Sen. Marco Rubio, R. Fla., said Thursday the Chinese Communist Party’s “repressive” and “brutal” oppression against Muslim minorities is an “evil” that the U.S. needs to confront.
Rubio said in his Wall Street Journal op/ed that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is imposing “political re-education” that’s targeted at the Uyghur Muslim population, Kazakhs, and other ethnic Muslim minorities.
“Consider what one official reportedly said about the ‘political re-education’ campaign in Xinjiang: ‘You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all,'” Rubio wrote. “American leaders must find the political will to confront this evil.”
Although the residents of the targeted region of Xinjiang Uyghur only make up 1.5 percent of China’s population, 21 percent of the arrests in 2017 came from that area, not including those detained in re-education centers.
“China has detained as many as one million people in camps,” Rubio wrote. “While Chinese authorities deny that such camps exist, satellite images show the recent construction of massive structures in Xinjiang.”
Detainees in these camps are forced into daily brainwashing sessions filled with Communist Party propaganda, and experience torture, medical neglect, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and other abuses, he said.
