"U.S. Rule Risks Disrupting Global Battery Supply" is the front-page print headline over a Times news article. It's a strange headline, as what's really risking disruption to the global battery supply isn't the "U.S. Rule" but the Chinese genocide. The print headline treats Chinese behavior as immutable and U.S. policy as malleable. The online Times headline, "Red Flags for Forced Labor Found in China's Car Battery Supply Chain," is better. When there's that big a divergence between the print and online headlines, it's generally an indicator that one or the other is poorly crafted.
The flaws with the Times approach here go beyond the headline, though. The word "genocide" doesn't appear in the long Times article, even though both the Trump and Biden administrations have described what is happening in Xinjiang as a genocide that is "ongoing." There is a Times sentence that reports, "Files from police servers in Xinjiang published by the BBC last month described a shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to escape from internment camps, as well as mandatory blindfolds and shackles for "students" being transferred between facilities." Actually, the Xinjiang Police Files were published by the BBC and by other news organizations but were released by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has been doing terrific work. You'd think maybe the Times would find the contents of the files newsworthy outside of the potential effects on the battery supply chain, but apparently not.
There's a he-said, she-said aspect to the Times article that is troubling. "Chinese authorities say that all employment is voluntary, and that work transfers help free rural families from poverty by giving them steady wages, skills and Chinese-language training....It is difficult to ascertain the level of coercion any individual worker has faced given the limited access to Xinjiang for journalists and research firms."
Who is limiting the access to Xinjiang for journalists, and by what means? The Times doesn't level with its readers precisely what the Chinese authorities would do to a reporter who set out for Xinjiang and tried to conduct interviews freely, or to people who spoke with such a reporter. If the newspaper did explain to readers what the Chinese reaction to such reporting would be, the reality of the "level of coercion" would be quite readily ascertainable. The Chinese communist coercion applies to foreign journalists and editors as surely as it does to Xinjiang battery workers.