A bipartisan group of senators wants the Trump administration to punish China’s repression of an ethnic Muslim minority and has introduced legislation to impose new sanctions on Chinese officials.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., led 15 other senators on a bill to sanction Chinese Communist Party officials responsible for human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The bill also directs the administration to report more fully on China’s repression and take steps to protect Uighur Muslims in the United States from Chinese harassment.
“The United States must hold accountable officials in the Chinese government and Communist Party responsible for gross violations of human rights and possible crimes against humanity, including the internment in ‘political re-education’ camps of as many as a million Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim minorities,” Rubio, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said Wednesday.
China has drawn international criticism for establishing camps for what they call “de-extremization education” targeting the Uighur Muslims who populate Xinjiang. “The relevant practices in China are no different from those in the U.K., France, and the U.S.,” Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters last month. “We oppose double standards on counterterrorism.”
U.S. officials describe them not as counterterrorism efforts, but an attempt to mandate cultural and ideological homogeneity in China under dictatorial President Xi Jinping’s regime.
“To guarantee that this suppression continues beyond the internment camps into the daily lives of all Uighurs, Chinese authorities have constructed a highly intrusive, high-tech surveillance system in Xinjiang, which many experts fear will be extended throughout China,” Ambassador Kelley Currie, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said during a congressional hearing in July.
The newly introduced Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act would encourage Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to impose sanctions on the Communist Party officials responsible for the abuse. They want “a report by the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media regarding efforts to intimidate Radio Free Asia (RFA) employees, the status and reach of U.S. broadcasting to Xinjiang, and analysis of disinformation propaganda by the PRC targeting Uyghur communities globally.”
It would also direct the State Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community to compile various reports on the scope and significance of the Uighur abuse, as well as the ways by which Chinese authorities target American residents related to the Uighurs.
“The situation in Xinjiang and China’s treatment of its Uighur minority is beyond abhorrent and shines a light of China’s surveillance state tactics that threaten basic human dignity,” Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday. “The president needs to have a clear and consistent approach to China and not turn a blind eye as a million Muslims are unjustly imprisoned and forced into labor camps by an autocratic regime.”
