Uighur Genocide - Western Reaction

By 2023, following a campaign the United States had labeled genocide, the Chinese Communist Party had practically eliminated any public practice of Islam in Xinjiang that it did not directly supervise. It then began working out the kinks in a new version of Islam which it hopes will bind Chinese Muslims, including Uyghur Muslims, even closer to the state.

The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.

Under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, " genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such ... Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group...."

Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps since early 2017. Chinese officials have said the camps are centers for “vocational training,” but detainees are mostly held against their will in cramped and unsanitary conditions, where they are forced to endure inhumane treatment and political indoctrination.

Hennes & Mauritz AB faced ire in early 2021 after a statement it made expressing concern over reports of forced labor in Xinjiang resurfaced. Its Chinese outlets disappeared from Apple and Baidu Maps searches, and some stores in smaller cities were closed by landlords. The company’s name and products can no longer be found on major Chinese e-commerce platforms including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao and Tmall. Online sales of Adidas AG and Nike Inc. also plunged in the country in April after their comments on the Xinjiang issue drew them into the boycott.

The Trump administration determined that China committed "genocide and crimes against humanity" by repressing Uighur Muslims in its Xinjiang region, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on 19 January 2021, in an embarrassing blow to Beijing just before President Joe Biden took office. Pompeo said he made the move, which is certain to further strain already frayed ties between the world's top economies, "after careful examination of the available facts," accusing the Chinese Communist Party of crimes against humanity targeting the Uighurs. "I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state," Pompeo said in a statement. The rare American determination followed intensive internal debate after Congress passed legislation on 27 December 2020 requiring the US administration to determine within 90 days whether China had committed crimes against humanity or a genocide.

Unlike many decisions by Pompeo seen as boxing in Joe Biden, the incoming president had called for more pressure on China on human rights with his campaign last year using the term genocide. Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a confirmation hearing on 19 January 2021 he agreed with the genocide declaration. Biden's Democratic campaign had declared, before the November 3 US election, that genocide was occurring in Xinjiang. "I think we're very much in agreement," Blinken said. "The forcing of men, women and children into concentration camps; trying to, in effect, re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide."

Omer Kanat, executive director of the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, hoped that the genocide determination would lead to further steps such as a boycott of next year's Beijing Winter Olympics. "The implications are enormous. It's unthinkable to continue 'business as usual' with a state committing genocide and crimes against humanity," he said in a statement. The Trump administration has already taken a number of steps to pressure China over its treatment of the Uighurs, including blocking all imports of cotton from Xinjiang -- one of the major global producers of yarn used in textile manufacturing.

China had possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, a bipartisan commission of the United States Congress said in a report 14 January 2021. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) said on Thursday that new evidence had emerged in the past year that “crimes against humanity – and possibly genocide – are occurring”. The CECC report called for a formal US “determination on whether atrocities are being committed” in Xinjiang, and such a determination is required within 90 days of US legislation passed on 27 December 2020.

CECC co-chair, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern, called China’s actions to crush human rights in the past year “shocking and unprecedented” and urged Congress and the incoming Biden administration to hold Beijing accountable. “The United States must continue to stand with the people of China in their struggle and lead the world in a united and coordinated response to the human rights abuses of the Chinese government,” he said.