The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden late last year.
A rare bipartisan Beltway move, the law is intended to keep goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province out of the U.S. market.
There’s no denying the Chinese government’s atrocities in the Uyghur region. However, in practice, it’s extremely difficult to identify and phase out these goods. Without fully developed solutions, what balance can policymakers strike? Turning a blind eye isn’t acceptable, and I don’t have all the answers, but the first step is being realistic about the obstacles. The question partly comes down to what U.S. consumers are willing to do on their own.
As I’ve written before, we face a trade-off between keeping China engaged with the free world and the need to safeguard liberal-democratic values and institutions. The recent Uyghur legislation has some important moving parts whose implementation will affect how well we’re striking that balance.
First, the policy has an unusual component known as “rebuttable presumption.” Goods made “wholly or in part” in Xinjiang, or produced by a list of yet-to-be-named entities, will be prohibited from entering the United States. Importers can contest this with “clear and convincing evidence,” which is also yet to be defined. The policy won’t have teeth if the evidentiary process is too lenient. But if it’s too draconian, it will overshoot by unfairly barring innocent importers, preventing consumers from purchasing legitimate products, and even denying income to willing workers in the Uyghur region.
Second, it remains to be seen who will make the forced labor entity list. A 2020 study by Australian Strategic Policy Institute researchers alarmingly found that more than 80,000 Uyghurs had been transferred out of Xinjiang in recent years to work in factories elsewhere in China. These turned out to be in the supply chains of at least 82 global brands. Their goods are not made in Xinjiang, but they, among possibly many others, should nevertheless be included in the list and face the rebuttable presumption.
Third, which goods are made “in part” in Xinjiang is subject to interpretation. A damning report by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University last year identified 53 intermediary manufacturers around the world that sourced unfinished cotton goods from Xinjiang, and they, in turn, are suppliers of 103 international brands. Their products are not necessarily made with Uyghur forced labor, but some could be — and so could many other goods imported to the U.S. from around the world. How widely should policymakers cast their rebuttable presumption net?
Regardless of these difficulties facing policymakers, the public has some power should they choose to exercise it. Consider the chocolate industry’s child labor problem. According to a 2020 study, about 1.56 million children in Ivory Coast and Ghana are doing backbreaking work to harvest cocoa, and these two countries account for 70% of the world’s cocoa bean supply. But at least some people care enough. That’s why there are child labor-free chocolate options and creative technologies to trace the origin of cocoa beans.
The Uyghur forced labor problem is similar but tougher. China can and does orchestrate domestic boycotts of foreign brands that want to rid their products of Uyghur forced labor, making international corporations less likely to cross Beijing. Neither Ivory Coast nor Ghana could make much of a wave boycotting foreign firms.
A tougher challenge demands a stronger will. We may be in the early stages of a welcomed awakening among the public, who increasingly sees the Chinese regime as the human rights abuser that it is. Given the difficulties of eradicating Uyghur forced labor through policymaking, this awakening may eventually determine how many, or how few, of these products remain in our market and whether the power of the people is really stronger than the people in power.
The ball may be in the court of policymakers now, whose job is to deliver the right balance. But ultimately it’s coming our way.
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.
