04/11/2025
EXCLUSIVE: A UK academic was yesterday reported to have been forced to stop her work "defending human rights" in China. But she really worked for Washington DC to do immense harm to the Chinese Uyghurs, the very people she is claiming to help, it can be revealed today.
Laura Murphy of Sheffield Hallam University worked for the US Department of Homeland Security to amplify a notorious law that halted more than US$2 billion of trade exports from Xinjiang, throwing thousands of Chinese Uyghurs out of work.
NO HUMAN RIGHTS HERO
The BBC, Guardian and Times today painted Laura Murphy as a courageous human rights hero, pressured by the UK's Sheffield Hallam University to cease research on Uyghur “forced labor” in Xinjiang.
But an examination of Ms Murphy’s past shows that the opposite is true – she was a well paid part of a US operation that badly hurt the Chinese Uyghurs: the development of the notorious Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA.
RISE OF THE UYGHURS
In the past decade, the Chinese ethnic minority group enjoyed a remarkably steep upward jump in health statistics, earnings, longevity, GDP per capita, employability and skill levels. The Uyghurs now live longer than many ethnic minority groups in the rich US.
But since 2022, the export businesses of the western Chinese region (Xinjiang is 58 per cent ethnic minorities) have been badly hit by a merciless US operation that specifically targeted their ability to sell the goods they grow or make. (For example, Xinjiang people grow much of the world’s tomato crop, and make the world’s finest cotton.)
KILLING THE RULE OF LAW
On 23 December, 2021, the US passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which declared that all goods made in Xinjiang, or by names on “the UFLPA Entity List”, would automatically be classified as products of slavery, the use of forced labor.
Ms Murphy worked as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration on several ways to hit out at Xinjiang but focused mainly on increasing the number of businesses in that region on the US target list.
“I was primarily tasked with expanding the UFLPA Entity List, and in one year, the list more than quadrupled,” she said in her Linked-In resume.
The astonishing new law, and the long list that came with it, was virtually unique in global legal statutes in that it demolished the foundation stone of the rule of law, which is that all defendents are innocent until proven guilty.
The law said all products were automatically presumed to have been made by slaves - unless the US Commerce Department said otherwise.
(Many experts in trade law pointed out its absurdity at the time. If white male US billionaire rock stars went to Xinjiang on holiday and recorded a song in their presidential hotel suite, the new law legally defined them as slaves whose goods could not be traded.)
ASTONISHINGLY UNFAIR
The astonishingly unfair UFLPA law forced companies from around the world, including from the US, UK, and Hong Kong, to stop doing business with Chinese Uyghur enterprises, contractors, or anyone (including Americans) who employed people from the ethnic group.
One US buyer for a major multinational told this writer that he had to suddenly stop buying any goods from enterprises led by or employing Uyghur staff “which was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do”.
That caused a huge drop in income for Uyghur people. But it got worse.
Between June 2022 and July 2025, about 10,000 shipments from China, estimated value US$2 billion, were denied entry to the United States with the authorities using the highly controversial UFLPA “presumption of guilt” clause, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics.
Most shockingly, the law directly hurt China’s astoundingly successful poverty alleviation work in the province.
DISTURBING RACIAL PROFILING
The practical outcome of Ms Murphy’s expanded UFLPA Entity List did not just turn the rule of law upside down, but had a very disturbing racial element, since the focus was on ethnic minorities, who make up the majority of people of Xinjiang.
“This means the United States is declaring millions of workers as illegal workers and the products of their labor unlawful on the basis of racial profiling,” said Jaq James, a lawyer who has made detailed analyses of the UFLPA and related laws.
That in itself makes the US law, controlled by the Commerce Department, highly problematic.
To respond to criticism, the US produced lawyers who defended the controversial law as having a potentially positive function in “freeing” slaves but provided no evidence for this.
Ms James wrote: “What none of the legal commentators have acknowledged is that, in respect of any extraterritorial objective to improve working conditions, there is no report by the United States government providing rigorous statistical analysis — such as before-and-after labor condition metrics — that support a causal link between the blanket country-of-origin import ban and freed forced labor.”
COTTON OFF
Ms Murphy’s expanded UFLPA Entity List also did enormous harm to the Chinese Uyghurs employed in the cotton industry. Until then, the province had a reputation for producing the world’s best cotton, and the world’s biggest shirtmaker was based in Xinjiang.
Yet this industry was hard hit after being declared a “slave labor” sector, despite the fact that cotton farming is almost entirely done by machine.
“The mechanization rate of cotton harvesting in Xinjiang has reached 97 percent,” Chen Quanjia, dean of college of agricultural sciences, Xinjiang Agricultural University, told Xinhua.
A former major buyer of Uyghur cotton for a western conglomerate told the present writer that he was now buying cotton from the southern United States, not because it was better or cheaper (it wasn’t), but because he could not have his business hurt by the US government’s anti-China politics.
THEN COMES THE IRONY
The extent of the unfairness of the untrue “China uses prisoners as slave labor” story was revealed when a study showed that prison labor really did exist—but in the United States.
Large numbers of prisoners in the US make products for companies including the world’s largest food manufacturers — and are paid just pennies or nothing at all, according to a report by the Associated Press on 29 January 2024.
Most shocking of all, the U.S. exported these goods to China.
(We found no records of Ms Murphy expressing outrage about that report.)
DISTORTED FACTS
The western campaign to harm the Uyghur community was discussed by delegates at the International Symposium on Employment and Social Security in Xinjiang in December 2024.
More than 200 representatives from 44 countries, regions and organizations attended the event. Enterprises run by or employing Chinese Uyghurs were clearly being harmed by recent events, the speakers said—but by the west, not by China.
“This is an international campaign against China using the lies and distorted facts about Xinjiang,” French writer Maxime Vivas told the press at the meeting in Urumqi.
An American, Mark Levine, said: “What I learned about life in Xinjiang and all I saw runs counter to what those who wish to detour China’s progress want us to believe,” he said.
‘A RACIST AND LAWLESS ACT’
Ms James laments the difficulty that China has in telling its side of the story to the world.
“It is striking that the Chinese government has not yet made rhetorical mileage out of the UFLPA’s apparent violations of so many international laws — both to expose the United States’ double standards on the ‘rules-based international order’ and to defend the Xinjiang people’s right to development and economic dignity,” she wrote in a report.
“It is a missed opportunity not to rhetorically frame the UFLPA as a racist and lawless Act that punishes ordinary workers under the guise of protecting them.”
