State Department officials compared China to Nazi Germany on Wednesday, saying the Communist nation “is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
“China intensified its campaign of detaining Muslim minority groups at record levels” last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a briefing on the release of the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
China has been brutally repressing Uighurs and other Muslims, forcing them into re-education camps reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The regime has made a police state of the minorities’ home of Xinjiang, a northwest region that’s a significant trade corridor for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“You haven’t seen things like this since the 1930s,” Ambassador Michael Kozak of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor told reporters. “Of rounding up — some estimations are in the millions of people — and then putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. It’s just remarkably awful.”
And it’s not just the Uighurs, Pompeo noted.
“The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans, and anyone who espouses different views from those of government or advocates change in government,” he said. China “is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told the Communist legislature at its annual meeting earlier this month that the regime must continue to “uphold the sinicization of religion in China.”
Sam Brownback, Pompeo’s top lieutenant for religious liberty, was in Hong Kong and Taiwan that same week to rebuke Beijing’s “war on faith.” Chinese officials dismissed Brownback’s criticism, with foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang saying Monday, “The Chinese side consistently opposes the U.S. side cooking up or using the so-called religious issues to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”
But international pressure is having at least some effect on China, the State Department suggested Wednesday.
“The Chinese government was denying that there were any camps or that anything was going on. Now they’re saying, ‘Well, there are camps, but they’re some kind of labor training camps, it’s all very voluntary,’ and so on,” Kozak said. “That does not match the facts that we and others are seeing. But at least I think we are starting to make them realize that there is a lot of international scrutiny on this. And none of it is good from their standpoint.”
The State Department has produced an annual report documenting the state of human rights in 200 countries since 1977. “We have told those who disgrace the concept of human dignity they will pay a price, that their abuses will be meticulously documented and then publicized,” Pompeo said at the release. “Even some of our friends, allies, and partners around the world have human rights violations. We document those reports with equal force.”
