Biden to push G7 on Uighur forced labour

The United States will urge its Group of Seven allies to increase pressure on China over the use of forced labour in its northwestern Xinjiang province, home to the Muslim Uighur minority, a top White House official has announced.

US President Joe Biden will attend a meeting of the G7 advanced economies in person in the United Kingdom in June, where he is expected to focus on what he sees as a strategic rivalry between democracies and more authoritarian states, particularly China.

Daleep Singh, deputy national security adviser to Biden and deputy director of the National Economic Council, said on Friday that the G7 meeting in Cornwall would focus on health security, a synchronised economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concrete actions on climate change, and “elevating shared democratic values within the G7”.

“These are like-minded allies, and we want to take tangible and concrete actions that show our willingness to coordinate on non-market economies, such as China,” Singh, who is helping to coordinate the meeting, told the Reuters news agency in an interview.

“The galvanising challenge for the G7 is to show that open societies, democratic societies still have the best chance of solving the biggest problems in our world, and that top-down autocracies are not the best path,” he said.

Singh said Washington has already taken strong actions against China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, but would seek to expand the effort with G7 allies.

Joint sanctions against Chinese officials accused of abuses in the province were announced last month by the US, European Union, UK and Canada.

China has denied all accusations of abuse and has responded with punitive measures of its own against the EU.

Biden’s first overseas trip

Singh said details were still being worked out before the meeting, but the summit offered an opportunity for US allies to show solidarity on the issue.

“We’ve made our views clear that our consumers deserve to know when that the goods they’re importing are made with forced labour,” he said. “Our values need to be infused in our trading relationships.”

Washington, he said, would be looking for the G7 to take clear steps “to elevate our shared values, as democracies and, and those certainly apply to what’s going on Xinjiang.”

Activists and UN rights experts have said at least one million Muslims have been detained in camps in Xinjiang.

The activists and some Western politicians have accused China of using torture, forced labour and sterilisations. China said its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.

The White House said on Friday that Biden will also travel Belgium in June for his first overseas trip since taking office, as well as the UK, including a stop at the G7 Summit in Cornwall from June 11-13.