The US would urge its G7 allies to increase pressure on China over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur minority, a top White House official said on Friday.
US President Joe Biden is to attend a meeting of the G7 advanced economies in person in the UK in June, where he is expected to focus on what he sees as a strategic rivalry between democracies and autocratic states, particularly China.
Daleep Singh, deputy national security adviser to Biden and deputy director of the US National Economic Council, said the G7 meeting in Cornwall would focus on health security, a synchronized economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concrete actions on climate change, and “elevating shared democratic values within the G7.”
Photo: Reuters
“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 Reuters in an interview.
“The galvanizing 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 over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, but would seek to expand the effort with G7 allies.
Singh said details were still being worked out ahead of 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 ... the goods they’re importing are made with forced labor,” he said. “Our values need to be infused in our trading relationships.”
Washington 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,” he said.
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