China's Uighur Genocide: Here's Everything You Need To Know About the CCP's Human Rights Abuses
Multiple reports confirm that the Communist Party of China is currently enacting an Uighur genocide.
Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority group native to China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, are being hauled off to labor camps and forced to undergo sterilization procedures in an effort to cull their population.
The many reports from various outlets that have covered the genocide provide significant evidence that these crimes are ongoing.
Here’s the evidence and everything you need to know about China’s Uighur genocide.
Defining Genocide
The U.N. Genocide Convention, to which the CCP is a signatory, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
These acts include:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
“(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
“(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
“(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
“(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
A July 15 article in Foreign Policy confirms that China is engaging in all of the above practices with its Uighur population.
“Any one of these categories constitutes genocide. The overwhelming evidence of the Chinese government’s deliberate and systematic campaign to destroy the Uighur people clearly meets each of these categories,” the report said.
“Over a million Turkic Uighurs are detained in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor factories in China. Detainees are subject to military-style discipline, thought transformation, and forced confessions. They are abused, tortured, raped, and even killed. Survivors report being subjected to electrocution, waterboarding, repeated beatings, stress positions, and injections of unknown substances.”
Labor Camps
Recently resurfaced drone footage originally released in September 2019 revealed large groups of blindfolded and bound men being herded into train cars by armed military personnel.
Uighurs sitting, bound and blindfolded, waiting to be loaded onto train cars and taken — somewhere.
Drone footage from an unknown hero in China.#Uighur pic.twitter.com/l9CTfyM2iT
— PariahDog1312?⚖️ (@PDog119) July 15, 2020
The prisoners shown in the drone footage were likely on their way to China’s many internment camps to forcibly partake in the Uighur genocide.
The existence of these camps was confirmed by a January report from The New York Times revealing how men, women and children of the Uighur community have been forced into labor camps.
Another Times report published Sunday revealed that Chinese companies are using forced labor to produce protective face masks being sold in the United States and other countries.
Face masks aren’t the only products produced in Uighur labor camps that have reach American shores.
On July 1, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that agents had seized beauty products that were made with real human hair.
Noticeably, the Uighur prisoners in the resurfaced drone footage all had shaved heads.
CBP detained a shipment of nearly 13 tons of hair products suspected of being produced by forced labor. The shipment, originating in Xinjiang, China, was detained in accordance with a Withhold Release Order. ➡️ https://t.co/QwWHLusKDf pic.twitter.com/zRDndtgAIE
— CBP (@CBP) July 2, 2020
The CBP added the company responsible, Lop County Meixin Hair Product Co. Ltd, to a detention orders list meant for organizations committing human rights abuses in the making of their products.
“The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation,” Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of the CBP Office of Trade, said in a statement following the seizure of the products.
“And the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains.”
Re-education
Additionally, leaked Chinese government documents sent to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — an organization partnered with BBC Panorama and The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. — detail the many methods used by Chinese re-education camps, according to the BBC.
A memo included in the government documents include orders to “never allow escapes,” “increase discipline and punishment of behavioral violations,” “promote repentance and confession,” “make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority” and “encourage students to truly transform and [ensure] full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blindspots.”
“It is very difficult to view that as anything other than a mass brainwashing scheme designed and directed at an entire ethnic community,” said Ben Emmerson, a human rights lawyer and adviser to the World Uighur Congress.
“It’s a total transformation that is designed specifically to wipe the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group off the face of the Earth.”
Forced Sterilization
Adrian Zenz, one of the world’s leading scholars on the CCP’s oppressive Uighur policies, analyzed the human rights abuses being enacted by the CCP in a report for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based research institute, titled “Sterilizations, Forced Abortions and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uighur Birthrates in Xinjiang.”
In a summary of the report’s major findings, Zenz confirmed the following about China’s Uighur genocide:
• “Natural population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically; growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in 2019.”
• “Government documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in ‘training’ camps. This confirms evidence from the leaked ‘Karakax List’ document, wherein such violations were the most common reason for internment.”
• “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions targeting 14 and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties that year.”
• “By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations), with actual shares likely being much higher.”
• “Shares of women aged 18 to 49 who were either widowed or in menopause have more than doubled since the onset of the internment campaign in one particular Uyghur region. These are potential proxy indicators for unnatural deaths (possibly of interned husbands), and/or of injections given in internment that can cause temporary or permanent loss of menstrual cycles.”
• “Between 2015 and 2018, about 860,000 ethnic Han residents left Xinjiang, while up to 2 million new residents were added to Xinjiang’s Han majority regions.”
Mysterious Population Declines
Various human rights organizations estimate between 1 million and 3 million Uighurs have been detained in the CCP’s various internment camps, the U.K.’s New Statesman reported.
While the CCP claims the majority of prisoners have been released from these camps unharmed, according to The Guardian, the Chinese government has offered no evidence to back that up.
In response to the CCP’s claims, Uighurs and their supporters sent out a flurry of tweets with the hashtag #Provethe90%,” referencing comments made by Xinjiang chairman Shohrat Zakir that “more than 90 percent” of those who “return to society … have work that they like and find suitable.”
China has failed to prove the existence of the 90 percent, leading observers to wonder if many of them are even alive.
U.S. State Department Response to the Uighur Genocide
The State Department confirmed in July that the Uighur genocide is real and perhaps “the worst crime” since the Nazis’ genocide of the Jewish people.
“This is one of the most disturbing stories in the world,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a tweet.
“I think when you look at what has happened to the Uyghur people, this is potentially the worst crime that we have seen since the Holocaust.”
The story of what has happened to the Uyghur people over the past few years is one of the most disturbing in the world— this is potentially one of the worst crimes that we have seen since the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/nD3sEOzrbN
— Morgan Ortagus (@statedeptspox) July 6, 2020
On July 9, the U.S. imposed sanctions on three senior officials of the CCP for their alleged human rights abuses and involvement in the Uighur genocide.
“The United States will not stand idly by as the Chinese Communist Party carries out human rights abuses targeting Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang, to include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, and attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.
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