#US companies must avoid Chinese forced labor from Uighur camps: Pompeo

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Residents of the Hui Muslim ethnic minority walk in a neighborhood near an OFILM factory in Nanchang
AP

The Trump administration is advising US companies against doing business with Chinese suppliers that use forced labor from Uighur Muslims, a minority ethnic group being forcibly detained in concentration camps in China.

In an advisory issued Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited the Chinese Communist Party ramping up “its campaign of systematic repression of Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups that includes widespread arbitrary detention and forced labor.”

“The advisory will make businesses aware of the potential exposure in their supply chains to entities that engage in human rights abuses in Xinjiang — or elsewhere in China — and the associated reputational, economic, and legal risks of such involvement,” Pompeo’s statement continued.

Xinjiang is a province in the Communist country where an estimated one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained since 2016.

These ethnic minorities are held in internment camps and prisons where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused.

CCP officials, however, have long suspected Uighurs of harboring separatist tendencies because they have their own culture, language and religion.

A recent investigation by the Associated Press found that individuals inside these internment camps and prisons are making sportswear and other apparel for popular US clothing brands.

Federal authorities on Wednesday seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories in New York suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp.

US Customs and Border Protection officials said that 13 tons of hair products worth an estimated $800,000 were in the shipment.

Pompeo’s advisory comes as relations continue to fray between the US and China.

Earlier this week, the nation’s top diplomat announced that the United States would cease exporting US-origin defense equipment to Hong Kong as mainland China continued to tighten its grip on the city.

Citing Beijing’s “decision to eviscerate Hong Kong’s freedoms,” Pompeo said Monday that the US was being forced “to re-evaluate its policies toward the territory.”

With Post Wires