Washington DC Dec 18 : United States unleashed volley of actions to censure China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority, with lawmakers voting to curb trade and issuing new sanctions on Beijing.
This is the latest step against the world’s top consumer drone maker over human rights abuses.
The United States has ramped up pressure on China, with President Joe Biden’s administration a day earlier targeting producers of painkillers that contributed to America’s addiction crisis.
The US Senate unanimously voted to make the United States the first country to ban virtually all imports from China’s Xinjiang region over forced labour concerns.
“We know it’s happening at an alarming, horrific rate with the genocide that we now witness being carried out,” said Senator Marco Rubio, a driver behind the act, which has already passed the House of Representatives, and which the White House says Biden will sign.
However, China denies all such allegations and says that Xinjiang is strictly an internal matter on which it will brook no interference by other countries.
Who are the Uyghurs?
According to official Chinese data, more than 12 million ethnic Uyghurs live in the country’s northwestern Xinjiang province, making up less than half of its population. Known officially as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, it is the country’s largest region, accounting for a sixth of China’s total territory.
Mostly followers of the Islamic faith, Uyghurs are racially and culturally different from the Han Chinese that make up the overwhelming majority of China’s population. Closer ethnically to the Central Asian communities, the Uyghurs have their own separate language, similar to Turkish.
What are the allegations against China?
The act, which has unsettled some US businesses, bans the import of all goods from the region unless companies offer verifiable proof that production did not involve slavery.
Xinjiang is a major source of cotton, with an estimated 20 percent of the garments imported each year into the United States including some material from the region.
Rights experts, witnesses and the US government say more than one million Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims are incarcerated in camps in an effort to root out their Islamic cultural traditions and forcibly homogenise them into China’s Han majority.
Beijing describes the sites as vocational training centers and says that, like many Western nations, it is seeking to reduce the allure of radical Islam following deadly attacks.
The United States has described the campaign as genocide and, along with Australia, Britain and Canada, has planned a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games next year over the issue.
China has long been wary of its ethnic minorities, suspecting them of harbouring separatist and extremist tendencies. Though Tibet and Xinjiang are “autonomous” regions within China, implying that they are meant to be self-governing, the Chinese state is seen to govern these with a strong hand, subjecting the minorities to close surveillance and scrutiny.
Beijing is accused of pursuing a policy of resettlement by way of incentivising ethnic Chinese to move to these regions so as to further marginalise the ethnic communities living there.