Chinese officials are fuming about a unanimous vote in the British Parliament that accused Beijing this week of committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims.
“The accusation that there is genocide in Xinjiang is a monstrous lie fabricated by international anti-China forces,” Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Friday. “The U.K. has enough problems of its own. British lawmakers should manage their own business and do more practical things for their constituents.”
British lawmakers passed the resolution just weeks after Western powers unveiled a concert of sanctions targeting Chinese officials responsible for the sexual violence and other atrocities that have been described by Uyghur survivors of mass detention camps. China retaliated by imposing sanctions on numerous Western officials and analysts, including five British lawmakers, but that reaction failed to deter the latest condemnation in Parliament.
“Those sanctions were an attempt to silence and intimidate us, to prevent us from raising the growing evidence of the abuse faced by the Uyghurs,” Nusrat Ghani, the Conservative politician who led the debate Thursday, said in the House of Commons. “The fact that we are here today having this debate shows that the sanctions simply have not worked.”
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The resolution passed after Ghani and her allies argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang violate each of the five criteria for genocide articulated in international law. She anchored that accusation in Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s rhetoric and in regime data that documents the plunging birthrates in Xinjiang, the ancestral home of the Uyghur Muslims.
“I do not believe there is any other place on earth where women are being violated on this scale,” Ghani said. “Despite the region accounting for just 1.8% of China’s population, 80% of all birth control device insertions in China were performed in the Uyghur region. That explains why, in one of the regions, birth rates are down 84%. Even more chillingly, China no longer shares the data by ethnicity as it tries to scrub away the evidence. Time is running out for the Uyghur, especially the women.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lieutenants declined to cast a vote with respect to the resolution, as they have condemned the “industrial-scale” human rights abuses in Xinjiang, but his team maintained that the specific finding of “genocide” is a question for the courts to decide.
“The situation faced by Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang is truly harrowing,” British lawmaker Nigel Adams, the minister of state for Asia, said during the debate. “The U.K.’s long-standing position, like many countries around the world, is that determining whether a situation amounts to genocide or crimes against humanity is a matter for competent national and international courts after consideration of all the available evidence.”
Chinese officials echoed that line while condemning the resolution.
“No country, organization, or individual is qualified or entitled to determine arbitrarily that another country has committed ‘genocide,’” the Chinese Embassy in London said. “In international relations, no country should use this accusation in a political game of rumor-mongering and malicious manipulation.”
Ghani dismissed that argument, observing that China’s influence at the United Nations has given Beijing an effective veto over such remedies.
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“Every route to a court is blocked by China,” she said. “Men and women in this House, the mother of all parliaments, will do all we can to ensure that atrocities like the Holocaust can never again take place.”
