According to the CPB, the shipment originated in Xinjiang, China, signaling potential human rights abuses of pressured labor and imprisonment. The merchandise had been price over $800,000.
Xinjiang is an
autonomous rural region in the northwest of China and residential to roughly 11 million Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority with a definite tradition and language. Until not too long ago,
there were many more Uyghurs in Xinjiang than Han Chinese, the ethnic majority that makes up the remaining of the nation.
The US State Department estimates that over a million Uyghurs have been detained in a large community of internment camps in Xinjiang, the place they’re reportedly “subjected to torture, cruel and inhumane treatment such as physical and sexual abuse, forced labor, and death.”
In addition to political indoctrination,
former detainees have told CNN that they skilled sleep deprivation, lack of meals and compelled injections.
This is the second time this 12 months that the CBP has seized merchandise from China suspected
to have been made from prisoner’s hair.
“It is absolutely essential that American importers ensure that the integrity of their supply chain meets the humane and ethical standards expected by the American government and by American consumers,”
said Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of the CBP Office of Trade.
“The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains.”
China has confronted worldwide scrutiny for its therapy of the Uyghurs, and in June, President Trump
signed a bill into law that aimed to punish Beijing for its repression of the ethnic minority.
However,
according to John Bolton’s new book “The Room Where It Happens”, Trump instructed Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019 that he ought to “go ahead with building the camps.”
Per Bolton’s account, Trump thought that was “exactly the right thing to do.”