In a desperate ploy, the State Department has used its 2022 “Trafficking in Persons” (TIP) report to charge that forced labor and human trafficking are taking place under the auspices of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the many countries that have signed onto that program. In a special July 19 briefing on the issuance of the annual report, Dr. Kari Johnstone, Acting Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, boasted that this year the report included a special chapter, entitled “Forced Labor: The Hidden Cost of China’s Belt and Road Initiative” documenting these alleged crimes.
This chapter describes the BRI as an unscrupulous, multi-trillion-dollar program aimed only at “edging out other world powers from international development partnerships and economic cooperation, securing intelligence, and amassing political, military, and economic leverage over participating countries through the accrual and manipulation of debt.”
This might better describe the foreign policy of the U.S. and other trans-Atlantic nations.
In at least a dozen participating countries, the chapter argues, “P.R.C. and host nationals, working in BRI construction projects, mining operations and factories in African, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Pacific, Latin American and Caribbean countries, experience deceptive recruitment into debt bondage, arbitrary wage garnishing or withholding, contract irregularities, confiscation of travel and identity documentation, forced overtime and resignation penalties.”
According to this narrative, workers faced “intimidation and threats, physical violence, denial of access to urgent medical care, poor working and living conditions,” etc. The report provides lurid details of sex trafficking and child forced labor that it alleges take place in areas near BRI construction projects, and demands that countries that host BRI projects inspect all the project sites, as well as surrounding communities, to find out whether such activities are going on. The report separately also retails allegations of Chinese “genocide” against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which won it effusive praise from the World Uyghur Congress, one of the color revolution appendages of the National Endowment for Democracy. See separate report on Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s forceful reply to the State Department’s bilge in Global Times. (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/337308-2022-TIP-REPORT-inaccessible.pdf)
