While out holiday shopping in Washington, D.C., recently, we picked up a small toy for our nephew: a miniature Washington, D.C., city bus, officially licensed by the city government. It was charming, well-made, and the perfect gift. Yet, when we turned the box over, we saw the toy was manufactured in Guangdong Province in China, a high-risk area for forced labor. We put it back down. 

Despite having both worked on international forced labor issues, we were surprised to see that our own holiday shopping in a liberal Washington, D.C., store implicated us in human rights abuses. The uncomfortable truth is that forced labor is so deeply embedded in global supply chains that many of us are encountering it with alarming frequency.

In the case of this miniature city bus, a toy company selling goods in the United States worked with a supplier that contracted with a manufacturer in China, and our region’s transportation authority, WMATA, licensed the end product. Eventually, it made its way to consumers in Washington, D.C.

Across China, most severely in the........

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