Washington [US], July 24 : The US-based Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (SCCCP), during its third meeting, explored policies to reduce dependence on entities involved in forced labour violations around the world and highlighted opportunities for the US and its allies to collaborate on the issue.
The participants of the meeting held on Tuesday, included Peter Mattis, President, of The Jamestown Foundation, Emily De La Bruyere, Senior Fellow, at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies and co-founder of Horizon Advisory, and Jennifer Hinton, Group Manager, ESG, at Jervois.
During the event, Robert Joseph Wittman, a US lawmaker, elaborated on the dubious tactics used by China, which include human rights abuses and market manipulation.
"We know that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been manipulating the world marketplace. And their human resources, we know their human rights abuses. The efforts that they have unfortunately made against Uyghurs and also the other places around the world, where for the most part they used enslaved labour. They exploit populations and nations for their benefit," he said.
"We don't see any kind of economic relationship to the benefit of the host nation. Instead, they are always for the benefit of China, and they are always unfortunately exploiting, the human beings in the country and their natural resources close to the determent of those countries," Wittman added.
Stating that people are "intimidated" by China because of which they don't speak out, the US lawmaker termed the situation "problematic."
"The challenge is that people are so intimidated or co-opted by China, rarely do they speak out, or rarely do they take actions that have a meaningful impact on China, which is problematic from our standpoint. China is what I call a transactional coercionist. If you look at what they do and how they structure agreements with other countries, it's always to their benefit and it's always to the detriment of the countries, and the people of those countries," he added.
The SCCCP, during the third meeting, also highlighted the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA) and the Forced Labour Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), an entity led by the US Department of Homeland Security dedicated to monitoring the enforcement of the prohibition on importing goods made wholly or in part with forced labour into the US.
While highlighting loopholes and the limitations of the same, Peter Mattis, President of The Jamestown Foundation, said the human-forced labour challenge is a problem, the US is not prepared for.
"The state of human-forced labour is a challenge that we are not prepared for. Initially, we thought that maybe it is an individual factory, or maybe it's a few bad apples but it is not necessarily the whole system. But now law enforcement is on the side of the abusers, not on the side of people who are interested in rooting out these kinds of problems. So I think this requires a legal response that goes much further than what we had previously done. And this is made worse because of the asymmetries that exist," Mattis said.
He added, "During the hours and hours we work with companies for UFLPA, it became clear that companies don't know their supply chains beyond who they have to write contracts with. Even the best ones may know one or two tiers ahead but nothing more than that. It was informal in the early days but it became formalised in the PRC this year. There has been a deliberate effort to prevent people from knowing what is going on in the factories and companies that use forced labour. As they have been classified as state secrets. So even if a company starts digging things you are violating the classification rules."
While referring to China's furious response over intrusions into 'state secrets', Mattis stressed the need to have a level playing field, but also warned that Beijing doesn't play by the same rules.
"Companies reported that as early as 2018, their investigators who do billables for them are being detained or arrested and sometimes simply disappearing for doing what could be called routine business for their clients. There were lots of companies that had made the report to the US government and the Department of Labour to say 'something is going on'," he said.
"We want a fair playing field, but we also need to recognise that what we're dealing with in the PRC is someone who's not playing by those same rules. And we're pretending, like, if we just spend a little time in the practice field, if we just study a little bit more film, we can wander out and prepare ourselves beyond that field. But none of that matters if you're walking down the tunnel and someone breaks your knee with a crowbar. And in many cases, that's what the PRC is doing" Mattis added.
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