The United States pledged on Tuesday to strictly enforce a ban on imports from China’s Xinjiang province, under a law that comes into force to punish “forced labor” by Uyghur Muslims that organizations blame authorities in Beijing. This law, one of the tools of the American government against what they consider to be a “genocide” targeting this Muslim minority in China, came into force six months after its unanimous adoption by American parliamentarians.
It targets a wide range of products manufactured in this region of northwestern China, but should particularly be felt in the textile industry.
No more forced labor
“We are mobilizing our allies and partners to ensure that global supply chains are free from the use of forced labor,” US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said in a statement. U.S. Customs, responsible for enforcing the law, has issued guidelines saying that products from Xinjiang will be considered forced labor, and therefore prohibited, unless companies can provide documentation proving opposite.
They claim to want to control the entire supply chain, without sparing goods arriving from other Chinese regions or third countries. Some 20% of clothing imported into the United States each year contains Xinjiang cotton, according to estimates cited by labor organizations. The Chinese region is also a major producer of canned peeled tomatoes for export.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who, for once, had joined forces with Democrats to bring this bill forward, hailed the entry into force of “the most significant change in America’s relationship with the China since 2001” – the date of the Asian giant’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
Beijing strongly protests
Beijing again protested the U.S. embargo, saying it ran counter to global efforts to curb inflation and smooth supply chains gripped by a series of crises. “This law is strong evidence of the arbitrariness of the United States which undermines the rules of international economy and trade,” said a spokesman for Chinese diplomacy, Wang Wenbin. “The American measure goes against the direction of history and is doomed to failure,” he added.
But Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an association for the defense of this minority, considered that the law was “a great victory”, calling on other countries to follow this example. According to several Western countries and independent organizations, Beijing has interned one million Uyghurs in “camps”. China strongly denies these accusations and presents the “camps” as “vocational training centers” intended to keep people away from the temptation of extremism.