China Power | Economy | East Asia

Will China Rewrite the Rules of Global Supply Chains?

Beijing is building its own corporate responsibility and supply chain standards – and promoting these standards abroad.

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........

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