Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has worked hard to slaughter the 12 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, one at a time, in an industrial-scale genocide. Their limitless cruelty ranges from enslavement in factories and cotton fields to indefinite detainment, forced sterilization, and torture of at least a million Uyghurs within concentration camps. A November 2021 report from the United States Holocaust Museum stated that “Survivors have reported being beaten, whipped with cables, hung from ceilings and walls, stomped, forced into stress positions, placed in solitary confinement, subjected to electric shocks and prolonged shackling, forcibly deprived of sleep for extended periods, and deprived of food.” Those that have survived these horrors continue to carry and relive their trauma after their escape. One such survivor says she was beaten with electrics batons and iron bars and raped on two occasions by three men. “I remember it very clearly,” she said. “I can’t cry and I can’t die … my soul and heart are dead.”
She is tragically only one of the many victims of the CCP’s sadistic practices. Around 2016, the population of Uyghurs began to decline, and between 2015 and 2018 the populations of Kashgar and Hotan – largely Uyghur inhabited areas – dropped by 84%. Other nations’ governments and human rights groups were rightly alarmed, suspecting that China was guilty of genocide. Their investigations revealed that the rapid population decrease was largely due to the Chinese government’s mass sterilization and forcible IUD implanting in Uyghur women. According to Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, documents found in 2018 reported that “Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations), with actual shares likely being much higher.” They have been largely successful in their genocidal aims. Xinjiang saw over 60 percent increase in IUD implants between 2014 and 2018, and while China maintains that the implants are voluntary, the idea that so many more women spontaneously decided to get sterilized seems ludicrous. This trend has continued since then, with Xinjiang experiencing another 24% decline in 2019.
Those who dissent against these genocidal policies (and many, many more who do not) are taken away to any of the 380 compounds that have been constructed to support the so–called political education of Xinjiang’s inhabitants. Inside the secretive containment centers, over a million Uyghurs have been detained without a trial, and they are denied their basic human rights. They are forced to renounce their religious beliefs, and any others which may conflict with Communist values, to learn Mandarin, and to swear allegiance to the CCP. Newlyweds are often split up, with one spouse being taken away to a prison camp and the other left behind. Uyghur women have also suffered forced abortions and forced sterilization via injection, and one woman said she was kicked repeatedly kicked in the stomach and given injections, and now cannot get pregnant. Other survivors have come forward with stories of sexual assault, rape, and physical and psychological torture that they suffered within the camps. Besides their brutality, the horrors which the Uyghurs undergo in these camps share the ultimate goal of stripping them of anything to which they might be more loyal to than the state, such as religion or family, and forcing them to conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s ideals. Indoctrination and torture are not the ultimate goal of the CCP – they will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete eradication of the Uyghurs. In the face of these outrages, the Chinese government continues to avow its innocence.
It is appalling to witness how lightly the plight of the Uyghurs has been ignored in the West. Many luxury brands such as Gucci continue to use slave-picked cotton sourced from Xinjiang to create the latest fashion designs. On the political front, there has been little more than token gestures of condemnation, with no real efforts being made to assist the Uyghurs. Both the Trump and Biden administrations did condemn China’s crimes as genocide, but sanctions and visa restrictions were the only real actions taken. Meanwhile, tech corporations like Microsoft, who are alway quick to pay lip-service to the fight for racial equality, also continue to profit from the enslaved Uyghurs who work in their factories. Other brands, such as Nike, have gone so far as to denounce the Chinese government for their human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Nike’s actions fail to reflect their denouncements — they continued to sell their products all over China. It would appear that the strength of their convictions is inversely proportional to their chances of making a dollar, since they are supplied by shoe factories which employ Uyghur slave labor. Their loyalty to the bottom line above all is mirrored by celebrities such as LeBron James, who clamors loudly for social justice in America but directly contributes to human rights abuses by maintaining his 32 million dollar brand deal with Nike.
The crowning insult was the diplomatic boycott of the Genocide Games (also known as the Beijing Winter Olympics). Rather than withdrawing US athletes from the Genocide Games altogether, which would have been a serious condemnation of China’s crimes, the Biden administration merely ordered a diplomatic boycott, an unimportant measure meaning the US delegation won’t be featured in photos from the opening and closing ceremonies. Their limp-wristed response is almost worse than none at all. It shows that the Biden administration is aware of the CCP’s torture, slavery, and genocide of the Uyghur people, but they simply don’t care enough about preventing the genocide to take real action.
The world’s apathy to the Uyghur genocide is inexcusable. The atrocities of the Uyghur genocide, especially the use of torture and concentration camps, make the nightmare unavoidably clear: the CCP is doing to the Uyghurs as the Nazis did to the Jews. The U.N.’s re-affirmation of the “Never Again” vow which followed the Holocaust means nothing if the world allows the same horrors to proceed unpunished today. Lawmakers and influential figures in the West need to prioritize basic morals over personal profit and issue unequivocal condemnations of China’s human rights abuses. We must do everything we can to prevent the CCP from completing the Uyghur genocide.