Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking Chairman Meeks and Chairman McGovern for bringing this important human rights legislation to this floor. It is high time.

I want to start this debate with the simple truth that we cannot afford to forget. Truly, free trade cannot involve slave labor.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party is using the forced labor of the Uyghurs and other minorities to help bankroll its genocide against these very same groups.

The repression taking place right now in Xinjiang is breathtaking in its scope and its brutality. It involves the detention of more than 1 million people in concentration camps. It also involves surveillance and intensive brainwashing on a massive scale. It involves breaking up families and taking children from their parents. And it involves forced sterilization and forced abortions.

This should be a terrifying warning not only to China's neighbors and to the American people but also to the world. The Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally focused on expanding its power and its authoritarian style of government. It views things that it does not control, like religion, cultural identity, and the yearning of all people for freedom, as threats that must be destroyed. Because we have drawn the CCP into many of our most critical supply chains, it has the ability to hold our national security hostage while it uses U.S. consumers to subsidize its atrocities.

As many as one in five cotton garments globally are potentially tainted with Uyghur slave labor. Last year alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a 13-ton shipment of human hair that originated in Xinjiang's forced labor system. It is brazen, and it is sickening.

We must refuse to be complicit in the CCP's genocide against the Uyghurs, and for that reason, I support the measure before us today.

I wish we could have taken this up earlier. After sending a letter to the Speaker, we are finally at the day where we are now. Last Congress, this legislation went straight to the floor. Two weeks ago, 10 members of the Foreign Affairs Committee joined me in a letter urging the Speaker to move this bill. I am grateful that our message was received. But we could send this legislation to the President's desk today by taking up the Senate version. Instead, we are setting this bill up for further legislative gridlock by passing a conflicting version, although I do applaud Chairman McGovern's efforts in this issue.

Mr. Speaker, going forward, I hope the majority in both Chambers will move this to final passage regardless of pressure from the administration to not advance the American values we all share.

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Mr. McCAUL. He also is the co-chair of the China Commission and has been a champion for human rights in China for three decades.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend for yielding. I thank Mr. McCaul for his extraordinary leadership on China, including his Commission that has made many, many recommendations. I want to thank Chairman Meeks for his leadership as well and, of course, Chairman McGovern, with whom I have worked on this bill, for his leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I chaired a Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing in May titled ``China, Genocide and the Olympics,'' which helped further underscore why H.R. 1155, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which I have cosponsored with Jim McGovern, is so important and so necessary.

At that hearing, we heard testimony from Rayhan Asat, whose brother, Ekpar, a Muslim Uyghur, at last report is still incarcerated in a concentration camp in Xinjiang. Ekpar is a tech entrepreneur, media founder, and philanthropist who won recognition both inside of China and outside. Indeed, our State Department thought so highly of him that he was part of the International Visitors Leadership Program.

But upon his return, because he was a Muslim Uyghur, the Chinese authorities arrested him and disappeared him into a concentration camp where he has remained for 5\1/2\ years.

What happens, Mr. Speaker, to those swallowed up in these horrific concentration camps?

That is something we heard about in another Lantos Commission hearing this past July where Gulzira, a survivor, told us what goes on each and every day. In addition to her horrific, firsthand description of unspeakable physical abuse, organized forced prostitution, rape, and every gross violation of human rights imaginable, she also gave a firsthand account of a forced labor factory in which she made gloves for export for 1\1/2\ years. Gulzira is one of the lucky ones because she was released when Radio Free Asia broadcast her plight to the world.

Mr. Speaker, there are millions of stories like hers waiting to be told, truly nightmarish accounts of President Xi Jinping's genocide. And make no mistake about it, this is Xi Jinping's genocide. He is personally responsible for having ordered it.

The rape and sexual abuse of women being held in so-called internment camps, forced abortion, and involuntary sterilization to prevent the birth of Uyghur children are in direct violation of Article II(d) of the U.N. Genocide Convention, which states in part that genocide includes imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group.

Forced labor on a massive scale that allows Chinese companies to profit--and profit big time--from modern-day slavery is also absolutely pervasive in Xinjiang. Documents obtained by The New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists exposed just how cruel these plans are, originating, again, with Xi Jinping himself who early next year will be hosting the Olympic Games, which is outrageous.

The leaked documents show how Xi directed the crackdowns, saying that the Communist Party must put the ``organs of dictatorship'' to work and show ``absolutely no mercy'' in dealing with Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities.

In one speech, President Xi said: ``The weapons of the people's democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering.''

Mr. Speaker, I am deeply concerned by a report from Josh Rogin in The Washington Post just last week stating how the Biden administration and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman sought to undermine the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the Senate last July and the House last Congress 406-3. According to Josh Rogin: ``Biden administration officials have been quietly telling lawmakers to slow down. . . . Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which goods are the products of forced labor.''

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record Josh Rogin's column from The Washington Post, ``Opinion: Congress needs to act on Xi Jinping's genocide now.'' [From the Global Opinions, Dec. 2, 2021]

Opinion: Congress Needs To Act on XI Jinping's Genocide Now (By Josh Rogin, Columnist)

This week, a private U.K.-based investigative panel released what it says are classified Chinese government documents that appear to show how Chinese President Xi Jinping personally laid the groundwork for systematic forced assimilation of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. It's the most damning proof to date of the ongoing Uyghur genocide. So why can't Congress pass a simple bill to stop the products connected to that genocide from ending up in U.S. homes and businesses?

Yet the documents, which likely come from the same tranche of leaked Chinese Communist Party communications revealed by the New York Times over two years ago, add to the already abundant evidence that the Chinese government's mass internment, mass forced labor, forced population control, family destruction and cultural erasure of the Uyghurs fit the United Nation's definition of genocide as ``a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.''

Yet, the Democrat-led Congress can't seem to get the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the Senate unanimously in July, to President Biden's desk. Pointing to procedural issues and promises of future action, Democratic leadership in both the House and Senate can't seem to agree on a strategy to pass the bill through both chambers, despite publicly claiming they support it.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the co-sponsor of the, Senate's version of the bill, pushed to add it as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, a must- pass piece of legislation.

Senate Democrats objected under a procedural rule that bars amendments that affect appropriations. Rubio called that a dodge. ``This is about the fact that they don't want this bill to pass over at the House,'' Rubio said on the Senate floor, referring directly to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Rubio also said U.S. corporations that profit from forced labor in China, such as Apple and Nike, have been lobbying against the bill, which is true. On Thursday, Pelosi denied Rubia's accusations of stalling and promised her chamber would pass the House's version of the legislation, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), which the House passed last year 406 to 3. In an interview, McGovern told me his bill will be voted on and likely passed again in the House next week. But if and when that happens, that won't be the end. The two chambers will still have passed two different versions of the bill, with no firm plan for how to reconcile them.

Meanwhile, Biden administration officials have been quietly telling lawmakers to slow down. Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy- in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

``To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,'' a State Department spokesman told me. ``We share the Congress' concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.'' In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman's specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it's a coincidence.

``It isn't partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,'' Merkley told me. ``The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it's time to get it over the finish line.''

There is a legitimate concern that supply chains for everything from solar panels to sneakers could be affected by the bill. But our dependency on products from an area where genocide is occurring is the root of the problem. Passing the bill now would send industry a clear signal to speed up what they are already doing, which is to stop doing business in areas riddled with forced labor. Also, forced labor products from China put U.S. manufacturers at a severe disadvantage. ``We must shine a light on the inhumane practice of forced labor, hold the perpetrators accountable and stop this exploitation,'' Pelosi said while passing the bill last year. ``And we must send a clear message to Beijing: These abuses must end now.''

Another year has gone and the bill still lingers. Pelosi has been a champion for human rights in China for decades, but the fight is not over and the ball is in her court. Overall, it's up to both parties and both chambers to act to stop a genocide now. There's no good reason to delay.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. We have no access, Mr. Speaker, to the concentration camps in Xinjiang. We have no idea the supply chains. It is closed. It is a dictatorship. There are no onsite inspections. Again, we are talking genocide against these Muslims who are being wiped off the face of the Earth.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act prohibits imports from Xinjiang to the United States by creating a rebuttable presumption. That is the core of this bill, that all goods produced in the region are made with forced labor unless U.S. Customs and Border Protection certifies by clear and convincing evidence that goods were not produced with forced labor. So the rebuttable presumption is the key to this legislation.

It is very workable. As my good friend and colleague noted, cotton, solar panels, and so many other things are produced there. We need to know. We need to stop them from coming here.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Again, if these companies can prove that it is not made by forced labor, not made as part of this genocide, then it would be welcomed here. But we know that is unlikely to happen.

My hope is that we will unite--Republican and Democrat, Democrat and Republican--around this bill and get it to the President as soon as humanly possible.

Delay is denial. People are being slaughtered each and every day in Xinjiang, and we can do something, maybe not a whole lot, but something to mitigate and stop this.

Mr. RICE of South Carolina. Mr. Speaker, China is a global thief. We all know it. They steal American intellectual property. They steal American jobs using currency manipulation, illegal subsidies, and product dumping to kill American competition. And worst of all, they produce products with slave labor.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1155, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. H.R. 1155's central provision establishes a rebuttable presumption that all goods made in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are produced with forced labor.

Since 2017, China has arbitrarily detained and persecuted over 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in extrajudicial, mass re- education camps in Xinjiang. We know that China is seeking to profit from the oppression by subsidizing companies to build factories near these mass internment sites.

H.R. 1155 leverages the power of our enormous market to send China a message that it cannot use its policies of repression to subsidize its exports. We must work with our allies to ensure that all global markets are closed to the products of Chinese theft and repression.

A core and essential provision of this bill is a rebuttable presumption that leads to an import prohibition. In 2016, the Ways and Means Committee led the way on a bipartisan basis in eliminating the consumptive demand loophole from the outright ban on products made with forced labor in Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act.

A few years later, we have worked with our USMCA partners to extend the U.S. ban on products produced with forced labor throughout North America. We are now leading the world in combating forced labor in Xinjiang.

Mr. RICE of South Carolina. For that reason, we wish that our Democratic colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee had worked with us to update the bill from the version that passed 14 months ago to ensure that it establishes the most effective mechanism for blocking imports from Xinjiang, while providing much-needed clarity to facilitate trade by good actors.

Just as importantly, we know that China has anticipated this ban by expanding this practice beyond Xinjiang. We need to work closely with our colleagues in the Senate to ensure that the version of the bill that becomes law can better assist importers to identify and proactively eradicate goods produced with forced labor from their supply chains, whether they arise in Xinjiang or in other locations.

This bill is just the beginning, but it sends a strong signal to China that it cannot launder its policies of persecution and repression in a global market.

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Mr. McCAUL. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close. I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I know there is another bill by Senator Rubio. I hope this bill, when it passes, can be worked out in the Senate, and I hope the administration will not slow-roll this important measure, as has been reported.

Out of this region we have batteries and solar panels. When Secretary John Kerry testified, he admitted that Xinjiang's solar panel production presents a problem for U.S. climate strategy, and I agree with him.

In recent years, the world has stood by as the Chinese Communist Party has detained more than 1 million ethnic minorities in concentration camps where they are tortured, brainwashed, and put into forced labor. This is all a part of a deliberate program by the CCP to wipe out their ethnic identity, their religion, and their culture, anything that might compete with the Communist Party for their loyalties and affection.

We have a moral duty to speak out against these horrifying crimes; but we have an even greater duty to avoid funding this genocide by paying for slave labor in Xinjiang.

Many American companies have built their businesses on values that include respect for basic human rights. The United States must continue to lead the world in setting corporate responsibility standards. There can no longer be business as usual with China. China is watching and the world is watching.

I support this bill, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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