The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act cleared a final hurdle this afternoon, after the Senate unanimously passed the legislation. The White House said yesterday — for the first time ever — that President Biden will sign it into law.
The Uyghur bill will create a presumption that goods produced in Xinjiang were manufactured using forced labor; the Chinese Communist Party has facilitated the transfer of ethnic minorities to factories in the region and across China, where they produce textile products, polysilicon for solar panels, and certain agricultural goods.
Although there was widespread bipartisan support for the legislation, it stalled for months at the beginning of the Biden administration as congressional Democrats declined to take it up and, on a few occasions, blocked it. Meanwhile, major corporations launched their own lobbying campaign last year to water down the bill.
Companies that are using supply chains tainted with slave labor, Senator Marco Rubio said on the Senate floor today, will “no longer be able to continue to make Americans, every one of us, frankly, unwitting accomplices in the atrocities, in the genocide that’s being committed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
After the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a version of the bill in April, and the Senate approved its own version authored by Rubio and Senator Jeff Merkley in July, the House declined for months to take up the legislation. Only after Rubio attempted to include the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, prompting Democratic leadership to block the move twice, did Speaker Nancy Pelosi move forward with a version of the legislation proposed by Representative Jim McGovern.
After the Rubio and McGovern bills were reconciled, incorporating the strongest enforcement provisions from each into a bigger package, the House passed the legislation again. When Rubio yesterday evening sought Senate approval, he was blocked by Senator Ron Wyden, who demanded that the legislation include an extension of the child tax credit.
Nike, which has reportedly lobbied against the legislation, has its headquarters in Wyden’s home state of Oregon, and it has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic lawmaker’s campaign fund over the years. But Wyden said he just wanted to bring more attention to the child tax credit, and declined to block the bill again today, paving the way for its approval by unanimous consent.
On the one hand, the Uyghur forced-labor legislation is a bipartisan triumph that demonstrates how overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats can come together to take action on a defining human-rights crisis.
On the other hand, the story behind the legislation’s delay shows the cravenness with which certain officials operated behind the scenes to slow progress on the U.S. response to ongoing mass atrocity crimes.
Although the White House yesterday did endorse the Rubio–McGovern compromise, Press Secretary Jen Psaki for months declined to say that the Biden administration supports the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Meanwhile, other officials, such as climate envoy John Kerry and deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, reportedly lobbied against the legislation, urging members of Congress to water it down and slow walk its passage. Even after the Washington Post revealed Sherman’s comments opposing the bill amid the Rubio NDAA blowup, she declined on two separate occasions to affirmatively support it.
If the goal of that campaign was to give the administration space to reach the first stages of an agreement with Beijing on forging climate cooperation, it was a success. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act had languished for some six months when Kerry took to the podium at Glasgow to announce that he and his Chinese counterpart had struck an agreement including the establishment of a U.S.–China working group on climate issues.
Asked by a reporter how he views the Chinese Communist Party’s mass atrocities in Xinjiang, which the Biden administration labeled genocide and crimes against humanity, Kerry replied, “that’s not my lane.”
If the goal of the administration’s lobbying against the forced-labor legislation was to give Biden time to establish new stability in the U.S.–China relationship, through a round of personal, face-to-face diplomacy with party general secretary Xi Jinping, the strategy was also successful for that reason.
Biden and Xi held a virtual meeting on November 16, during which they tasked their aides with establishing a number of formats for dialogues across four issues. After the talks, the two sides also unrolled a tentative agreement that would ease visa restrictions on Chinese employees for state propaganda organs in the U.S. and journalists with American media outlets in China.
Throughout all of this, the entirety of the administration remained silent about legislation that the Senate had passed unanimously months before.
Top U.S. officials took office promising to put human rights “back at the center of U.S. foreign policy.” When it came time to do the bare minimum — to voice support of legislation designed to prevent Americans from being complicit in crimes against humanity — other priorities took center stage. That is, until Rubio pushed back.