The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a new United States law to ban imports tainted with forced labor in China, went into effect in June. According to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), a co-author of the legislation, “we can finally ensure that American consumers and businesses can buy goods without inadvertent complicity in China’s horrific human rights abuses.”
Horrific human rights abuses are exactly what they are. But early signs suggest that the law may not have its intended effects, and policymakers still have a long way to go before they can meaningfully push back against Beijing’s atrocities.
The letter and spirit of the Uyghur law are sweeping, and Customs and Border Protection intends to implement it as such. But U.S. industries just don’t seem convinced.
The law states that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or produced by certain entities in or outside of China that source material from the Uyghur region, would, by default, be barred from entering the U.S. unless importers can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that no forced labor was used. CBP seems to take it seriously, warning that an importer would need to trace its supply chains down to raw materials to prove that its merchandise isn’t made with forced labor and that it expects to grant very few exceptions.
Yet, when the agency detained a shipment of quartzite — a key material for making polysilicon for solar panels and a major export of Xinjiang — it still caught the industry by surprise. Polysilicon importers reportedly believed that only a handful of suppliers would face enforcement action, and their vendors don’t have any quartzite documentation to show anyway.
That’s by no means an isolated event. Nearly half of the world’s polysilicon supply comes from Xinjiang, but a solar industry group somehow believes that “most companies should be able to meet the requirements” of the Uyghur law. It’s amazing how optimists do their math. The solar industry is among the most closely watched sectors tainted with Uyghur forced labor, and it’s anyone’s guess how much more unrealistic similar optimism in other sectors will be.
In fairness to importers, the confusion stems from a loophole since 1930 that allowed merchandise made with forced labor to enter the U.S. market as long as importers showed that the U.S. production of the good did not meet domestic demand — a bar Chinese products have often cleared with flying colors. While this loophole was closed in 2016, the reputational damage done to U.S. customs law has not yet subsided.
Compared to 1930, today’s supply chains are orders of magnitude more complex. That means the private sector is best suited to clean up forced labor in its own supply chains, which requires policymakers to light an extra fire under companies. For this reason, my colleague Christine McDaniel and I have argued that the implementation of the Uyghur law needs to err on the side of being overly stringent to incentivize importers’ due diligence.
Finally, while Americans should be proud that they’re the only Western power imposing an import ban on forced labor-tainted goods from China, that’s just a nicer way of saying that America’s allies are not yet on board. Reports suggest that this may be changing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, but unless the interest materializes in actions, U.S. allies may well become a stepping stone before forced labor-tainted goods make it to America’s shores.
Talk is cheap, and the letter of the law won’t be much better without rigorous enforcement.
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. He’s also the curator of the Wei To Think Again newsletter on U.S.-China competition.
