With the next harvest a mere three months away, cotton mills in China’s far west Xinjiang region are currently sitting on about 3 million tonnes of unsold inventory – a massive stockpile more than a million tonnes larger than it usually is this time of year.
“Xinjiang cotton used to be the most expensive cotton in the world. Now it has become the cheapest, and still no one buys it,” said the owner of a cotton-ginning mill in southern Xinjiang, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now I would lose 2,000 yuan (US$300) selling each tonne of cotton.”
This is owing to the impact of the Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act – a United States law that effectively bans American imports of all products from Xinjiang unless conclusive evidence shows that no forced labour was involved in their production.
Forced-labour allegations started making international headlines three years ago in what is formally known as the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. And they emerged roughly a year into the US-China trade war that began under the administration of then-US president Donald Trump.
And the far-reaching implications and uncertainties stemming from the new law will undoubtedly continue to cloud – or even fundamentally change – trade relations between the world’s two largest economies, even as the Biden administration mulls the removal of some tariffs imposed on Chinese goods in an attempt to mitigate out-of-control inflation in the US that has ballooned to a 40-year high.
While Xinjiang...
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