In The News

US Crackdown On Chinese Slave Labor Is Devastating The Solar Industry

https://dailycaller.com/

The federal government has seized thousands of Chinese solar imports that were made using the slave labor of Uyghur Muslims, placing heavy constraints on the U.S. solar industry, according to Axios.

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials impounded 2,600 Chinese imports that mostly consisted of solar panels worth $806 million from October 2022 to January 2023 because the deliveries were in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), Axios reported. The UFLPA, which was signed into law in December 2021 to stop the alleged exploitation of Uyghurs, has severely limited the number of solar products coming into the U.S., raising costs and delaying large solar projects.

“I have seen developers and investors revising solar module costs up by 30-40%,” Xu Chen, a senior director at FTI Consulting, told Axios.

The U.S. also seized 1,592 Chinese imports that mostly consisted of solar products, worth nearly $500 million, from January 2022 to the end of September 2022, according to Axios. The Chinese government has coerced millions of Uyghur Muslims into performing forced labor throughout the nation’s Xinjiang province, which is home to the minority population, according to a May 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice in the U.K.

Many Uyghurs have been placed at factories producing polysilicon, a key material for producing solar panels, according to the report. Xinjiang dominates the global solar production market and harbors up to 45% of the world’s manufacturing capacity for polysilicon.

Although the U.S. is attempting to crack down on such imports, some Chinese companies have been attempting to evade U.S. tariffs by finishing their products in Southeast Asia, according to the Department of Commerce. In June, a White House report on supply chains labeled human rights violations as a “risk” for the renewable energy industry.

President Joe Biden is ramping up efforts to acquire solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of green energy in order to meet international climate targets. Recently, the Chinese Communist Party-linked solar giant JA Solar leased a plot of land in Phoenix, Arizona, to construct a $60 million solar panel factory that is poised to benefit from huge green energy tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

CBP and the White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Support Conservative Daily News with a small donation via Paypal or credit card that will go towards supporting the news and commentary you've come to appreciate.

Related Articles

One Comment

  1. This is peanuts compared to the real threats from China that our government largely ignores. Trump wanted to withdraw us from The World Health Organization but Biden refuses and we continue to be main country funding them. WHO is controlled by China and is largely responsible for the COVID cover up and the draconian world wide lockdowns. But, it’s way worse than just the WHO. Tic Tok needs to be banned and China needs to be banned from buying U.S. companies or buying any real estate in the U.S.. Tic Tok is nothing but a Chinese intelligence gathering apparatus. Most people don’t realize that even though China has the appearance of allowing some free enterprise, all Chinese companies are bound, by law, to allegiance to the CCP and are even required to spy for them if asked.

    90% of the computer chips in the world are produced either in China or Taiwan and everything manufactured today depends on computer chips to function. Of course, China is thinking about taking Taiwan and may act before Biden leaves office. 90% of our antibiotics and pharmaceutical ingredients come from China. Almost all of our solar panels come from China as well as many of the rare earth minerals that are needed to produce batteries for electric cars. They steal our intellectual property with near impunity to copy our advanced military hardware and software and now have hypersonic missiles that we don’t even have. Their Army dwarves ours and even their Navy is now bigger. They are watching our military go “woke” painting rainbow bullets on Marine helmets in recruiting ads and rolling on the ground laughing. They are funding and supplying infrastructure everywhere in the world (especially in South America) to embed themselves in countries around the world and make them dependent while we waste all our capital on useless regime change wars.

    Most of our debt is owned by China and they are allowed to buy American companies at will. They now own the biggest pork producer in America (formerly Smithfield Ham) and are buying up as much U.S. property as they desire, even near our military bases. Then there’s the 300,00 Chinese students in our universities (all taking STEM courses and not majoring in “Gender studies”) many of whom will end up being employed by defense contractors or in hi tech companies where they will end up spying for the CCP. Biden and Hunter took tens of millions from the CCP and are so compromised by China that he won’t even dare to speak against them, much less take any actions against them. Most of our international companies (Coke, Disney, Nike, Hollywood and even the NBA) are also compromised by China because they are blinded by the potential billions of consumers vs. a mere 330 million here. China even controls what American companies can say and censor them if they critique China in any way. The Chinese ultimate plan is world domination and we should take that seriously. Unless we wake up, we will likely cede our grandchildren’s future to them and they better start learning Mandarin.

Back to top button