'Forced labor' opportunism and disinformation strike again

The United States recently blacklisted two Chinese firms, Camel Group, a battery manufacturer, and Chenguang Biotech Group, a spice and extract manufacturer, accusing them of having employed so-called "forced labor "in their manufacturing, and banning their products from entry into the United States. A US spokesman claimed that the blacklisting was to hold China to account for "genocide and crimes against humanity".

This is not the first time that the US has used falsified accusations of "forced labor" in order to ban specific Chinese products. The theme has repeated itself over the past three years, including products such as cotton, tomatoes and solar panels.

Now, however, the emphasis is turning to batteries. This is because the US sees batteries as a critical strategic good in its competition with China over renewables, and is therefore doing what it always does, resorting to bad faith tactics in order to further the ends of protectionism.

The US bans Chinese goods based on political, strategic and economic motivations. The utilization of allegations of "forced labor", which are never truly substantiated, is an opportunistic pretense in order to target certain items, whose production is perceived to be dominated by China, in order to facilitate supply chain shifts favorable to US objectives.

This has been a consistent goal of US foreign policy, which repeatedly uses supply chain "resilience" and "diversification "as excuses for excluding China, and attempts to move other countries in the same direction.

As a result, allegations of "forced labor" are repeatedly pushed by US government-funded think-tanks or organizations in order to fulfill, justify and manufacture consent for these objectives, which are then amplified by the media.

As one example of this, the firm which first published allegations of "forced labor" in the solar panel supply chain, in line with the objectives of US President Joe Biden's administration to dominate clean energy manufacturing, Horizon Advisory, is a single purpose anti-China think tank receiving funding from the US Department of Defense.

With such allegations being so deeply intertwined with strategic objectives, the allegation of "forced labor" in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region is not applied with any moral consistency or urgency, but tends to come and go depending on whenever the US intends to weaponize it.

The allegation of "genocide" sits in a box and is essentially taken off the shelf whenever the US seeks to invoke it for strategic, economic and geopolitical ends.

In this case, however, it has been a growing theme of media discourse and criticism from Republican politicians that the US is not doing enough in order to deal with China's success in battery supply chains for electric vehicles.

It is therefore a natural consequence that allegations of "forced labor" follow, because it is a convenient ruse to completely exclude a given company or product from the supply chain, and therefore eliminate it as a competitor.

The US political system does not play nice when it comes to China, but seeks to degrade, smear and undermine its international standing through the constant weaponization of allegations.

It is therefore no surprise that the "concerns" of the US over "forced labor" are not applied consistently with respect to other countries, that real human slavery throughout the world is likewise completely ignored and not treated as a moral dilemma, and of course the US is perfectly fine with the widespread use of penal labor in its own prison system.

In other words, the US' real problem is its perceived inability or unwillingness to compete with China on level terms, which as a whole has produced an inward turn to protectionism in US economic policies, as it is obsessed with forcibly attempting to reshore supply chains, and of course uses whatever smears it can in order to exclude rivals' products from its market.

If it isn't "forced labor", the other card it plays, more applicable to technology, is that of a "national security threat" which again is always based on unsubstantiated allegations, fearmongering and weaponization of paranoia. The US has no intentions or good faith to compete positively, but rather seeks to tear others down.

The author is a British political and international relations analyst.