Leaders of the G7 nations presented a newfound  Western unity at its first physical summit since 2019 as they confronted China and  the threat of future pandemics.

The leader wrapped up their three-day summit on Sunday, they reached a consensus on the need for a shared approach to China’s exports at unfairly low prices and to human rights abuses, Reuters quoted a senior official in the US President Joe Biden’s administration as saying.  

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The senior official spoke on the condition of anonymity and said the G7 leaders, the Group of Seven world’s largest advanced economies had also agreed on the need to coordinate on the supply chain to ensure democracies are supporting each other. He also said that there was unanimity in terms of a willingness to call out human rights abuses and violations of fundamental freedoms that invoke their shared values. Biden told reporters that they are on the same page, pushing to rally the West against a resurgent China and recalcitrant Russia, Reuters reported.

G7 had moved far from three years ago when the final communique made no mention of China, said the official, “There was a commitment to take action in response to what we’re seeing.” The G7 leaders said they would offer a “values-driven, high-standard and transparent” partnership.

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The official said that Joe Biden wanted concrete action on the forced labor accusations and called them “an affront to human dignity, and an egregious example of China’s unfair economic competition”.

Under the legal structure of the World Trade Organization(WTO), China’s designation as a “non-market economy” allows its trading partners, including the United States, to use a special framework to determine whether China’s exports are being sold at unfairly low prices and if that is found to be the case, to apply additional anti-dumping duties.