U.S. Government initiated 4.5-year lawfare program against Chinese nickel mining through Indonesian labor unions
The economic influence program is an escalation of a competition for nickel since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and is led by the nonprofits C4ADS and China Labor Watch.
“China’s decisive source of global competitive advantage lies in its weak labor protections,” declared Li Qiang, the 25-year leader of the American nonprofit China Labor Watch, in an editorial published by MHT Corporation’s foreign affairs magazine The Diplomat on Thursday. One of the supporting arguments was that the vast disparity between the per-worker car production rates within the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla’s Fremont and Shanghai factories “cannot be explained by automation, technology, or skill differentials alone.”
“The difficult question facing liberal democracies is whether they are willing to defend labor standards not just as moral aspirations, but as enforceable rules of economic competition,” Li continued, before concluding that, if not, “the future of manufacturing will belong to those most willing to forfeit labor rights, with consequences that extend beyond any single company, country, or industry.”
Left undisclosed by The Diplomat, Li’s New Jersey-based China Labor Watch had begun a $1.5 million, five-year grant with the U.S. State Department’s international law enforcement arm in October “to address the issue of exploitation of workers on CCP [Chinese Communist Party] funded projects” in Indonesia, where Tesla had agreed to a $5 billion deal to acquire nickel for its batteries in 2022. “Any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel,” stated Tesla’s centi-billionaire chief executive Elon R. Musk during a widely quoted July 2020 investor call.
The British Virgin Islands-based nickel-mining company Talon Metals Corporation, by way of the D.C.-based lobbying firm Venn Strategies, was able to secure more than $130 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Defense in 2023, in the aftermath of a U.S. ban on imports of Russian nickel in response to the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russia had been the world’s third-largest source of nickel in 2022 — behind Indonesia and the Philippines — and Talon Metals launched a public relations campaign to brand its Tamarack, Minnesota mine as the American alternative to China’s refineries in Indonesia. (The Tamarack mine is a joint venture between the BVI-based Talon and the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.)
Further undisclosed by The Diplomat, just one week prior to the publication of Li’s op-ed, China Labor Watch was named as a subawardee on a $3 million, 4.5-year program funded by the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of International Affairs to enforce stricter Indonesian law enforcement against Chinese nickel-mining companies. With more than $1 million in registered lobbying through Venn Strategies since the fourth quarter of 2021, Talon Metals had significantly ramped up its influence campaign in the quarter preceding the new lawfare project against its Indonesian competition, spending $320,000 in the third quarter of 2025.
“This project will have nationwide impact in Indonesia, with focused activities in key industrial hubs, including the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (Central Sulawesi), Weda Bay (North Maluku), and the Southeast Sulawesi Nickel Corridor,” stated the grant summary. The first of the three target areas for the grant, the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in the central region of the Sulawesi island, was also a target of a 2024 digital campaign led by China Labor Watch through a $600,000 U.S. State Department grant, complete with a “brand waiver” to avoid disclosure of the funding source.
(The same international affairs arm of the U.S. Department of Labor on New Year’s Eve initiated another $7 million grant for nickel supply chains in Indonesia with Winrock International and yesterday further announced $23 million in grants to the American nonprofits Partners of the Americas and Creative Associates, “to enforce labor laws and ensure compliance with labor provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, negotiated under the first Trump administration.” “These projects will target labor practices that suppress wages, distort competition, and give bad actors an unfair trade advantage at the expense of American workers,” continued the press release, which Mexico Solidarity Media described as an award to “CIA cutouts.”)
The most significant media output of China Labor Watch’s previous IMIP campaign was a June 2024 film, produced by the Indonesian studio Raw Story, entitled “Forged in Silence: The Untold Stories of Chinese Workers at Indonesia’s Nickel Plants.” The largely cartoonized film, which describes its central character as, “Li, a fictional representation of the many Chinese nickel smelting plant workers,” does not disclose the effort’s funding from the U.S. State Department, apparently as a result of the brand waiver.
China Labor Watch’s earlier campaign against IMIP was part of a broader effort to impede the Indonesian component of China’s flagship international infrastructure development effort, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, of which China’s development of Indonesian nickel refineries is one successful offshoot. The U.S. State Department similarly funded investigative journalists in the region to slow down the Belt and Road Initiative through greater scrutiny of the effort’s environmental impacts, through a program administered by Internews through the acronym STRIDES (Strengthening Transparency in Infrastructure Development Through Environmental Reporting in Southeast Asia). Outlets such as Project Multatuli were provided with funds from the U.S. State Department which Internews advertised as, “averaging $20,000 each for local media and CSOs [civil society organizations] to implement activities that will strengthen media reporting, transparency and accountability on the impacts of infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia.”
China Labor Watch further claimed credit in its 2024 annual report for the Bureau of International Affairs labeling Indonesian nickel as a product of forced labor, stating, “As a result of our efforts, the Department of Labor (DOL) included Nickel products from Indonesia under their List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.”
“Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel producer, has supply chains plagued by forced labor and opaque ownership structures dominated by Chinese companies that distort markets and undercut U.S. businesses that play by the rules,” declared the new $3 million grant summary, promising to combat the disparity by “train[ing] workers, unions, government investigative bodies, and civil society organizations to identify, report, and litigate forced labor cases, while establishing a worker-union-led monitoring network.” The grant later noted that China Labor Watch would perform these labor trainings, stating, “China Labor Watch will act as a subrecipient, focusing on worker engagement, monitoring, and training in Indonesia.”
The new effort is led by the D.C.-based, data-focused think-tank Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), whose board of directors includes the former head of U.S. Special Operations Forces in the Indo-Pacific, David P. Fridovich. C4ADS, which powers its analysis of the evasion of unilateral American sanctions with the Gotham and Foundry products of the controversial enterprise data analysis firm Palantir, has maintained close ties to U.S. intelligence and special operations since its formation more than 20 years ago, further disclosing that roughly 85% of its 2024 budget was provided by the U.S. Government.
While China Labor Watch is tasked with disrupting Chinese nickel mining through its relationships with Indonesian unions, C4ADS’s tasks are described in the grant summary as including, “Document[ing] incidents of forced labor and connect[ing] them to company owners, intermediaries, and global buyers through enforcement-ready dossiers and evidentiary packages submitted to U.S., Indonesian, and international enforcement bodies,” as well as, “Map[ping] ownership networks and enabler systems across the nickel industry, archiving findings in a secure database and producing risk reports for downstream companies.”
The American government’s history of leveraging international labor training programs for enacting U.S. foreign policy goals, including regime change in concert with the Central Intelligence Agency, is well documented and now embodied by the Solidarity Center, which is jointly run by the U.S. Congress’s (now dark-money) National Endowment for Democracy and the American Federal of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). During the early years of China Labor Watch’s operations, the nonprofit’s tax filings disclosed the AFL-CIO’s then-head of international affairs, Philip Fishman, as a board member, with his address listed as that of the AFL-CIO.
In addition to providing testimony to the U.S. Congressional Executive Committee on China in July 2003 regarding “Freedom of Association in China and its Effects on Workers,” while simultaneously leading the AFL-CIO’s international affairs and serving on China Labor Watch’s board, Mr. Fishman candidly explained the utility of labor unions in a 2007 editorial published by The American Interest. “One of the great, and greatly under-appreciated, success stories of the 20th century is the tale of how the international work of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) helped the ‘third wave’ of democratic expansion to crest,” opened the editorial, later noting that, “The role played by Solidarity (Solidarnosc) is perhaps the best known, not only for toppling the Communist government in Poland but for events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union.”
The American tradition of quietly leveraging international labor unions in the geopolitical struggle against its economic competitors is now being revitalized, with a focus on law enforcement campaigns in Indonesia. “Absent credible enforcement of workers’ rights, global manufacturing competition will continue to reward systems that lower costs by weakening labor protections, placing sustained downward pressure on labor standards across borders,” argued Li Qiang in his editorial in The Diplomat on Thursday.
The new labor-based lawfare campaigns in Indonesia and Mexico follow the Trump administration’s January 3 kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia, which led to former CIA chief of station in Caracas Enrique de la Torre declaring on Saturday that, “Now the United States commands most of the world’s oil supply.” The Trump administration has similarly threatened a seizure of Greenland, largely in order to profit from the Danish island’s rare earth minerals.
China Labor Watch and The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) did not respond to requests for comment, including regarding which labor unions in Indonesia their effort would be in partnership with. C4ADS instead publicly promoted its collaboration with China Labor Watch on the social media platform X, following publication of this article.
Update January 13, 2026 to add reference to further recent grants from the U.S. Department of Labor’s international affairs arm for law enforcement in relation to access to natural resources.
Appendix: The C4ADS grant summary
The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (‘C4ADS’)
Strengthening Labor Governance and Responsible Supply Chains in Indonesia’s Nickel Industry
Purpose:
This project will protect American workers and businesses by ensuring U.S. access to fair, reliable, and forced-labor-free supplies of nickel, a mineral critical to U.S. defense, infrastructure and energy security. Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel producer, has supply chains plagued by forced labor and opaque ownership structures dominated by Chinese companies that distort markets and undercut U.S. businesses that play by the rules. This project will have nationwide impact in Indonesia, with focused activities in key industrial hubs, including the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (Central Sulawesi), Weda Bay (North Maluku), and the Southeast Sulawesi Nickel Corridor. Target populations include miners, migrant workers, refinery employees (including Chinese workers brought into industrial parks), and their unions, alongside Indonesian government enforcement bodies and civil society watchdogs. The project requests $4 million over four years.
Activities to be Performed:
The project will strengthen Indonesia’s legal and policy frameworks (Focus Area 1) and improve systems for monitoring, identification, enforcement, and remediation (Focus Area 2) through the following activities:
Document incidents of forced labor and connect them to company owners, intermediaries, and global buyers through enforcement-ready dossiers and evidentiary packages submitted to U.S., Indonesian, and international enforcement bodies.
Map ownership networks and enabler systems across the nickel industry, archiving findings in a secure database and producing risk reports for downstream companies.
Conduct policy and legal gap analyses against U.S. import requirements and international labor standards and host stakeholder workshops to generate reform recommendations.
Train workers, unions, government investigative bodies, and civil society organizations to identify, report, and litigate forced labor cases, while establishing a worker-union-led monitoring network.
Publish a comprehensive investigative supply chain report and deliver tailored briefings to U.S. and international standard-setting organizations.
Expected Outcomes:
Outcomes include a robust evidence base linking forced labor incidents to specific corporate actors; stronger labor monitoring systems sustained by unions, CSOs, and local enforcement agencies; clear pathways for litigation and remediation that connect evidence to action for affected workers; and policy recommendations and pressure that drive Indonesian authorities to close labor governance gaps. Ultimately the project will reduce forced labor in Indonesia’s nickel industry and ensure that U.S. firms are not undercut by abusive practices.
Intended Beneficiaries:
Primary beneficiaries are Indonesian miners, refinery workers, and migrant workers who face the highest risks of forced labor. Institutional beneficiaries include unions, labor inspectorates, legal advocates, and civil society organizations. Downstream, U.S. businesses and workers will benefit directly from a more level playing field, free from the market distortions caused by forced labor.
Subrecipient Activities:
C4ADS will serve as the prime awardee, leading efforts on ownership and supply chain mapping, risk analysis, and engagement with U.S. stakeholders. China Labor Watch will act as a subrecipient, focusing on worker engagement, monitoring, and training in Indonesia. Together, this partnership links ground-level evidence with corporate actors and investors, ensuring accountability and delivering tangible benefits for both workers and U.S. businesses.