[maxsanic]

Xinjiang lah... 

Despicable... 

This is the standard way US has always operated. First pass a bombastic law and/or executive order threatening to beat up any county who does not comply for maximum news headline impact to demonstrate to the world that the US can get whatever it wants.

Subsequently hide all the unimpressive stuff under the appeal footnote section. After that allow discretionary exceptions to take place depending on actual needs behind cover and out of public scrutiny.

The key difference is in the past when US was at the pinnacle of its power, policy exceptions were really exceptions, i.e. only a minority of items get through for very specific reasons. Now that US influence is receding especially with regards to trade with the Chinese, it has reached a stage where exceptions outnumber items that comply to policy.

For e.g. the public is misled into believing that the US has banned all stuff from Xinjiang for supposed noble reasons like human rights, but in reality all major items that US currently imports from Xinjiang is awarded an exception. The only remaining sanctioned items are those that have hardly even been exported to US in the first place.

With the current situation, I believe the only real item that the US wants to ideally ban is chip related technology. Unfortunately for them, as part of globalization many chip related items are held by other allied countries which US has now discovered only pay anti-China lip service but otherwise have no intention of doing anything substantial.