The US president Joe Biden will attend a meeting of advanced economies in the UK in June, where he is expected to raise the Uighur problem.
The United States would encourage its Group of Seven allies to raise pressure on China to use forced labor in its northwestern Xinjiang region, home to the Muslim Uighur minority, a top official in the White House reported.
US President Joe Biden will attend a G7 Advanced Economies meeting in person in the United Kingdom in June to reflect on what he sees as strategic competition between democracies and more authoritarian states, particularly China.
Daleep Singh, Deputy National Security Advisor to Biden and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, said on Friday that the Cornwall G7 meeting will concentrate on health security, a synchronised economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, meaningful action on climate change, and “rising common democratic values in the G7.”
“These are like-minded allies, and we want to take tangible and concrete actions that demonstrate our willingness to coordinate with non-market economies like China,” Singh, who helped coordinate the meeting, told Reuters news agency in an interview.
“The G7’s galvanizing challenge is to demonstrate that open societies, democratic societies, and top-down autocracies are not the best way to solve the world’s biggest problems,” he said.
Singh stated that the United States has already taken strong action against China in Xinjiang for human rights violations, but that it will continue to work with G7 allies.
Last month, the US, EU, UK, and Canada declared joint sanctions against Chinese officials suspected of violence in the province.
China rejected all charges of violence and replied with the EU’s own punitive steps.
Biden First Trip Abroad
Singh said specifics were still being worked out before the conference, but the summit gave US allies an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity on the subject.
“We made our views clear that our customers need to know when slave labour makes the products they are importing,” he said. “Our ideals must be built into our trading relationships.”
Washington, he said, would be looking for the G7 to take clear steps “to elevate our shared values as democracies, and those certainly apply to Xinjiang.”
Activists and UN experts said at least one million Muslims were detained in Xinjiang camps.
Activists and some Western politicians accused China of torture, forced labour, and sterilisation. China said its camps provide vocational training to fight extremism.
The White House said Friday that Biden will also travel to Belgium in June for his first overseas trip since taking office and the UK, including a stop at the Cornwall G7 Summit from June 11-13.
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