How is Xinjiang still shipping millions of goods to US after ‘forced labour’ law came into effect?

Xinjiang entities exported a 10-month high of US$56.8 million of goods to the US in August despite the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act being in place since June

Act assumes that all goods from Xinjiang are at risk of being tainted by forced labour, despite repeated denials from Beijing

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Entities from China’s Xinjiang region exported a 10-month high of US$56.8 million worth of goods to the US in August despite the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act having come into effect at the end of June. Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

Published: 11:00pm, 25 Sep 2022

On the 29th of August, at the height of the busy import season before America’s annual holiday shopping boom, a crate of T-shirts and toys arrived at the Port of Long Beach in California after a journey of thousands of miles from Yantian Port in Southern China.

The 21kg of shirts (46lbs) and 3kg (6.6lbs) of toys were on their way to Massachusetts and New York – two almost negligible entries among the billions of dollars in US-China trade every year.

But they were both shipped from the same unexpected place: the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Despite a new Washington law meant to effectively block all imports from the far-west region of China due to forced labour allegations, shipping records and customs data suggest that companies from Xinjiang are still sending their goods to the US – and at a much higher volume than before.

Chinese customs data showed that Xinjiang entities exported US$56.8 million worth of goods to the US in August, surging to their highest level in 10 months, and appearing for the second consecutive month to defy the new law.

The value more than doubled that of July – the first full month after the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act went into effect – and was almost sevenfold of that in June. It also surged 592.8 per cent compared to a year earlier.

With the apparent jump in exports, the US became the far-west region’s fifth biggest trading partner in August, following three neighbouring Central Asian countries and Russia, up from 12th in July.

The surge in trade reported from Xinjiang also bucked the overall trend of weakening Chinese exports to the US, which recorded a year-on-year decline in August for the first time since May 2020.

CBP probably needs to do more, especially to address all of the different modes that these goods might potentially be using to circumvent inspection and detention

Ana Hinojosa