Richard Vanderford of The Wall Street Journal reports that the Biden administration is adding 30 Chinese companies to its forced labor blacklist; the raft of additions is the single-largest expansion of a list created to combat alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Vanderford writes:
The Biden administration will block imports from more than two dozen Chinese companies over their alleged links to forced labor in the country’s Xinjiang region, its largest-ever expansion of a ban list that took effect in 2022.
On Friday, the administration added 29 companies to what is known as the Entity List, bringing the total to more than 100. Goods from those companies are presumptively blocked from entry to the U.S. under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Enforcement of the law has been a prominent part of the Biden administration’s efforts to tackle what it deems unfair Chinese trade practices. […]
“We get competing arguments about what we are doing—some will say we’re slow, and we certainly have heard from some businesses that we are too aggressive and moving too quickly,” Mayorkas said in a telephone interview.
“It’s sometimes very difficult to get the granularity in the supply chain, but we have made incredible strides in our investigative capabilities, and we are looking at harnessing, increasingly, technology to assist us in that,” he said.
Donald Trump’s pick to head the State Department, Marco Rubio, sponsored the UFLPA in the Senate and has argued for tough enforcement.
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