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BEIJING: Beijing responded on Wednesday (September 23) to a US move to ban imports from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region over forced labor claims, lamenting a “fabricated lie” that says it is intended to harm Chinese Chinese companies.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Tuesday in favor of a ban on complaints of systematic forced labor in Xinjiang, where activists say more than a million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkish-speaking people have been jailed. in fields.
READ: US House votes to ban Xinjiang imports for forced labor
Beijing reacted angrily to the move, saying it was “maliciously slandering the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang.”
“China expresses strong indignation and strong opposition, and had already spoken out severely to the United States,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular news conference.
“Xinjiang affairs are purely China’s internal affairs. The United States had no right to interfere. The so-called forced labor issue is a completely fabricated lie by certain Western organizations and individuals,” he said.
Wang went on to accuse the United States of using the forced labor claims to “restrict and oppress Xinjiang companies.”
LEE: The United States blocks Chinese products of Uighur ‘forced labor’
Swedish clothing giant H&M said this month it was ending its relationship with a Chinese yarn producer over labor charges.
Xinjiang is a global hub for cotton with a study by a labor group estimating that 20 percent of garments imported into the United States contain at least some yarn from the region.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has yet to be passed by the Senate before it becomes law.
Speaking before the vote, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that “the products of forced labor often end up here in American stores and homes.”
Last week, Beijing published a white paper staunchly defending its policy in Xinjiang, saying that training programs, job schemes and better education mean life has improved.
He has defended the training centers as necessary to end extremism.
But US Homeland Security officials have described them as facilities that function like a “concentration camp.”
