The United States pledged enforcement Tuesday as a landmark ban on most imports from Xinjiang, the Chinese region where rights groups say the Uighurs are being forced into slave labor, went into effect.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Law, which will be felt particularly in the textile industry, went into effect six months after President Joe Biden signed it after bipartisan support in Congress.
“We are rallying our allies and partners to free global supply chains from the use of forced labour,” Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said in a statement.
The US Customs and Border Protection Service, which will enforce the new law, issued guidelines saying Xinjiang products contain forced labor and are therefore prohibited unless companies can prove otherwise.
The law “requires that importers demonstrate due diligence, effective supply chain tracing and supply chain management measures to ensure they do not import goods manufactured in whole or in part by forced labour,” the report said.
It would look at the entire supply chain and not exempt goods shipped from other parts of China or third countries.
According to labor rights groups, an estimated 20 percent of the garments imported into the United States each year contain some Xinjiang cotton.
The vast western region is also a major center for canned tomatoes for export.
Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican hawk who has joined forces with liberal Democrats to push for the legislation, called the law “the most significant change in America’s relationship with China since 2001.”
“We will no longer look at pictures of bareheaded prisoners with shackles and blindfolds lined up like animals for slaughter and shrugging their shoulders,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Real Clear Politics.
– “Undermines the principles of the free market” –
China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and helped initiate rapid growth as it became the manufacturing hub of the world.
US politicians across party lines have gradually rejected their bets that trade integration would temper Beijing, which the Biden administration has identified as the United States’ key global competitor.
China once again voiced its anger at the trade ban, saying it goes against global efforts to lower inflation and stabilize supply chains.
“The law is solid evidence of US arbitrariness in undermining international economic and trade rules,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.
“The US move is against the trend of the times and doomed to failure.”
But Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, called the law a “big win” for the movement and said it would push other governments to take similar action.
Citing testimonies, human rights groups say well over a million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic speakers have been jailed in re-education camps to forcibly integrate them into China’s Han majority.
Beijing denies the allegations and says it is offering vocational training to reduce the pull of Islamist extremism after violence.
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