Local Communist Party officials in Xinjiang, China — where the government has established a network of concentration camps imprisoning as many as 2 million members of local ethnic minorities — invited members of President Joe Biden’s administration to visit the region Monday.
Most of those imprisoned in concentration camps are members of the local Uyghur ethnic minority, the majority of whom are Muslims. Joining them are members of other ethnic minorities such as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz people, forced into the camps to engage in slave labor and indoctrination. There, they endure extreme torture, rape, and forced sterilization, according to survivors. Shortly before departing his post, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to the widespread sterilization and disappearance of Uyghur people in Xinjiang as a “genocide.”
Pompeo’s successor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, agreed during his confirmation hearing that the situation in Xinjiang is a genocide. Blinken has also publicly praised Trump’s overall policies against the Chinese Communist Party.
The agreement between the two otherwise contentious camps prompted an outraged response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which adamantly denied, once again, that its abuses and extermination of Uyghur people amounted to genocide.
On Monday, local officials in Xinjiang offered to give Biden administration officials a guided tour under the auspices of the Communist Party to prove that no genocide was ongoing in the region.
“We welcome people from all fields around the world, including officials from the new US administration, to visit Xinjiang to learn what is really happening there and avoid being fooled by Pompeo’s lies,” China’s state-run Global Times newspaper quoted Xu Guixiang, a deputy director-general of the publicity department of the Xinjiang Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), as saying.
Xu also claimed China would “welcome foreign reporters to visit Xinjiang at any time,” but added that the invitation did not apply to “any so-called investigation with a presumption of guilt.” He added that Pompeo’s declaration China is committing genocide in Xinjiang was “a piece of waste paper,” suggesting Pompeo would not be an acceptable envoy for the Biden administration to send on a visit.
Human rights investigators believe China began building its concentration camps for Uyghurs between 2017 and 2018, and as many as 3 million people have passed through them since then. The Chinese Communist Party has not denied that the camps exists, but refers to them as “vocational training centers” and it claims that prisoners are recruited there to learn trade skills they can use to live fulfilling lives. The camps, the Party claims, are necessary to keep wayward Muslims from joining jihadist groups.
In late 2019, Chinese officials announced that the population of the camps had declined significantly because the prisoners had “graduated” from their “vocational training.” Less than a year later, a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) revealed that Beijing had begun selling Uyghur people as slaves to factories nationwide, introducing slave labor to facilities manufacturing products for at least 82 international companies, including U.S. staples like Nike and Apple.
Chinese officials deny that any slavery is taking place in Xinjiang or elsewhere in the country. To protect its public image, the Communist Party began offering tours to friendly journalists of Xinjiang in 2019, resulting in favorable coverage in friendly media.
Journalists attempting to reveal the true situation in Xinjiang have accused China of significantly limiting their access to daily life in the region.
“Basically, from the moment we arrive, we’re followed by at least one car. … You can see that the local handlers are trying hard to be professional. They are members of the propaganda department, so they’re PR professionals. They don’t want to make it appear like it’s so stifling,” Yanan Wang, an Associated Press journalist, detailed of a 2019 visit to Xinjiang. “They had all of these interesting tactics to work around the idea that they were trying to obstruct our reporting.”
Other journalists have lamented that authentic Uyghur sources in the region appeared to disappear as soon as Chinese officials discovered they were speaking with media.
China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The CPJ granted the ignominious title to China for both 2019 and 2020, taking it away from Turkey, which remains in second place.
The Chinese Communist Party has disparaged missing Uyghur people whose families abroad are advocating for them as criminals who found themselves behind bars for being a threat to society. Chinese state media has also accused the United States of an alleged genocide against its indigenous population when confronted with the reality of the Uyghur people.
Last week, in response to Blinken’s statement that he agreed with Pompeo’s genocide designation, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, repeatedly chanted “China has no genocide” in front of reporters, then accused Blinken of having “malicious purposes” in addressing the human rights catastrophe.
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