Ram Ben Tzion, founder and CEO of digital vetting platform Ultra Information Solutions, has always been a skeptic of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the 2021 law that places a rebuttable presumption that all goods made in whole or in part from China’s Xinjiang region are the product of forced labor and therefore impermissible in the United States.
Now he thinks it’s been a complete failure, for what he says is one simple reason: It hasn’t meaningfully improved the lives and working conditions of the mostly Muslim minorities who have been swept up in a state-sponsored crackdown that the United States and others have declared genocide but that the Chinese government has derided as a Western ploy to smear its name.
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“Because of the way that it’s enacted, it’s made a lot of complexities and a lot of liabilities associated with imports without really having anyone assume responsibility,” Ben Tzion said. “So what we’ve ended up with is that the production in Xinjiang hasn’t changed: cotton, electric vehicles, tomatoes—the output of Xinjiang as a region has grown, not gone down. We are seeing that the working conditions of the Uyghur minority have perhaps become worse because of political circumstances within China. And then we have U.S. companies—importers—that are struggling to either comply or predict the level of compliance they need to meet.”
Trump 2.0 has thrown an additional wrench in the form of additional tariffs, including a 10 percent border tax increase in goods from China that kicked in on Tuesday. (Shipments from Canada and Mexico, which were looking at an extra 25 percent in damages, have received a monthlong reprieve.)
Until Friday, the duties included the millions of low-value packages that inundate American shores daily from Chinese factories selling through e-commerce platforms such as Shein and Temu, which have been linked to—but say they reject—the use of forced Uyghur labor. Such goods were formerly exempt under the trade law exception known as de minimis, which allows deliveries under $800 to sidestep taxes and fees, stricter documentation requirements and more intense customs scrutiny.
Though a new executive order has restored the waiver—one whose revocation had sowed chaos and confusion, not to mention created a logjam of parcels, at stateside receiving points that were already near breaking point—Ben Tzion sees the sanctions as indicative of a new trade approach, one that is focused on protecting the interests of the American consumers and the American economy and less so those of ethnic minorities in China.
“I would be surprised if the UFLPA is not canceled, because I really don’t see the value,” he said. “The volume, the magnitude, the complexity of global trade—we’re talking about 85 million TEU containers coming into the United States every year—is beyond enforcement capabilities. Customs and Border Protection, which is security oriented in nature and not other compliance aspects, cannot effectively inspect this volume of trade, and this is why the UFLPA has been so difficult to implement.”
Sheng Lu, professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, agrees with Ben Tzion—to a point. While it’s true, he said, that a domestic law like the UFLPA can do little to change China’s policies and practices involving the Uyghurs, the UFLPA works as it was designed: as an economic tool to stop the United States from importing products made by forced labor in Xinjiang. This is backed up by trade data, which indicates that shipments from China made up just 10 percent of U.S. cotton apparel imports in 2024, down from nearly 27 percent in pre-UFLPA 2017.
“Likewise, the 2024 United States Fashion Industry Association benchmarking study reveals that all U.S. fashion companies surveyed consider UFLPA compliance to be one of their sourcing priorities, indicating that UFLPA works,” Lu said. The only thing that will change repressive practices in China, he added, will be diplomatic dialogue between the U.S. and Chinese governments.
Lu also thinks that Trump’s tariffs, despite their more protectionist angle, could have reverberations on forced labor enforcement. To wit: If American fashion companies curtail their sourcing from China in response to the tariff increase, it would theoretically reduce the potential exposure of products to Xinjiang. That said, failing to close the de minimis exception would only incentivize companies seeking to skirt tariff increases to exploit that route, though this depends on how successful CBP is in implementing new rules to reform it in the face of mercurial Oval Office edicts.
Even so, nobody wins a tariff war, Lu said.
“PVH Corp. being added to China’s entity list is a reminder that the escalated U.S.-China trade war could further politicize the bilateral trade relationship and hurt companies on both sides,” he said, referring to the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger owner, which Beijing investigated for “discriminatory measures” against Xinjiang cotton, before naming it to a list of unreliable entities this week.
How things will further shake out is still anyone’s guess. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is a longtime China hawk who helped author the UFLPA when he was a Florida senator. Meanwhile, the financial disclosures of Kash Patel, as reported by watchdog group Accountable.Us, revealed Friday that Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation owns between $1-5 million in stock from Elite Depot, a Cayman Islands entity that is Shein’s ultimate controlling party, one step up from Singapore’s Roadget Business.
“It’s hard to take known grifter Kash Patel at his word he will fight human trafficking after getting rich consulting for a Chinese fast fashion company notorious for its forced labor,” Accountable.Us executive director Tony Carrk said in a statement. “Since Secretary Rubio and Senator [Tom] Cotton have spoken out about Shein’s exploitative business practices, will they also raise red flags about their preferred FBI director candidate profiting off it? If they remain silent, it’d be just the latest case of conservatives in power putting loyalty to President Trump above all else, even their own supposed values.”
A representative for Patel said that he has gone “above and beyond in this advice and consent process,” including “countless meetings with Senators, disclosing and reporting all sources of income, submitting hundreds of pages of documents, replying to hundreds of pages of questions for the record, and testifying for six hours with multiple rounds of questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee.” He also looks forward to the vote on Thursday and “being swiftly confirmed by the Senate so he can start working to refocus the FBI on making our country safer.” Shein did not immediately return an email requesting comment.
Ultimately, what will bolster the fight against forced labor in Xinjiang—short of requiring companies to divest from China altogether because of limited or obfuscated supply chain visibility—is plugging the de minimis loophole, said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and one of the foremost experts on the Uyghur crisis.
“This step greatly reduces the risk that goods linked to Uyghur forced labor are entering the country unchecked,” he said. “The business model of Temu and Shein had been like a ‘black hole’ through which American consumers were unwittingly exposed to a range of rights abuses, most notably those linked to Xinjiang, which currently operates the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor.”
But whether broad tariffs or surgical trade bans are more effective is, for now, a toss-up. In his order on Friday, Trump said that the de minimis restoration will be available for goods from China until the secretary of commerce informs him that systems have been put “in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue.”
“I would generally argue that the UFLPA task force has the greater skill set, experience, and methodology for addressing this, but with all the institutional changes at present, it will remain to be seen how enforcement priorities are going to be handled,” Zenz said.
