announced that the “retention rate of Xinjiang employees was 24.62%” suggesting on the one hand that these laborers were not held in their position indefinitely, but on the other hand might indicate a lack of willingness to work for the company in the first place. The article indicates Avary brought in workers from Ili because the area is “rich in surplus labor resources in the rural areas, and the local government attaches great importance to the transfer of employees from Xinjiang to the inner China.” Avary claimed to segregate the workers on a separate floor according to differences in ethnicity and religious beliefs. The company simultaneously put in place programs that would strengthen “patriotic education” and promote “ethnic consolidation and integration.” The latter of these efforts suggests that Avary is taking part in the larger program to [disperse] the Indigenous populations in the Uyghur Region, in the government’s “population optimization” efforts that have been described as genocidal.

Avary’s engagement in labor transfer programs has been the subject of an investigation published by The Information (focused on the company’s relationship with Apple) and a letter regarding forced labor allegations from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. A spokesperson for Avary told The Information that it had never employed transferred laborers.