How is Xinjiang still shipping millions of goods to US after ‘forced labour’ law came into effect?
- Xinjiang entities exported a 10-month high of US$56.8 million of goods to the US in August despite the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act being in place since June
- Act assumes that all goods from Xinjiang are at risk of being tainted by forced labour, despite repeated denials from Beijing
On the 29th of August, at the height of the busy import season before America’s annual holiday shopping boom, a crate of T-shirts and toys arrived at the Port of Long Beach in California after a journey of thousands of miles from Yantian Port in Southern China.
The 21kg of shirts (46lbs) and 3kg (6.6lbs) of toys were on their way to Massachusetts and New York – two almost negligible entries among the billions of dollars in US-China trade every year.
But they were both shipped from the same unexpected place: the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
Chinese customs data showed that Xinjiang entities exported US$56.8 million worth of goods to the US in August, surging to their highest level in 10 months, and appearing for the second consecutive month to defy the new law.
The value more than doubled that of July – the first full month after the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act went into effect – and was almost sevenfold of that in June. It also surged 592.8 per cent compared to a year earlier.
