Several close U.S. allies are split over China’s repression of Uyghur Muslims as President Biden reviews his predecessor’s last-minute determination to call their treatment “genocide.”
“A lot of our friends are probably aware that they’re gonna have to make some tough decisions on this issue,” American Enterprise Institute research fellow Zack Cooper said. “But until we sit down with them and explain now what the plan is, they’re going to be pretty hesitant out there on their own with some big announcements.”
That unease has been on display among U.S. allies. Australian senators spiked a resolution this week that accused the Chinese Communist regime of committing the “crime of genocide.” Canadian lawmakers passed a similar denunciation last month, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his top lieutenants skipped the vote. British officials have condemned the “industrial scale” abuses, but London likewise has not invoked the “genocide” label — although China’s harassment of Uyghur Muslims has extended even to British shores.
“We are aware of reports of members of the Uighur diaspora – including in the UK – being harassed by the Chinese authorities in an effort to intimidate them into silence, force them to return to China, or co-opt them into providing information on other Uyghurs,” British lawmaker Nigel Adams, minister of state in the Foreign Office, said last week. “The Government regards such activity as unacceptable and has raised our concerns directly with the Chinese Embassy in London.”
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Those revelations come two years after Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio issued a report on Chinese government harassment operations in the United States. One activist in the United Kingdom told the Telegraph that British Uyghurs are bombarded by the Chinese government with demands for propaganda or espionage cooperation, in messages that contain ominous reminders that “your mother and other family members are still in China.”
Re-education camp survivors, in defiance of such threats, have revealed their experiences to lawmakers and journalists in Western countries. BBC journalists interviewed a Kazakh woman “who was detained for 18 months in the camp system, who said she was forced to strip Uighur women naked and handcuff them, before leaving them alone with Chinese men.” Another woman who was taken to the camp said that she endured gang rape on multiple occasions.
“While a number of Coalition and Labor members have self-styled themselves as ‘wolverines’ on the issue of China, today they have proved to be all huff and puff and nothing more when it came to calling out what is an immense crime against humanity,” independent Australian Sen. Rex Patrick said Monday after Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s allies united with opposition lawmakers to vote down his resolution.
Australian leaders will “continue to work closely with our key partners to advocate” on behalf of the Uyghurs, one of his opponents pledged. “Australia remains deeply concerned by reports of enforced disappearances, mass detentions, forced labour, pervasive surveillance of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang,” Sen. Jonathon Duniam maintained.
Morrison has adopted a very confrontational posture with China on other issues, but it has proven expensive, as Beijing used an array of punitive economic measures to retaliate. China’s status as the world’s second-largest economy might make a genocide label seem like a luxury that other governments can’t afford.
“Here’s the fundamental reality: China is not Rwanda,” the Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng, a senior researcher in the Asian Studies Center, said in reference to the African nation where militias massacred approximately 800,000 people over 100 days in 1994. “China is the No. 2 [economy] in the world, has nuclear weapons, has lots of ties to lots of countries, provides a huge amount of aid and/or investment … so it’s going to be a lot harder for people to say, ‘Yes, you are committing genocide’ because there are way bigger consequences.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken endorsed outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s genocide determination during his own nomination hearing, but his team has avoided making reference to the genocide in the present tense. Still, Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan are expected to deliver a “very frank” criticism of China’s human rights record during their meeting in Alaska this week with Chinese officials.
“This is an important opportunity for us to lay out, in very frank terms, many concerns that we have with Beijing’s actions and behavior that are challenging the security, prosperity, the values of the United States, and our partners and allies,” Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. “This is an opportunity to put on the table concerns [that we have] and to hear theirs.”
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U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, speaking to lawmakers during her own nomination hearing, told lawmakers that State Department officials were reviewing the genocide determination for any technical flaws. That process could give Blinken the space to coordinate a multilateral response.
“When the Trump team did this, they didn’t have anyone else on board, internationally,” Cooper said. “It may be that the Biden team wants to make this decision and try and get other allies and partners on board. That would certainly take some time.”
