Administration officials say President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau want to “closely align” their respective China policies, a pledge that will test their ability to confront Beijing’s human rights abuses while convincing the regime to help mitigate climate change.
Climate change stands as a top foreign policy priority for both Biden and Trudeau, who agree that China looms large over any international effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, Beijing has threatened to withhold that desired cooperation on climate change if Western leaders attempt to “undermine China's interests,” putting those green initiatives on a collision course with intensifying anger over atrocious treatment of Uighur Muslims.
“We believe that we can have those conversations,” a senior administration official told reporters ahead of a Tuesday virtual meeting between the two leaders. “The United States is not going to subsume its defense of democracy and human rights to pursue climate goals.”
“We believe that we can have a conversation about the urgent and pressing need to address climate change — it’s in everybody’s interest; it’s in China’s interest — but at the same time have a very candid conversation about our concerns, and, frankly, to seek to closely align our approaches to China,” the senior administration official said. “This includes dealing with its coercive and unfair economic practices, national security challenges, and … the human rights abuses.”
Chinese officials insist that is not true.
“China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in January. “That said … no one should imagine they could ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global affairs when they blatantly interfere in China's domestic affairs and undermine China's interests.”
'YOUR GOD IS XI JINPING': UIGHURS MOCKED AND TORTURED IN CHINESE INTERNMENT CAMPS FOR THEIR FAITH
Canadian lawmakers passed a nonbinding resolution Monday that denounces China’s repression of the Uighurs as a genocide, but Trudeau and top lieutenants skipped the 266-0 vote, and the prime minister is hesitant to use that term.
“When it comes to the application of the very specific word genocide, we simply need to ensure that all the I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed before a determination like that is made,” Trudeau said last week.
Beijing defends the mass detention camps in Xinjiang as a counterterrorism program, but survivors and Uighur activists have described a program of “modern-day slavery” and the “mass rape” of Uighur women.
"No one should be subjected to such cruelty,” Kalbinur Tursun, a Uighur woman who said she was forcibly sterilized in 2019, told Canadian reporters before the Monday vote.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has endorsed outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last-minute decision to label the repression a genocide, but the legal determination is nonetheless under review at the State Department.
Other Western powers also have stopped short of using the genocide terminology, though recent revelations about the extent of the sexual violence perpetrated in the re-education camps — "They don't only rape but also bite all over your body, you don't know if they are human or animal," a survivor recently told the BBC — has spurred condemnations of Beijing in Western diplomatic circles.
“The reported abuses, which include torture, forced labor, and forced sterilization of women, are extreme, and they are extensive,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday. “They are taking place on an industrial scale. It must be our collective duty to ensure this does not go unanswered.”
Trudeau has acknowledged the “tremendous human rights abuses coming out of Xinjiang,” the region where most Uighurs live, but he wants to avoid a solitary confrontation with China.
“Moving forward multilaterally will be the best way to demonstrate the solidarity of Western democracies … that are extremely concerned and dismayed by reports of what’s going on in Xinjiang,” he said last week.
Trudeau is embroiled already in a separate human rights controversy with China, stemming from the communist regime’s seizure of two Canadian citizens. The detention of the two men, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, is an apparent effort by Chinese officials to pressure Canada to free a senior Huawei executive who is fighting extradition to the U.S., where she faces criminal charges.
Canadian officials orchestrated an initiative last week to condemn the “arbitrary arrest, detention, or sentencing to exercise leverage over foreign governments,” a diplomatic maneuver implicitly aimed at drawing democratic allies into a network to condemn China’s hostage diplomacy tactics.
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“It’s time to send a clear message to every government that arbitrarily detains foreign nationals and tries to use them as leverage: This will not be tolerated by the international community,” Blinken said last week. “The fact that so many countries are endorsing this declaration is a sign of its strength.”
