U.S. is headquarters of forced labor

 (Cartoon by Ma Hongliang)

The United States has deliberately concocted lies about “forced labor” in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in an attempt to disrupt and destroy the development of Xinjiang and China at large under the pretext of human rights. The U.S. politicized the human rights issue and applied double standards on this issue, while taking a blind eye to its own poor human rights record. In fact, the U.S. is the world leader in forced labor.

The United States has its own notorious history of slavery. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between 1525 and 1866, during the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, over 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World.

Forced labor is still rampant throughout the United States today. Every year, nearly 100,000 people are trafficked to the U.S. for forced labor. It is estimated that there are some 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States, the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Arab News noted that the United States has always criticized other countries for so-called “humanitarian crimes,” but has refused to honestly examine itself in the mirror. Discrediting other countries through political manipulation for the country’s own political purposes cannot cover its poor records of historic and modern slavery.