Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds the following: In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, the Government of the People’s Republic of China has, since 2017, arbitrarily detained as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups in a system of extrajudicial mass internment camps, in addition to arbitrarily detaining many in formal prisons and detention centers, and has subjected detainees to forced labor, torture, political indoctrination, and other severe human rights abuses.
Forced labor exists within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s system of mass internment camps, and throughout the region, and is confirmed by the testimony of former camp detainees, satellite imagery, official media reports, publicly available documents, official statements, and official leaked documents from the Government of the People’s Republic of China as part of a targeted campaign of repression of Muslim ethnic minorities. In addition to reports from researchers and civil society groups documenting evidence that many factories and other suppliers in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are exploiting forced labor, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security on July 22, 2020, added eleven entities to the entity list after determining the entities had been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region .
Audits and efforts to vet products and supply chains in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are unreliable due to the extent forced labor has been integrated into the regional economy, the mixing of involuntary labor with voluntary labor, the inability of witnesses to speak freely about working conditions given government surveillance and coercion, and the incentive of government officials to conceal government-sponsored forced labor. The Department of State’s June 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report found that Authorities offer subsidies incentivizing Chinese companies to open factories in close proximity to the internment camps, and to receive transferred detainees at satellite manufacturing sites in other provinces.
Local governments receive additional funds for each inmate forced to work in these sites at a fraction of minimum wage or without any compensation. . U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued 11 Withhold Release Orders on products suspected to be produced with prison or forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Products subject to the Withhold Release Orders include all cotton, cotton products, tomatoes, and tomato products as well as certain garments, hair products, apparel, computer parts, and other products.
In its 2019 Annual Report, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
(CECC)found that products reportedly produced with forced labor by current and former mass internment camp detainees included textiles, electronics, food products, shoes, tea, and handicrafts. Reports in 2020 indicated that, in recent years, People’s Republic of China Government authorities had organized a labor training and transfer system on a mass scale. Under this system, hundreds of thousands of rural residents of the Tibet Autonomous Region participated in military-style training, ideological education, and vocational training before being transferred to job postings in the Tibetan Autonomous Region or elsewhere in China. The similarity of the Tibet Autonomous Region system to that in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region raised fears that coercive practices or rights abuses may be taking place in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 ( 19 U.S.C. 1307 ) states that it is illegal to import into the United States goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part by forced labor. Such merchandise is subject to exclusion or seizure and may lead to criminal investigation of the importer. The policies of the Government of the People’s Republic of China are in contravention of international human rights instruments signed by that government, including— the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the People’s Republic of China has signed but not yet ratified; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, ratified by the People’s Republic of China in 2001; and the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), to which the People’s Republic of China has been a state party since February 2010.
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