Chinese authorities have contaminated U.S. markets with products made by enslaved Uighur Muslims, according to lawmakers and a U.S. official.
“We know forced labor is widespread and systematic and exists both within and outside the mass internment camps,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-chairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, said Wednesday. “We know that many U.S., international, and Chinese companies are complicit in the exploitation of forced labor regarding Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.”
McGovern is part of a bipartisan bloc in the House and Senate that drafted legislation to force companies to cut their links to Xinjiang, the region where Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uighur Muslims in labor and reeducation camps. The bloc introduced that bill Wednesday while State Department officials provided an annual update on “the stain of the century,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has dubbed the Uighur crackdown.
“We have spoken out very strongly about what’s going on in Xinjiang and not only the forced labor in Xinjiang, but also the forced labor that China exports to other places,” Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Rob Destro told reporters Wednesday while unveiling the department’s 2019 human rights report. “The secretary himself has called it one of the worst human rights violations in recent memory.”
McGovern and other lawmakers hope to muscle U.S. companies out of Xinjiang by drafting legislation that would force the corporations to prove that they aren’t relying on slave labor.
“We should assume that anything that’s produced in this region is done … through forced labor,” Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who also sits on the commission, said Wednesday.
Chinese officials have swept as many as 1.8 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into the forced labor economy under the auspices of “job training,” according to congressional researchers.
“Authorities used tax exemptions and subsidies to encourage Chinese garment manufacturers to move production to the” Xinjiang region, a CECC report released Wednesday said.
China denies enslaving anyone. “All workers … sign voluntarily contracts with their employers on the basis of equality and consensus and get due payment,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters Wednesday.
A U.S. clothing company, Badger Sportswear, “agreed to pay $300,000 to human rights organizations” last year following reports that the company relied on a factory that operated inside a Uighur internment camp. Other high-profile companies, including Adidas, Nike, and Coca-Cola, also rely on the offending camps, according to McGovern and other CECC lawmakers.
“It’s injected forced labor into many of the things we buy on a daily basis,” Rubio said.
