The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily on Thursday to the announcement that, later this month, the Biden administration will begin enforcing a new law barring products made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province from being imported to the United States.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which President Joe Biden signed into law in December, is set to take effect June 21. Under the law, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will treat any goods that are made in Xinjiang, either wholly or in part, as the product of forced labor unless the importer can show “clear and convincing evidence” that they are not.

The law passed with strong bipartisan support, as lawmakers from both parties joined to condemn China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority. The U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and an array of human rights groups have accused China of perpetrating genocide against Uyghurs, with a regime that includes mass imprisonment and forced labor, vast “reeducation” camps, forced sterilization, blanket surveillance and the separation of children from families.

China reacts

China has denied the allegations against it in forceful terms, and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian repeated those denials Thursday when he condemned the U.S. announcement that the UFLPA would soon come into force.

“We have rebuked U.S. lies on Xinjiang many times,” he said at a news conference. “The so-called Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, in disregard of facts, maliciously smears the human rights conditions in China’s Xinjiang, grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs, gravely violates international law and basic norms governing international relations, and violates market rules and commercial ethics.”

Zhao warned of dire consequences that, he said, would follow from the law’s being allowed to take effect.

“If implemented, the act will seriously disrupt normal cooperation between Chinese and American businesses, undermine the stability of global supply chains and eventually hurt the U.S.’s own interests,” he said. “We urge the U.S. to refrain from enforcing the act, stop using Xinjiang-related issues to interfere in China’s internal affairs and contain China’s development. If the U.S. is bent on doing so, China will take forceful measures to firmly defend its own interests and dignity.”

China’s potential response

The Biden administration has given no indication that it would consider seeing the law go unenforced. On Wednesday, in a webinar about the new law, a Customs and Border Protection official said, “The expectation is that we will be ready to implement the Uyghur Act on June 21, and that we have the resources.”

How China will respond is not immediately obvious, but some sort of reaction is almost certain, said Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“The Chinese play hardball,” Noland told VOA. “They use what you might call legal means, they abuse legal means, and they use extralegal means in terms of economic coercion or retaliation, oftentimes linked to noneconomic issues.”

In the past, he said, Beijing has used “anti-dumping” sanctions to retaliate for what it has seen as political slights. For example, it imposed sanctions on Australian barley, beef and wine in what was widely seen as retaliation over an Australian call to probe the origins of COVID-19 on mainland China. Beijing restricted imports of Norwegian salmon after the Nobel Committee gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiao Bao.

Noland said the U.S. might see those types of retaliatory sanctions. However, he said, Beijing might resort to something more complex, such as demanding that Chinese firms break the embargoes the U.S. and its allies have imposed on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine.

US businesses concerned

U.S. companies that do business in China are concerned about the looming implementation of the UFLPA, said Doug Barry, a vice president with the U.S.-China Business Council, in an email exchange with VOA.

The law creates what is known as a “rebuttable presumption” that goods with ties to Xinjiang were produced with forced labor. This means that unless an importer can prove to the satisfaction of Customs and Border Protection that the goods are not made with forced labor, they will be subject to seizure, forfeiture, fines and other penalties.

This creates “a high bar” for importers to clear, Barry said, and the rules importers must observe remain in question.

“The specifics of what must be proven and how have not been announced, leaving American companies to worry that cargo may be seized for unspecified reasons,” he said. “Companies insist that they take every reasonable action to ensure supply chains don’t involve forced labor. The worry is that the law is so broad that it can apply to many categories of goods regardless of proximity to Xinjiang.”

The uncertainty is made worse by what Barry described as the “amped-up rhetoric” coming from both Washington and Beijing.

“In the absence of official dialogue, [it] makes it difficult to put a floor under the downward trajectory of the bilateral relationship.”

Labor investigation demanded

Also on Thursday, the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia and the European Union asked the International Labor Organization, an arm of the United Nations, to launch a probe into whether China is abiding by its commitments to international labor conventions that Beijing has ratified.

The countries cited reports of mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in general, and of prisoners being subject to forced labor in particular.

“We call on the PRC to immediately end its discriminatory policies and abuses against minority groups,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Sheba Crocker said in a statement.

Crocker called on China to “provide full and unhindered access, including meaningful, unrestricted and unsupervised access to all relevant organizations, individuals and locations implicated in the system of detention.”

A Chinese representative to the U.N. in Geneva denied the allegations, calling them “a political show.”
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India has allowed wheat shipments of 469,202 tons since banning most exports last month, but at least 1.7 million tons is lying at ports and could be damaged by looming monsoon rains, government and industry officials told Reuters. 

Shipments that have been allowed moved mainly to Bangladesh, the Philippines, Tanzania and Malaysia, said a senior government official, who also stated the total quantity. 

The ban pulled Indian wheat exports down to 1.13 million tons in May from a record 1.46 million tons in April, the official said, declining to be named. 

India, the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, imposed a general ban on exports on May 14 as a scorching heat wave curtailed output and pushed domestic prices to record highs. 

Exceptions were allowed for shipments backed by letters of credit that had already been issued and those to countries that requested supplies to meet their food security needs. 

But even after the departure of some wheat, at least 1.7 million tons remained piled up at various ports, three dealers with global trading firms told Reuters. 

Before the ban, exporters moved unusually large quantities to ports, because the crop was then expected to be strong and the government was encouraging them to replace Black Sea supply lost because of the war in Ukraine. 

They expected New Delhi to authorize shipments this year of 8 million to 10 million tons or even more, compared with 7.2 million tons last year. 

“Kandla and Mundra ports have maximum wheat stocks,” said a Mumbai-based dealer with a global trading firm. “Together they are holding more than 1.3 million tons.” 

The government needed to issue export permits promptly, because wheat at the ports was in loose form and therefore vulnerable to monsoon rains, said a New Delhi based dealer with a global trading firm. 

India receives heavy rainfall during the monsoon season, from June to September. 

“The government banned wheat exports to ensure food security, but if stocks get damaged by rains, then it will not serve any purpose,” the dealer said. 

Moving the wheat back out of ports and into interior towns for local consumption was unfeasible, as traders would incur additional losses on loading and transportation fees, said the Mumbai-based dealer. 

“The government should allow exports of wheat lying at ports for government-to-government deals,” he said. 

India has received requests to supply more than 1.5 million tons of wheat from several countries facing shortages. Read full story 

Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav, Aftab Ahmed; Additional reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; editing by Gavin Maguire and Bradley Perrett 
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The U.S. launched a new trade pact with Taiwan on Wednesday, hoping to forge closer economic ties with the island territory that China claims as its own, while blunting Beijing’s economic clout in the region.

Biden administration officials said the U.S.-Taiwan deal would boost bilateral digital and clean energy trade and that the two partners would open talks to further technology trade and investments. 

 

In announcing the pact, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said economic relations between the U.S. and Taiwan were especially important because Taiwan is a leading supplier of advanced semiconductors needed in an array of consumer technology products. Senior administration officials said controls on the export of sensitive technologies would be addressed in talks between the U.S. and Taiwan. 

 

“Taiwan is an incredibly important partner to us, especially as it relates to semiconductors,” Raimondo told reporters. “We look forward to continuing to deepen our economic ties with Taiwan, and we are in active conversations with Taiwan.” 

 

The U.S.-Taiwan pact comes days after President Joe Biden announced a new economic cooperation agreement with a dozen Asia-Pacific countries during his trip to South Korea and Japan.

Taiwan was not invited to join the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework out of concerns from some countries that the country’s participation might anger China.

But a senior administration official said, “The Biden-Harris administration sees Taiwan as a leading democracy, a technological powerhouse and a key economic and security partner.” 

 

The latest U.S.-Taiwan connection could further strain Washington-Beijing relations. In Asia last week, Biden said the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if China were to attack the democratic, self-governed island, a statement seemingly at odds with the U.S.’s long-standing “one China” policy recognizing Taiwan as part of mainland China. 

 

While the White House later said there was no change in U.S. policy, the U.S. does ship weaponry to Taiwan. 

 

Biden’s comment drew a rebuke from China, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin saying that “no forces, the U.S. included, can hold back the Chinese people’s endeavor to reunify the nation.”
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In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 spread throughout the world in ways not fully understood, the United States faced a critical shortage of protective masks. 

Dozens of manufacturing startups attempted to meet the demand for what was then a confusing array of grades and types — N95, KN95, full-face respirators.  

Now, after a short respite from many COVID-19 precautions, the U.S. is weeks into a new surge in cases that may foreshadow a greater one this fall, and those same small companies that make masks are hurting.  

John Bielamowicz is a co-founder of United States Mask. The Fort Worth, Texas, company is among those struggling.  

Bielamowicz launched his mask-making mission after reading social media posts about medical professionals not having N95 masks in the pandemic’s terrifying early months. It was caregivers like them who had helped his family in 2016, when his son Matthew was born missing 80% of his diaphragm on the left side. 

Bielamowicz and his business partner ​David Baillargeon put their commercial real estate business on hold to start the mask company. 

“This was our way of paying it back … for the gift that they gave us for sending us home with our son,” Bielamowicz told VOA Mandarin in a virtual interview. “It was a debt that I never thought that I’d be able to pay back.” 

The partners began reading and experimenting in February 2020, and by late October of that year, their N95 masks carried a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health certification. At its peak in early 2021, the company produced millions of N95 masks a month and employed close to 50 people. 

“For me and my family, this was a mission, and we were going to do it or fail trying,” Bielamowicz said. “And we didn’t fail. We did it.”  

Masks and jobs

The American Mask Manufacturers Association (AMMA) represents small companies that started making masks during the pandemic.  

“During the pandemic, we created just over 8,000 new manufacturing jobs. And this was at a time where most businesses were laying people off or furloughing people,” Lloyd Armbrust, president of the association, told VOA in a virtual interview.  

But attitudes toward mask wearing have varied widely across the U.S. since 2020, and on April 18, a federal judge in Florida voided the national mask mandate covering airplanes and other public transportation. This came a day before the Biden administration said it would no longer enforce a U.S. mask mandate.  

Armbrust American, Armbrust’s mask company in Pflugerville, Texas, staggered from the twin blows.  

“That day, we saw our online sales be cut at half or even more,” said Armbrust, who added that he and other mask-makers had already been competing with cheap masks from China before the one-two punch.  

China and masks 

According to research published last year by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank, 72% of the masks and respirators imported by the U.S. in 2019 came from China. 

When the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was first identified in humans in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, U.S. imports of protective masks from China plunged. 

When China resumed exporting government-subsidized masks in 2020, it attempted to create “a monopoly within the PPE (personal protective equipment) market,” the AMMA charged, and manufacturers such as Armbrust American found themselves in difficulty. 

“Our raw material costs me about $0.015 per mask,” Armbrust said. “And yet China can deliver it to the United States for less than $0.01. They say that they’re more efficient, but how is that possible when the cost of their finished products is cheaper than I buy the raw materials for? It’s just not possible. The answer is, the Chinese government is subsidizing it because they don’t want to lose this business.”  

In response to VOA Mandarin questions about China’s mask exports to the U.S., Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said, “I would like to point out that as a market economy, China has earnestly fulfilled its WTO (World Trade Organization) commitments and abides by multilateral economic and trade rules. Chinese merchandise is cheap and good because of the good supply chain, sufficient competition and economies of scale, not non-market behavior.” 

“I can be very competitive, but I can’t be competitive against the whole government. … In 2021, we laid off about 70% of our staff,” Armbrust said. 

Bielamowicz’s United States Mask laid off people as well. 

“It was the worst day of my career,” he said.   

An uncertain future 

Nationwide, the AMMA, which peaked with almost 30 members in 2021, now includes fewer than 10 enterprises still producing masks. 

Facing masks’ uncertain future, Armbrust American shifted to producing home air filters. 

Bielamowicz has been traveling to Washington to lobby the federal government. 

“We’re asking for free competition,” Bielamowicz said. “We know the free market works.” 

That said, Armbrust hopes the government can subsidize small companies that make masks, as it does farmers, to preserve production capability so that when the next pandemic hits, small producers can jump back into mask making. 

“If I could just have a base,” Armbrust said, “… where I could mothball these machines and … I could afford to pay the rent for the space instead of actually shutting it down and scrapping the machines, that would be another solution.”  
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Nigerian manufacturers say they are struggling with rising grain prices, especially for wheat, sparked by Russia’s war on Ukraine. But even before the war started in February, Nigeria had been dealing with fuel and power shortages and high inflation. Timothy Obiezu reports from Abuja, Nigeria.
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