US Should Impose Harsher Sanctions on China's Human Rights Violations, Lawmakers Say
A bipartisan group of more than 45 lawmakers urged the Trump administration to impose strict sanctions on China’s treatment of its Uighur population, saying the October addition of 28 Chinese entities to the Commerce Department’s Entity List (see 1910070076) was not enough. “These measures were a first step that do not go far enough in ensuring accountability for China’s government and Communist Party,” the lawmakers said in a Dec. 12 letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
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The administration should impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials responsible for the country’s human rights violations, the letter said, including Chen Quanguo, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region community communist party secretary. Sanctions should also target officials in China’s “front work departments, political-legal commissions and state security commissions,” the lawmakers said. “The Treasury Department should move to approve and implement these sanctions immediately.”
The Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security also should expand the scope of its Entity List designations of Chinese government agencies and companies responsible for the human rights abuses, the letter added, particularly to ensure that no U.S. companies are “contributing to, directly or indirectly,” the violations. The list should include Chinese companies involved in the “pairing assistance” program in the Xinjiang region, which subsidizes manufacturing facilities in Xinjiang, as well as any companies “benefiting from the system of forced labor.”