More than half a million of Uighur labourers in China's northwestern Xinjiang region are being forced into picking cotton by hand through a coercive state labour scheme, a report has said.

At least 570,000 people in Xinjiang's three majority-Uighur regions were sent to pick cotton as part of a state-run coercive labour transfer scheme in 2018, according to Washington-based think tank the Center for Global Policy.