We welcome the Trump administration’s announcement that it will block the importation of goods made with forced Uighur labor. A Muslim minority ethnic group living in China’s Xinjiang province, the Uighurs have been subjected to a 10-year campaign of tyranny by the Communist Party. The maltreatment of these innocents has included forced sterilization, endemic repression, and the imprisonment of 2 million people in reeducation camps.
Fortunately, Customs and Border Protection is now moving to prevent the importation of cotton, tomatoes, and other goods at risk of having been produced with forced labor. Considering that Xinjiang plays a major role in global cotton trading, the impact might be significant for pricing and distribution chains. But this action is necessary. Recent reports underline the manner by which hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are being forced to supplement Xinjiang’s cotton-picking industry. This is a disgrace that shames the communist superpower.
China says the U.S. restrictions are built on a totally false foundation. Speaking on Thursday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian declared that “forced labor is the biggest lie of the century … with an aim to restrict and suppress the relevant Chinese authorities and companies and contain China’s development. The United States both creates lies and takes egregious actions based on its lies to violate international trade rules and principles of market economy … bringing no good to anyone.”
Anyone except, perhaps, the Uighurs whose plight might now receive more global attention. Oh, and except those Western consumers who can now avoid using goods that were made by slaves. And to Zhao’s first point, we’d rather suggest that the biggest lie of the century is actually China’s claim that it seeks only “win-win” cooperation with the international community.
What the Trump administration has done here goes beyond the U.S. market. As the European Union faces a tense struggle within its Parliament over whether to ratify a trade deal with China, actions such as this one will offer impetus to those who are concerned about China’s human rights record. The U.S. is both taking a stand against injustice and offering a credible example as to how that injustice might be better countered.
Unfortunately, what China is doing to the Uighurs is just one example of how it approaches international trade. If Beijing is willing to turn its own people into slaves, we should have no delusions as to why it treats the rest of us so poorly. The evidence is clear. What China can make with slaves, it makes. What intellectual property China cannot access with legitimate contracts, it steals. What China cannot outcompete, it overwhelms with political pressure. When China is challenged on such actions, it feigns outrage.
To listen to Zhao and company, we would believe that Beijing alone should be the moral compass by which the rest of the world operates. Take Zhao’s comment on Thursday that “Xinjiang affairs are China’s internal affairs that no other country has the right or privilege to interfere with.” How can Zhao honestly claim that America’s decision whether to allow or restrict imports from China is a matter of “China’s internal affairs”? Morality aside, it is up to America alone what goods it allows on its soil.
We should not stand for China’s abuses at home and its arrogance abroad — especially when, as with the Uighurs, the consequence is destroyed lives, not simple economics. As it was right to end the domestic cotton slave trade in the 19th century, the U.S. is right to oppose the foreign slave trade in the 21st century. Let our democratic allies take example.
