The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act: Forced Labor and Genocide in U.S.-China Relations

On June 21, 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect, requiring companies to prove that goods imported from the People’s Republic of China were not made with forced labor. The bill was a reaction to reports of products being made with forced labor from Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities being held in camps in the PRC, chiefly in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. However, implementation of the bill would be difficult. The PRC government denied the existence of forced labor, and this would make it nearly impossible for importers to trace their supply chains all the way to the origins of primary goods and prove that no forced labor was involved. Three industries were chiefly at stake—tomatoes, cotton, and polysilicon—at a time of high inflation and increasing urgency to do something about climate change, but the bill also threatened to fundamentally re-shape U.S.-PRC relations, potentially along the lines of a full-scale economic “decoupling.”