China is Wiping an Entire People Off the Map. The World Must Act.
“Free the Uighurs” Protest outside of The White House on April 10, 2009. Photo by Future Atlas.
The Chinese government has detained 2 million Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims in its northwestern Xinjiang region and placed them in mass internment camps. It has also made detainees engage in state-sponsored forced labor in Xinjiang, whose yarn and cotton are in roughly one in five cotton garments sold globally. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called the situation the “stain of the century,” and Anti-Slavery International has said it’s the “largest mass detention of an ethno-religious community since World War II.” To end China’s flagrant human rights abuses, democratic nations must live up to their verbal denouncements of China’s actions and institute measures that (1) penalize Chinese government officials responsible for the mass internment of the Uyghur people and (2) bar international companies from selling goods from Xinjiang, unless they are proven not to have been made with forced labor.
Why is this happening?
From the 1950s to 1970s, China conducted a state-orchestrated migration of mainland Han Chinese individuals to Xinjiang, where they lived side-by-side with the native Uyghur Muslim population. In 1991, former Xinjiang Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary Wang Lequan stated that the “major task” facing Xinjiang authorities was to “manage religion and guide it in being subordinate to… the objective of national unity.” In 2009, riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where 156 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. Government policies in Xinjiang had convinced the 10 million Muslims in Xinjiang to believe that their livelihoods were in danger.
In 2014, China arrested Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti and sentenced him to life imprisonment after a two-day trial. Amnesty International called the verdict “deplorable.” Tohti, who used his academic platform to speak out publicly against the oppression of the Uyghur Muslim population, has won many international awards for his efforts. Indeed, Tohti risked his life by speaking to a growing animosity toward Beijing’s policies among the Uyghur people. But, the CCP began to see Uyghur opposition as an existential threat.
During the same year, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered secret speeches in Xinjiang that warned against the “toxicity of religious extremism” and suggested the CCP employ the tactics of “dictatorship” to put down Islamic extremism. But George Washington University professor Sean Roberts says the threat of Uyghur terrorism has been “minimal, if not non-existent.” Soon after in 2017, the Xinjiang government established what it calls “reeducation camps.” The Council on Foreign Relations finds that, based on satellite imagery, thirty-nine of the camps almost tripled in size between April 2017 and August 2018. As of June 30, between 800,000 to two million Uyghur and other Muslim people have been detained since April 2017.
What is happening?
In the reeducation camps, detainees are forced “to pledge loyalty to the CCP and renounce Islam, they say, as well as sing praises for communism and learn Mandarin.” Cameras and microphones are ubiquitous and record their every move and utterance. Detainees are physically tortured and undergo sleep deprivation. Uyghur women have described experiences of sexual abuse, forced abortions, and the mandatory implantation of contraceptive devices. Additionally, Uyghur parents are being barred from giving their children Islamic names. Some released detainees contemplated suicide or witnessed others kill themselves. One Uyghur journalist has described Beijing’s acts as “cultural genocide.”
In July 2020, Uyghur exiles demanded the International Criminal Court to investigate the Chinese government for genocide and crimes against humanity. However, China fails to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. Based on testimony by reeducation camp escapees, the recovered correspondence of Chinese officials, and journalistic reports, it is undeniable that China’s goal is to abuse the Uyghur people and dilute their traditions—leaving them permanently and irreparably weakened. China can ensure that the Uyghurs will languish in poverty and disorganization.
Besides maintaining domestic order, China’s mass internment of the Uyghurs also bolsters their state-sponsored forced labor operations. In the internment camps, detainees are made to undergo job training, with local government officials receiving kickbacks depending upon how many detainees they force to work at factories for little or no pay. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) states that in Xinjiang alone, there are countless textile mills and factories that rely on forced labor to produce textiles, electronics, food products, shoes, tea, and handicrafts.
In fact, about 20 percent of all cotton garments sold globally contain cotton or yarn from Xinjiang. Companies suspected of profiting from forced labor sourced from Xinjiang include Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Amazon, BMW, Gap, H&M, Inditex, Marks & Spencer, Nike, North Face, Puma, PVH, Samsung, UNIQLO, and more.
In response to growing visibility of China’s human rights abuses and forced labor practices, more than 190 organizations spanning 36 countries issued a call to action in July demanding that more international companies sever ties in Xinjiang over the next year. But as Uyghur Human Rights Project Senior Program Officer Peter Irwinhas said “[companies] won’t stop unethical sourcing practices unless they are faced with real reputational risk and the possibility that consumers will stop shopping from their stores.”
Indeed, since the findings in CECC’s 2019 annual report indicate that many forced labor operations in Xinjiang are nearly impossible to trace, it is not enough for companies to merely separate with the operations that come into public view. To truly put pressure on China for its human rights abuses and halt its forced labor profiteering, governments themselves must take formal action against China’s activities in Xinjiang.
What can be done?
On October 29, 2019, U. K. Ambassador to the U.N. Karen Pierce delivered a joint statement recognizing China’s human rights abuses and calling on “the Chinese government to uphold its national laws and international obligations and commitments to respect human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, in Xinjiang and across China.” The statement, backed by 23 countries including the United States, France, Germany, and 11 other E.U. member states, pressured China to “refrain from the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and members of other Muslim communities.” The statement also called on China to “allow the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and U.N. Special Procedures immediate unfettered, meaningful access to Xinjiang.”
Nearly a year has passed since the statement, and China has only continued its practices, refusing to allow the U.N. access to Xinjiang for international monitoring. But only empty rhetoric has followed from E.U. nations. In July, British Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State Dominic Raab accused Beijing of "gross, egregious human rights abuses,” and French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves le Drian denounced China’s “unacceptable” actions in Xinjiang. The European Union has equivocated on the matter. The United States has wasted little time.
On June 17, 2020, President Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. Sanctioning Xinjiang’s CCP Secretary Chen Quanguo as responsible for “gross human rights violations,” the law also requires the U.S. president and various executive agencies to conduct investigations and compile reports specifically designating China’s human rights abuses. The law has paved the way for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s recent decision to blacklist 11 Chinese companies for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
In addition, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act takes measures to address intimidation tactics employed by China against the Uyghur diaspora. As Uyghur exiles have attested, China has silenced Uyghur people abroad by illegally kidnapping their family members and holding them hostage. The law also encourages Congress to conduct investigations of such intimidation tactics and requires the executive branch to issue reports to Congress on efforts made to protect Uyghurs studying or working in the United States.
While these measures target the officials abetting the mass internment of Uyghur Muslims to penalize their behavior and levy modest sanctions against Chinese companies guilty of using forced labor, they do not exert sufficient pressure to cripple the forced labor practices themselves. Co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project Nury Turkel agrees with this assessment in an op-ed for Time magazine. She urges “Congress to swiftly pass a second bill, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would direct the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to presume that any goods produced in the Uyghur region are the product of forced labor.”
Indeed, what Turkel refers to in the bi-partisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, introduced jointly in March 2020 to the U.S. House and Senate, is a “rebuttable presumption.” Under this law, all corporations are required to prove with “clear and convincing evidence” that any products imported into the United States and sourced from Xinjiang are not made with forced labor. According to the act, this provision is necessary because “audits to vet products and supply chains in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are not possible due to the extent forced labor has contaminated the regional economy, the mixing of involuntary labor with voluntary labor,” among other reasons.
This economic provision represents the second point of pressure that can be applied to curb China’s human rights abuses. The first point, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, has sanctioned specific members of the CCP to discourage their facilitation of the arbitrary detention of Uyghur Muslims. The second point, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, would aim to cripple China’s forced labor industry adjacent to the mass internment camps.
But while all of these developments are happening in the United States, it remains that every other nation who backed the U.N. statement from October 2019—nearly forming a majority of E.U. member states—has failed to take action against China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Moreover, while the European Union recently announced that it would use its influence as China’s biggest trading partner to penalize Beijing after implementing a draconian security law restricting the rights of Hong Kong citizens, the E.U. was virtually silent on the human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Indeed, some have suggested that the union and its member states fear that taking action against China would further sour trade relations. As a result, Uyghur activist Rishat Abbas has said “millions of Uyghurs are becoming collateral damage to international trade policies, enabling China to continue to threaten our freedoms around the world.”
The United States alone cannot prevent China’s human rights abuses. The rest of the nations backing the September 2019 U.N. statement, whether individually or as part of the European Union, must live up to their verbal denouncements. They must act by (1) levying sanctions against specific officials of the CCP to discourage the arbitrary detention of the Uyghur Muslim people and (2) codifying policies to restrict trade in Xinjiang to cripple China’s forced labor industry adjacent to the mass internment camps. Otherwise, posterity will be right to observe that the world looked on indifferently as China committed one of the worst human rights atrocities since World War II.
Kenneth Gatten III is a senior English major at Penn State University and writer of journalism and creative nonfiction. During his free time, you can find him quaffing a cortado and touring the local arboretum.