President Trump should impose sanctions on senior Chinese officials, according a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., have a list of names for the administration to sanction for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, a province populated by a religious and ethnic minority that faces some of the most aggressive and high-tech repression in the world. Re-education camps and surveillance characterize an attempt to consolidate cultural homogeneity in a region where a lack of control could interfere with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s economic plans for Central Asia.
“Given the gravity of the situation, and the severity and scope of the rights abuses being perpetrated, we urge you to apply global Magnitsky sanctions, and consider additional measures, against senior Chinese government and Communist Party officials who oversee these repressive policies, including XUAR Party Secretary Chen Quanguo,” Rubio and Smith wrote.
Such designations would invite a direct diplomatic clash with China, in the midst of high-stakes trade talks and frustration over a lack of cooperation in confronting the North Korean nuclear crisis. Rubio and Smith drafted the letter, which is addressed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, after co-chairing a hearing of the Congressional China Executive Commission in July. Ambassador Kelley Currie testified that “hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Uighur citizens … have disappeared into state custody,” and “possibly millions” of people have been put into detention camps.
“The stated goal of the current campaign is to ‘Sinicize religion’ and ‘adapt religion to a socialist society,’ suggesting that Beijing wagers that it now possesses the political, diplomatic, and technological capabilities to transform religion and ethnicity in Chinese society in a way that its predecessors never could, even during the peak horrors of the Cultural Revolution and other heinous Maoist campaigns intended to remake Chinese society,” Currie, the second-ranked U.S. diplomat at the United Nations, told the lawmakers.
That repression affects U.S. national security interests in two ways, independent of American opposition to human rights abuses. For one thing, Xinjiang is “hub and heart” of Xi’s plan to expand China’s influence at the western end of its vaunted Belt and Road Initiative.
“The province is intended to connect Central Asia, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Siberia to the densely industrialized Chinese heartland,” as Bloomberg columnist Mihir Sharma noted.
Internal control is also a precondition for outward aggression, lawmakers believe. “I mean, one of the reasons why China has been able to turn its focus outward onto the blue seas and challenge us inside the first island chain and in the South China Sea is that they’ve gained they’ve gained greater control over their internal borders, especially Xinjiang and Tibet,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Currie.
Cotton was one of the 17 lawmakers to sign Rubio and Smith’s letter, a group that includes New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and New York Rep. Eliot Engel — the top foreign policy Democrats in the House and Senate.
“We believe that targeted sanctions will have an impact,” they wrote. “At a time when the Chinese government is seeking to expand its influence through the Belt and Road Initiative, the last thing China’s leaders want is international condemnation of their poor and abusive treatment of ethnic and religious minorities.”
