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China’s human rights: US must improve seafood supply chain monitoring to spot Chinese violations, panel told

  • Forced labour hearing follows investigation finding at least 1,000 Uygurs moved from Xinjiang to Shandong to process seafood supplying American brands
  • ‘Comprehensive strategy for transparency’ urged as witness notes companies serving most of the US need not heed ‘Buy America’ policy

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Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey is a chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which convened the hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Photo: Bloomberg
Bochen Hanin Washington
The US must improve its monitoring mechanisms to identify human rights violations in its seafood supply chain where China plays a key role, witnesses told an influential bipartisan panel on Tuesday.
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The comments came at a hearing titled “From Bait to Plate: How Forced Labour in China Taints America’s Seafood Supply Chain” and hosted by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a group of lawmakers and senior administration officials that advises Congress and the executive branch on human rights and the rule of law in China.

The hearing arose after a four-year investigation by journalist Ian Urbina found that 357 of the 751 ships in the Chinese squid fleet his team studied were tied to human rights and environmental violations.

The investigation also found that, since 2018, at least 1,000 Uygurs were transported from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to Shandong province to process seafood that supplied dozens of US brands.
Why the US-China cold war is heating up in public
In 2021, Congress passed the Uygur Forced Labor Prevention Act declaring that goods produced wholly or in part by certain ethnic minorities, especially in Xinjiang, should be presumed to have involved state-imposed forced labour and thus ineligible for import into the US.
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