Congress Wants Answers on How China’s Slave Labor Goods Are Getting Into US
Congress is seeking answers on whether Chinese companies are skirting U.S. sanctions that bar the importation of goods made with Uhygur slave labor.
Congressional investigators recently found that grocery stores around the country, including in Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs, are selling red jujube dates, an Asian fruit that is produced and packaged using Uyghur slave labor in China's contested Xinjiang province. A coalition of 27 Republican lawmakers is demanding answers from the Treasury Department and Customs and Border Protection about how these goods are making their way to American shelves and enriching Communist companies that rely on slave labor, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was passed in June, the importation of Chinese Communist Party goods that are produced with Uyghur slave labor is illegal. But this has not stopped a sanctioned Chinese company known as XPCC from selling its jujube dates to a middleman, Qingdao Daochuan Food Company Limited, which offloads the products to a Brooklyn-based distributor, according to the lawmakers. The sanctions-busting scheme, congressional sources say, is reminiscent of tactics used by the Iranian regime to skirt similar human rights sanctions. The appearance of these products in the United States is fueling accusations that the Biden administration is failing to uphold the law.
"Selling products made by Uyghur slave labor is both illegal under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and morally abhorrent," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), one of the letter's signers, told the Free Beacon. "Customs and Border Patrol has been directed by Congress to ensure no goods made in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are permitted to enter American markets, and the presence of these red dates in American grocery stores is a clear failure by the Biden administration to enforce this law."..................
