The growth in Xinjiang, where journalists and researchers have been documenting a human rights crisis for years, is of particular concern, said Peter Irwin, co-executive director at the nonprofit Network for Uyghur Rights.

"Uyghurs have been kicked off their land, imprisoned or compelled into state-backed forced labor settings, all part of broader atrocity crimes that are ongoing," said Irwin, who is conducting further research into the industry. He fears that the expansion of gasification will only worsen this.

China routinely denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere.

The key argument for placing coal gasification projects in these two regions is to be near the source of much of China's domestic coal output. But other coal-producing regions like Shandong or Shanxi are not seeing as much planned expansion, and Irwin thinks there are other factors at play.

"For decades, the party-state has pursued an extractive, colonial relationship with Uyghurs," he said. "It's far from clear that Uyghurs themselves have actually benefited from coal gasification or other large-scale industrial development."

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Coal gasification and coal-to-chemicals processes also use a lot of water. "The industry will also inevitably push the region's already highly stressed water resources to the absolute limit, building on existing pressures driven by a decade of rapid industrialization," Irwin said.

He acknowledged that the tendency to place polluting or resource-draining industries in minority, low-income or remote regions is not just a China problem but a global one, from coal-fired power plants to even data centers.

"Although Uyghurs face severe human rights abuses more broadly, you see similar patterns around the world in terms of concentrating and offloading environmental burdens onto vulnerable groups while ostensibly serving national or global economic interests," he said.