House votes to ban goods made by forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region

Since 2017, Beijing has waged a campaign to forcibly assimilate the Uyghur community, carrying out widespread surveillance and repression, as well as detaining many members of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority in centers and camps. The practices have garnered accusations of crimes against humanity and both the Biden and Donald Trump administrations, as well as several European legislatures, have declared China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims a genocide.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who sponsored the bill in the House, said in a Wednesday statement that the legislation had a “simple purpose: to stop the government of China from exploiting the Uyghur people.”

“In two months, the Chinese government will host the Winter Olympics in the middle of a genocide. We must take a clear moral position to stand with those who are suffering because of forced labor,” he added. The White House announced Monday that the United States would not send any officials to the Olympics because of Beijing’s human rights abuses.

The sole vote against the measure was from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has said in the past that he did not want the U.S. government to “meddle” in the internal affairs of other countries.

There was no immediate reaction from Beijing, which has repeatedly denied allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang, on the bill’s passage. In a Dec. 6 news conference, a government spokesman, Xu Guixiang, said that “the so-called genocide Xinjiang committed against the Uyghur people is the biggest frame job in human history.”

The most recent tweet from the Chinese Embassy in the United States, from January, purportedly quotes a Uyghur person saying: “We want good life, so we work and make money with our hard work, why would we need to be forced to do so?”

The bill now heads to the Senate. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has pushed for the legislation in that chamber, has said it should be presumed that any product made in the region was “made by slaves.” The legislation includes a provision requiring the president to impose sanctions on individuals and foreign entities who are found to be “knowingly facilitating” forced labor in Xinjiang.

The Xinjiang region produces 85 percent of China’s cotton, and factories there produce nearly half of the world’s supply of a key ingredient for solar panels. With Xinjiang playing such a major role in global supply chains, business groups and large companies — including Apple — have lobbied against restrictions on imports from the region.

“The solar value chain is almost completely contaminated by forced labor,” according to an industry analyst, Johannes Bernreuter.

China has worked to contain evidence of the crackdown in Xinjiang, wiping information from websites and expelling journalists who have documented the government’s practices there, which have reportedly included forced assimilation, torture and forced sterilizations and abortions.

Beijing has in recent weeks stumbled in its attempt to quell concerns over the disappearance of tennis player Peng Shaui, who accused a senior government official of sexual assault.