Faced with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), U.S. legislation that presumes any goods made in Xinjiang involved forced labor, as well as with new European forced labor rules, China has not retreated. Instead, Beijing is building its own corporate responsibility and supply chain standards, limiting how some Western audit and standards systems operate in China, and promoting China-led standards abroad.

China’s Ministry of Commerce recently accused the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) of assisting U.S. sanctions against China over alleged forced labor in Xinjiang and barred Chinese organizations and individuals from doing business or cooperating with it. The RBA is one of the world’s largest corporate social responsibility initiatives; it has over 600 member companies that together employ more than 21.5 million workers. Its Responsible Minerals Initiative runs the Responsible Minerals Assurance Process (RMAP), the only supply chain due diligence scheme so far formally recognized by the EU under its Conflict Minerals Regulation.

According to the publicly disclosed list of RMAP conformant and active facilities, as of January 31, 2026, 71 out of 196, or 36.2 percent, of the cobalt, tantalum, tin, and tungsten smelters and refiners were located in mainland China. 

For years, many Chinese companies and suppliers have participated in RBA-related auditing and compliance systems, even though the Chinese government has never formally recognized the RBA. Now, as China’s economic power and international influence have grown, Beijing is moved to head off any such cooperation. The significance of the RBA sanctions thus goes far beyond corporate compliance – it is part of a broader shift through which China is moving from the position of rule-taker to that of rule-maker in global supply chains. 

I have watched this shift develop for several years. In 2023, in New York, I met with a representative of the China Association of Social Workers, a government-linked organization. At the time, the organization was reaching out to China Labor Watch and other overseas groups working on labor and forced labor issues. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act had recently taken effect in the United States, and Europe was moving toward its own forced labor rules.

In retrospect, I can see that those contacts appear to have been part of a broader effort to understand the existing international system as Chinese institutions became increasingly active in developing standards of their own.

By 2025, this shift had become much more apparent. At an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forum in Paris, Jiang Hui, chairman of the China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals &  Chemicals Importers and Exporters (CCCMC), a large government-linked industry association, said that some Chinese companies would not allow foreign organizations to audit them because of information security concerns. Instead, he urged Western companies to participate in China’s emerging supply chain governance system. 

China’s efforts soon gained international recognition. The London Metal Exchange, for instance, has already accepted the CCCMC’s due-diligence guidelines for mineral supply chains as an approved standard. Chinese-led frameworks have also drawn Western firms in directly: The CCCMC’s Responsible Cobalt Initiative, which promotes due diligence across the cobalt supply chain, counts multinationals such as Apple, Tesla, and BMW among its members.

In 2025, a CCCMC draft mining standard included prohibitions on forced labor and requirements for human rights due diligence. The China Enterprise Confederation and the Ministry of Commerce also issued new guidelines on labor compliance and corporate responsibility for Chinese companies operating overseas.

Then, in July 2026, China’s new Regulation on Outbound Investment took effect. It requires Chinese investors abroad to respect workers’ legitimate rights and comply with applicable laws and international practices. More significantly, it goes beyond compliance with existing rules, calling on China to “actively participate in the formulation of international investment rules.” 

China is also building platforms to promote its current approach abroad. In 2025, the CCCMC brought governments, companies, NGOs, and international organizations, including independent trade unions from some mineral producing countries, together in Xiamen for its International Forum on Sustainable Mineral Supply Chains. 

This expansion of China’s regulatory ambitions comes as Washington has reduced some of its own international labor work. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in international programs addressing child labor, forced labor, and trafficking, leaving more space for China to expand its influence over global labor and supply-chain governance. 

Beijing’s language on corporate responsibility also stands in stark contrast to Washington’s current position: China now emphasizes shared development and improving local livelihoods, while the United States increasingly focuses on actions that it claims are protecting American workers from unfair competition. China’s message may resonate more strongly in developing countries because it presents its standards as part of their own development.

The West’s greatest weakness is that, after decades of writing and promoting these rules, it still has not ensured that workers worldwide genuinely benefit. That gives China room to promote its own standards and its own narrative. However, Beijing is clearly willing to expand its influence over global rules even without first improving conditions for workers in China itself. 

The logic behind the two approaches is increasingly similar: Both governments are tying labor standards to broader national economic interests. The two systems nevertheless differ in important ways. 

Western supply chain due diligence systems generally emphasize access to information, external assessment, and risk identification. China’s emerging system also emphasizes labor rights and corporate responsibility, but gives greater weight to oversight by the state, information security, and the role of Chinese institutions in setting and implementing standards.

For now, therefore, the competition is largely about who gets to write the rules for global supply chains.

If those standards strengthen the competitiveness of Chinese companies overseas and give China a greater role in governing those chains, especially in developing and critical mineral producing countries, Beijing has ample reason to promote them. In fact, it already has.

Ultimately, the matter of who writes the rules is less important than whether or not those rules actually improve conditions for workers worldwide. If competition pushes both sides to prove that their standards work, it may not be a bad thing for global workers.