The attack on China's solar industry

How lyingly the USA and GB fight for economic supremacy

In May the Helena Kennedy Center for International Justice published a study with the telling title „In Broad Daylight - Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Solar Supply Chains“The Biden Administration responded promptly at the beginning of June with an import stop of polysilicon from the Xinjiang region, an indispensable raw material for photovoltaic production. Of course the western media in Europe directly rushed to the story.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomus Region supplies approx. 45% of the world market of this raw material. The import ban targets a significant share of the world market. According to the authors of the study the reason for the ban was that: "the companies and XPCC" have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in "Xinjiang."

To understand the reasoning one has to look at the report published by the Helena Kennedy Center. The authors expressly point out that their study mainly relies on publicly available documents, from official Chinese bodies. This is supposed to justify the seriousness of the study and try to convey to the readership that it is an "objective" analysis. Sounds plausible to an outsider who does not know China and looks to China with Western expectations, but it is completely misleading.

The fact is that the official documents only describe administrative procedures and requirements for administrative members in the fight against poverty. The authors of the study then interpret these according to their own ideas. However, this interpretation has nothing to do with the reality in China.

First of all, one must remember where China was 40 years ago: In 1980 China's GDP was USD 305 billion. Even then, China had a population of just under 1 billion people. In 1980, around 305 USD/a were earned per capita. Less than USD 1 per day on average! Almost the entire Chinese population was considered bitterly poor! For comparison, West Germany with almost 60 million inhabitants. In 1980 it had a GDP of USD 950 billion, i.e. USD 15,833 per year and capita!

At that time, Xinjiang was at the lower end of the poverty scale in China and was a restless province with neighbours (Afghanistan, Tadchikistan, Uzbekistan) that were partially shaken by tribal wars.

In 2020, China had a GDP of around USD 14,700 billion with a population of 1.4 billion. So over 10,000 USD per capita per year. In April 2021, China announced to the world that bitter poverty had been eliminated across the country!

China has thus achieved the most successful poverty reduction in human history worldwide! From bitter poverty, it has developed into the second largest economy in the world within 4 decades and due to its large population, in a few years (around 2030) it will even become the largest economy in the world. A path that can hardly be stopped but is being fought by the political elite in the USA with all possible means of economic war. The Biden administration makes this clear again and again. It's about slowing the rise of China! The US wants to maintain its status as an economic superpower alone.

The new study, which the USA refers to in its strike against the Chinese polysilicon industry, attacks precisely this successful fight against poverty and denounces and frames it as forced labor! This description alone shows how absurd the argumentation is, which is probably nevertheless taken up successfully in Western media and societies!

Fighting poverty is part of the political DNA of the CPC. The CPC thus won the civil war and also its social position as a leading party in China and is rightly celebrating its 100th successful anniversary today!

For thousands of years, the people in China have always transferred their fate to the rulers in the expectation that they will improve their living conditions. The "Son of Heaven" had the mission to protect the people.

This is a completely different approach than in western, individualized and fragmented societies, where people primarily do not want to be restricted in their free development by the government. (The call for help from the state, especially from large companies, is always huge with us when the market failed. See financial crisis).

Nevertheless, in Germany for example, we have allowed labour offices to interfere with individual freedom. For example, they also rate which unemployed person receives support within the framework of the law, employees who do not conform to standards have bad cards.

In contrast, job creation and Job placement in China is not carried out through employment offices as we know them in Germany.

There are recruitment agencies (head hunters) who pounce on qualified workers and, as they participate in the income generated by the candidate, drive up the salary costs year by year. It is a huge market. Universities, vocational schools and municipalities also organize so-called job fairs a few times a year. Companies then appear there and look for employees. However, these job fairs are also aimed at qualified employees. There are also famous internet portals with which companies can search for employees and job seekers can apply through them.

However, all these offers bypass the rural, mostly poorly educated population in China. It does not matter whether it is Uighurs or other ethnic groups who live in the villages. Those who do not be used to get access to the existing conventional offers, and that affects entire villages in rural regions, will unfortunately not be covered by this and cannot be placed in a job.

China’s labour law has stipulated that local authorities are obliged to promote work programs since 1994. See Chapter II “Promotion of Employment” of Chinese Labor Law on the right.

The main sector that it revolves around is the manufacturing area. Like in our country, the municipalities try to locate or develop companies in their region. I explained this in my report about Xinjiang on my homepage (www.juergenk.de/6.html. So if an administration succeeds to locate a company in their region, this company needs manpower for production.

This is exactly where the municipal administration comes into the game again. If the company went into the villages and looked for workers, it would hardly be successful. People rightly do not trust an unknown company. The villagers have had too many bad experiences with businesses that have not been government established. The amendment to occupational health and safety law in 2016 hardly changed anything in this regard.

In order to overcome this blockade and in the context of a precautionary idea, the local administrations have to get involved! As part of the fight against poverty, employees are then placed with the help of the administration with private companies. This also assures, that regional minimum wages and requirements are secured, people are socially insured and are not at the mercy of companies. You have to know that in China, in contrast to Western countries, there is a much higher leap of faith for administrations. In addition, the legal enforcement of workers' rights in many Chinese provinces is not yet at the same level as on the east coast. With this approach, one tries to promote work and protect rural workers.

This positive approach is now being sold to the western public as a forced labour scheme! This works because people in the West, based on their own experience, can hardly imagine how to fight poverty in China. So as a top joke and twist of the truth, the study claims in all seriousness that people in China are not free to look for their jobs.

That this statement is completely out of thin air can be seen, for example, from the many Uyghurs who run a restaurant outside of Xinjiang. By the way, these restaurants are very popular all over China. How hypocritical the whole thing is can also be seen from the fact that western tourists welcome and find cheap jobs in their exotic vacation spots, while comparable, much better paid jobs in China are denounced and described as forced labour.

The attack on China's solar industry is further evidence of how unscrupulous the US is in the fight against China's rise.

The strategic approach is obvious: everything is being done to destabilize the province of Xinjiang by weakening the economic foundations there. The Pentagon strategists openly and frankly admit that they hope to be able to destabilize the People's Republic of China as a whole through easily ignited ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. This strategy fits 100% into the new US approach to China as described in „the longer Telegram“ .

It is a shame and a peak of hypocracy to see how easily many European countries and media evidently allow themselves to be drawn into this dirty, warmongering policy.










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Labour Law Chapter II „Promotion of employment“