A united, international front of democracies has taken significant steps to crack down on the Chinese Communist Party’s forced-labor scheme.
With the world fixated on the crisis in Washington this month, few noticed that a united, international front of democracies took significant steps to crack down on the Chinese Communist Party’s Xinjiang forced-labor scheme last week.
But that’s exactly what happened. Within the span of a few days, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States all issued rules to tighten up their enforcement of laws designed to combat the slave labor that the Chinese Party-state has inflicted on over, by some estimates, upwards of half a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims from China’s West.
The new regulations aren’t all identical. The upshot, though, is all the same: Some democracies are moving off the sidelines from which they merely “expressed concern” in substitution for concrete action on the Uyghur crisis. The United States has for months led this push, leading with targeted sanctions, bans on companies complicit in the atrocities, and restrictions on forced-labor-tainted imports. But the response from other Western democracies has lagged, even following this summer’s explosive revelations about Beijing’s forced sterilization of Uyghurs. If last week is any indication, though, that’s starting to change for the better.
These forced-labor practices are an open secret. The reams of evidence that offer insights about the situation include not just eyewitness accounts and satellite imagery, but also the Chinese government’s own documents and other information that researchers, such as Adrian Zenz (who has written some of the most impactful reports on Xinjiang), have found online.
U.K. foreign secretary Dominic Raab made his country the first of this group of three countries to announce new steps last week. Declaring that “we have a moral duty to respond,” Raab told the British parliament that his goal is to ensure that “no company that profits from forced labour in Xinjiang can do business in the U.K., and no U.K. business is involved in their supply chains.”
And that’s the main thrust of these new steps — which include stricter guidelines for the import of goods from Xinjiang, fines for companies that don’t comply, and a forced-labor audit of U.K. government suppliers. That was January 12, and before the end of the day, Raab’s Canadian counterpart at the time, Francois Phillipe Champagne, announced that his government was joining the charge with a similar toolkit that included new restrictions on the import of forced-labor-produced goods and advice to businesses on avoiding tainted supply chains. And, finally, the next day, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued an order banning the import of products made with cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang, a move that had been hinted at months ago but had only been brought about in a piecemeal way until last week.
This kind of international cooperation among democracies to address Beijing’s human-rights abuses in Xinjiang is unprecedented. Despite President Trump’s personal aversion to speaking about human rights (and the allegations that he expressed approval of the camps to CCP general-secretary Xi Jinping), the U.S. for the past couple of years had largely been alone in addressing the plight of the Uyghurs on the world stage. Following the horrific revelations of mass sterilizations this summer — a tipping point, providing compelling evidence that the repression of the Uyghurs is a genocide — the international criticism of Beijing reached new heights. And, at the start of 2021, it’s truly taken root, despite the fact that dozens of countries still endorse Beijing’s Xinjiang repression.
These new efforts on forced labor, while promising, fall short for two reasons. First, obviously, a mere three countries don’t make for an overwhelming international coalition on Xinjiang. The foundations of one are can be seen, but although it might contain the United States and some countries in the Anglosphere, and possibly Japan, Europe, which is poised to approve a massive investment deal with Beijing, appears to have little stomach for mixing human-rights concerns with trade policy. This is all the more disappointing in light of the recent awakening vis-à-vis China on the continent.
And while going after Xinjiang forced-labor cotton is a requisite step for adopting a maximalist Western strategy on the Uyghur genocide, this ought to be accompanied by other measures. Magnitsky sanctions, like the ones that the United States adopted to target top CCP officials complicit in the abuses, are a bare minimum. Ottawa and London have yet to take these steps, though it’s not unlikely that they do this in the future.
Adopting the proper, most accurate language with which we refer to China’s crimes should be part of this effort, too. The U.K. parliament is set to consider an amendment that forces the courts to determine whether a genocide is taking place in Xinjiang. And the U.S. government, following recent legislation enacted by Congress, is statutorily required to issue its own determination about whether genocide is taking place.
The new cotton bans will do much to prevent Western businesses from benefitting from the CCP’s ethnostate and slave-labor regime. But getting the rest of the world to see this and turning the Party-state into an international pariah must be the eventual goal.