China’s atrocities are not a calamity that might take place in the future. They’ve been underway for years now.
The people who have personally faced the Chinese Communist Party’s abuses say that the regime’s actions within its borders are an international threat. That’s the message that you’ll hear from leaders in the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, and it’s the same as the one that you’ll hear from Uyghurs.
Tursunay Ziawudun, the woman who underwent a horrific ordeal in the Xinjiang concentration camp system then bravely shared her story with the world, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday. Her testimony about the Party’s conduct should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that what’s taking place in the Western region of China will stay there.
In her remarks, Ziawudun painted a portrait of a modern mass atrocity that the Chinese authorities are perpetrating against a defenseless ethnic minority. “I don’t exactly understand why, but they truly seem to feel that we are terrifying. In the time when I was in the concentration camp, we had nothing on our persons. The police had weapons, and still, they treated us like we were terrifying.”
She continued, chillingly, to describe the stakes of what is taking place.
“It seems to me like they just want to get rid of us from the earth. I don’t understand. But this really is a threat to the whole world, and I think they are sending this threat to the world through what they are doing to the Uyghurs.”
The mass atrocities targeted at Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples there already have long-held global implications, as the Party has shown a willingness to chase former concentration-camp detainees around the world.
After Ziawudun shared her story with the international media, she says, the Chinese government responded with a vicious attempt at character assassination. “The Chinese government reacted by smearing me and the other survivors who testified about sexual abuse, even a culture of rape in the camps. At a press conference in Beijing, the foreign ministry spokesman held up my photo and called me a liar.”
Ziawudun’s comments didn’t encapsulate the full measure of cruelty exhibited by the Party’s propaganda campaign to discredit her and other Uyghur women. During a different press conference that followed the BBC story on Ziawudun’s experience in the camps, Chinese officials “disclosed what they say is private medical data and information on the women’s fertility, and accused some of having affairs and one of having a sexually transmitted disease,” according to a Reuters report on the event.
At another point, the piece quotes a Xinjiang official’s comments about a Uyghur individual who had spoken up. “Everyone knows about her inferior character. She’s lazy and likes comfort, her private life is chaotic, her neighbors say that she committed adultery while in China.”
It’s a relentless, ongoing campaign that has targeted a number of the Uyghur women who have spoken out about China’s abuses. Meanwhile, Chinese officials have more quietly harassed Uyghurs who live abroad through phone calls and text messages that use these individuals’ relatives in Xinjiang as hostages. Facing an impossible choice between remaining silent to potentially protect their family members and going public with these threats, an increasing number of Uyghurs have chosen the latter.
“I want to emphasize that genocide denial is in full swing,” Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American lawyer who sits on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, said during his testimony at the hearing. “The Chinese government is not only implementing a brutal policy of state violence, causing immeasurable human suffering. It is also demanding that the world praise its policy.”
Experts told Reuters that the tactics employed by the foreign ministry could be a sign that Beijing fears that it is losing the fight in the public eye. The Chinese government first denied the existence of the camps, before admitting that they exist but that they are merely vocational-training facilities.
Indeed, since the U.S. State Department recognized the Uyghur genocide in January, and in the weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly endorsed the Trump-era policy determination, the parliaments of Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.K. recognized the atrocities as such as well. Still, 64 countries at the U.N. Human Rights Council signed onto a letter in March praising China’s actions in Xinjiang. The parliament of New Zealand this week watered down its own Uyghur-genocide resolution, passing unanimously a motion that recognizes “severe human-rights abuses” but not genocide.
China also won election to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women last month. Out of the 53 countries on the Economic and Social Council that voted in the election, 48 voted for China, which means that at least nine of the Western democracies on the council supported Beijing’s bid. The State Department has called it “troubling” that countries with terrible women’s-rights records won election to the Council, though it has not outright condemned China’s election to the body.
The Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council, which include the United States and China, are known to have a “gentleman’s agreement” vote-dealing arrangement according to which they support each other’s bids for election to U.N. bodies.
Ziawudun’s story yesterday found a sympathetic audience in Congress, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears elsewhere. What most people haven’t yet internalized is that the atrocities are not a calamity that might take place in the future. They’ve been under way for years now, and the party-state has faced an almost negligible price for its actions.