US hits China with new trade curbs, sanctions over Uyghur rights

WASHINGTON, December 20 ------ The United States on Thursday unleashed a volley of actions to censure China's treatment of the Uyghur minority, with lawmakers voting to curb trade and new sanctions slapped on the world's top consumer drone maker. The United States has been ramping up pressure on China amid a crop of disputes, with US President Joe Biden's administration a day earlier targeting producers of painkillers that have contributed to America's addiction crisis.

The US Senate unanimously voted to make the United States the first country to ban virtually all imports from China's northwestern Xinjiang region over concerns of the prevalence of forced labor. "We know it's happening at an alarming, horrific rate with the genocide that we now witness being carried out," said Senator Marco Rubio, a driver behind the act, which already passed the House of Representatives and which the White House says Biden will sign.

After prolonged negotiations to secure its passage, Rubio lifted objections and the Senate confirmed veteran diplomat Nicholas Burns as ambassador to China. Burns, a widely respected former ambassador to Greece and NATO and a professor at Harvard, has described China as an "aggressor" and denounced the "genocide" of the Uyghurs, but has also voiced a willingness to cooperate on issues such as climate change. Some US businesses had voiced unease about the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans the import of all goods from the region unless companies offer verifiable proof that production did not involve slavery. Xinjiang is a major source of cotton, with an estimated 20% of the garments imported each year into the United States including some material from the region.

Rights experts, witnesses and the US government say more than one million Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims are incarcerated in camps in an effort to root out their Islamic cultural traditions and forcibly assimilate them into China's Han majority. Beijing describes the sites as vocational training centers and says that, like many Western nations, it is seeking to reduce the allure of radical Islam following deadly attacks. The United States has described the campaign as genocide and, along with Australia, Britain and Canada, has planned a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games next year over the issue.

Source: philstar.com