The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would require companies sending goods to the United States to scrutinize those supply chains, or perhaps abandon Chinese suppliers altogether. (According to a report published in March by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that cited state media, the factory employed around 800 Uighur workers at the end of 2019 and produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike each year.)Ĭhina’s vast campaign of suppressing and forcibly assimilating Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has attracted the scorn of politicians and consumers around the world.īut for many companies, fully investigating and eliminating any potential ties to forced labor there has been difficult, given the opacity of Chinese supply chains and the limited access of auditors to a region where the Chinese government tightly restricts people’s movements. Nike said that the Qingdao factory had stopped hiring new workers from Xinjiang in 2019, and that an independent audit confirmed there were no longer employees from there at the facility. officials are said to be intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan in case China blockades the island as a prelude to an attempted invasion.Īsked about the allegations of forced labor, Nike referred to a statement in March in which it said that it did not source products from Xinjiang and that it had confirmed that its suppliers were not using textiles or yarn from the region. influence to try to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology. Tech Crackdown : The Biden administration is waging a new global campaign against China, using U.S.As the rivalry between the two powers intensifies, South Korea is increasingly feeling the heat. Seoul Gets Squeezed : The United States is South Korea’s main security ally.More on the Relations Between Asia and the U.S. Greg Rossiter, the director of global communications at Nike, said the company “did not lobby against” the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act but instead had “constructive discussions” with congressional staff aides aimed at eliminating forced labor and protecting human rights. It also said that the COFCO Tunhe facility in Xinjiang, which supplies sugar to a local bottling facility and had been linked to allegations of forced labor by The Wall Street Journal and Chinese-language news media, “successfully completed an audit in 2019.” In a statement, Coca-Cola said that it “strictly prohibits any type of forced labor in our supply chain” and uses third-party auditors to closely monitor its suppliers. In a report issued in March, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, listed Nike and Coca-Cola as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang, alongside Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger and others. Human rights groups and news reports have linked many multinational companies to suppliers there, including tying Coca-Cola to sugar sourced from Xinjiang, and documenting Uighur workers in a factory in Qingdao that makes Nike shoes. Xinjiang produces vast amounts of raw materials like cotton, coal, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, and supplies workers for China’s apparel and footwear factories. Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China. Congressional aides say it has the backing to pass the Senate, and could be signed into law by either the Trump administration or the incoming Biden administration.īut the legislation, called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has become the target of multinational companies including Apple whose supply chains touch the far western Xinjiang region, as well as of business groups including the U.S. The bill, which would prohibit broad categories of certain goods made by persecuted Muslim minorities in an effort to crack down on human rights abuses, has gained bipartisan support, passing the House in September by a margin of 406 to 3. WASHINGTON - Nike and Coca-Cola are among the major companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to congressional staff members and other people familiar with the matter, as well as lobbying records that show vast spending on the legislation.
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