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[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.
By Philip Wegmann
Real Clear Politics
On the question of China’s treatment of the Uyghur people, there is no debate in Washington.
Republicans and Democrats alike say the Chinese government is committing genocide against the minority Muslim population through mass internment, forced labor, and population control. President Biden has expressed concern and more. As the White House press secretary recently told RealClearPolitics, “we have taken a number of concrete measures” to address those human rights abuses.
Some of those steps from Biden’s first year in office include sanctions and visa restrictions against Chinese Communist Party officials involved in the mistreatment; export and import controls to keep foreign goods made with forced labor out of domestic markets; and a thinly veiled reference to China in a statement released after the G7 Summit in October.
Those concrete measures do not, however, include support for twin bills in Congress dubbed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would specifically prohibit imports from China’s Xinjiang region, where an estimated 12 million Uyghurs live, many of them in labor camps. The House version of the legislation passed last year by a vote of 406-3. The Senate version sailed through by unanimous consent this summer.
The White House doesn’t have a position on either, and for months it’s kept the legislation at arm's length. But “I would say we are hardly neutral,” Jen Psaki countered last week. “We have strong concerns, and we are absolutely not lobbying in any way against the passage of this bill.”
(The House had to pass a 2021 version of the measure, which it did Wednesday night by 428-1; that now goes to Senate for consideration there.)
Republican critics are less than convinced of the White House’s commitment, and some suspect an underhanded explanation for how, in this increasingly polarized era in American politics, a rare piece of bipartisan legislation can languish. Republicans, as RCP first reported in September, believe the president’s special envoy on climate, John Kerry, has been quietly lobbying against the measure.
In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey warned Biden that Kerry is “downplaying the genocide precisely because he intends to import solar panels that are produced using forced labor in the PRC to the United States in order to meet your administration’s climate goals.”
The bill, if it becomes law, would no doubt have an oversized effect: According to researchers at England’s Sheffield Hallam University, the Xinjiang province accounts for 45% of the world's supply of polysilicon, the key component in solar panels.
But those close to the special envoy reply that Rubio and Smith see an enemy where none exists. “This is false,” a State Department spokesperson told RCP on Wednesday, adding that Kerry has a long record as both a senator and a former secretary of state of “standing up for human rights.” They added that, in his climate capacity, “Kerry has said from the start, the United States and China have mutual interests in solving the climate crisis while there’s still time, even when we fundamentally disagree on other critical issues.”
Climate concerns and a commitment to human rights are not necessarily competing goals. Neither are they necessarily reinforcing. And while Kerry has said previously that human rights are “not my lane,” he has been upfront about how they can intersect with his focus. “On the one hand, we’re saying to them, ‘You have to do more to help deal with the climate,’” Kerry told reporters in September. “And on the other hand, their solar panels are being sanctioned, which makes it harder for them to sell them.”
“They see that as a contradiction,” Kerry explained further in an interview with the Washington Post after several days of meetings in China. When asked how to determine the proper balance between human rights and the need to address climate change, Kerry replied, “Well, life is always full of tough choices.” Likening his negotiations with China to diplomacy with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Kerry recalled how President Reagan “thought the Soviet Union was the evil empire” but still forged a treaty with the Kremlin to withdraw intermediate nuclear missiles from European soil.
And yet, the administration has already publicly ruled out any kind of climate deal with China that hinges on correcting human rights abuses. Nonetheless, “the president strongly believes that we can both take a strong stand against forced labor and against slave labor anywhere it occurs, including in Xinjiang, and at the same time cultivate and develop a robust and effective solar power supply chain,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told RCP in October.
Given those sentiments, Julie Millsap of the human rights group Campaign for Uyghurs says the long delay on the bipartisan legislation “is a bit confounding.” Her group hopes and expects an anti-forced-labor bill will be signed into law soon, she told RCP, because “this is not just a matter of policy — it's a life and death situation.”
Millsap said her group is “very thankful” for the action that the administration has taken thus far, from unilateral moves to international coordination. She called them “concrete steps” that have elicited a response from the Chinese. All the same, she said, “our point is that it doesn't go far enough.”
Critics looking from the outside in have cast White House sluggishness on the issue as weakness. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told RCP that “standing up against Chinese communist genocide shouldn’t be a tough call.” She blasted the administration, saying that there is “no excuse for stalling this bill” and that Biden’s foreign policy “continues to weaken and embarrass America.”
Human rights advocates were hopeful that Rubio’s version of the bill could become law as an amendment tied to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act. But that was a non-starter, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who called Rubio’s provisions “a poison pill in the sense that it blows up the [NDAA] bill.” Echoing an argument made by House leadership since September, Schumer said it has a so-called “blue-slip” problem: Legislation that involves spending — as the defense authorization does — must originate in the House, Schumer noted on the Senate floor, and if the Rubio provision had been included, “the House will kill” the entire bill.
Rubio shot back that, if this were an issue over raising revenue, the House should pass its version, send it to the Senate, and both chambers could cooperate to make it law in a hurry. “You know why they haven’t done that? Because they’re not for this. They’re not for it,” he added. “And they wield the ‘blue slip’ thing to mean whatever they want it to mean.”
Rubio got an assist from Sen. Mitt Romney. The Utah Republican said on the floor that there was no real procedural reason for Schumer and his fellow Democrats to block the legislation. Instead, Romney argued the reason for the delay is that “they need cheap batteries for their ‘Build Back Better’ agenda. Most of the materials used to make those batteries come from China.”
Even before it came to a head last week, the procedural rigamarole has been giving solar industry lobbyists fits for months. Domestic solar manufacturers stand to benefit from restrictions on Chinese solar components, but one Democratic operative advising those companies said to expect legislative delays. “Any action by the United States to pass legislation would be a big issue from China's perspective,” the operative told RCP in October. “And so I think the administration has taken an approach of saying, ‘We'd like to hold off right now until we get some other things in place.” The problem? According to the Democrat, without a commitment from the administration, investors are passing up “opportunities to reinvest in United States manufacturing.”
That was the state of the debate through the summer and into the holiday season, as the White House steered clear of the debate and deferred to Congress. Then a story in the Washington Post last week stirred anger among China hawks. Columnist Josh Rogin reported the administration had been quietly telling lawmakers to slow their roll. According to the report, it was Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman who told Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, the Democratic co-sponsor of the Rubio bill, that the administration prefers “a more targeted and deliberative approach” to determining which goods are or aren’t made with forced labor.
Within hours, a White House spokesperson told RCP that “the administration is not lobbying against the passage of this bill” and noted also that Biden had brought up the plight of the Uyghurs “directly with President Xi.” Merkley’s office did not return repeated requests for comment. Sherman said later at the Brookings Institution that the “the administration does not oppose this amendment.”
Since then, Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed that the House version of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, sponsored by Democratic Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, would pass the chamber by Wednesday night — as, in fact, happened — sending a clear message that “Beijing’s crimes against the Uyghur people constitute genocide and must end now.” That doesn't mean it will become law anytime soon, however. Republicans gripe that had the provision been tucked into the NDAA, “it’d be law in three or four days.”
A senior GOP aide told RCP that Pelosi has shown “a genius for policy. She gets a stand-alone vote; they look like they’re moving the bill when it will actually take forever for a final product to get through the Senate; and the White House gets the delay that they wanted.”
Psaki said, without giving specifics, that Biden “supports the objective of doing more here.”
Rubio doesn’t make much of administration statements. “Look, it is pretty easy to figure out what is going on here,” he told RCP late Wednesday. “Some of us are trying to block goods made with slave labor from entering the country and others are standing in the way.” He believes all this could be cleared up — the White House just has to take a position on legislation combating forced labor.
“The Biden administration has been standing in the way for months,” he added. “If they want to clear things up, all they have to do is voice support for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and work with us in good faith to make it happen. It is that easy.”
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.
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