‘Indicative of Genocide’: CCP’s Abuses in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet Detailed by Tory Human Rights Commission

China's President Xi Jinping reviews a military honour guard during a welcome ceremony at
FRED DUFOUR/AFP via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “intensified an assault on all human rights” against every group and individual in China, Britain’s Conservative Party Human Rights Commission has alleged in a report, which claims to show evidence that the actions carried out by the regime are “indicative of the crime of genocide”.

In the report, The Darkness Deepens: The Crackdown on Human Rights in China 2016-2020 — an advance copy of which was seen by Breitbart London — the Commission detailed the stunning growth of authoritarianism in China carried out by the dictatorship in Beijing.

The report documented the implementation of mass surveillance systems, mass instances of modern-day slavery, torture, organ harvesting, the dismantling of promised freedoms in Hong Kong, and the crimes committed against ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang.

The Commission said that evidence shows that between one and three million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in concentration camps in the Western Chinese province of Xinjiang, known also as East Turkestan by the local inhabitants.

Evidence presented to the Commission demonstrated the “mass internment, forced labour, torture, mass surveillance, severe violations of freedom of religion or belief and forced sterilisation” in Xinjiang.

Dr Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University, told the Commission of a conversation she had with a Uyghur man in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, on July 18, 2018, who told her that “people are taken for small things, not necessarily always because of religious practice”.

The man said that he had never heard of anyone leaving the internment camps, with the exceptions of those who fell ill, saying: “Some people were given ‘medicine’ to change their thinking, ‘for their minds’. When this made them mentally ill, only then were they released.”

Two days prior to the conversation, a Han Chinese man — the dominant ethnic group of China — told Dr Smith Finley that “detainers are just there to have their thinking changed”.

One Uyghur woman who provided testimony to the Commission said that the CCP was attempting to “wipe out” three types of Uyghur: intellectuals, the rich, and the religious.

She said that 15 of her extended family members were interned in the camps for these reasons, including both of her parents, “for not cooperating with the Communist Party of China and for performing pilgrimage, being religious, being rich, and having more children”.

She said that one of her family members died as a result of the torture carried out by the communist regime.

“My youngest uncle has two children, and when he and his wife were taken away, the regime took his children away and put them in the children’s concentration camps,” the woman testified.

Speaking to the Commission, Dr Adrian Zenz said that by 2019, Xinjiang authorities had “planned to subject at least 80 per cent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilisation), with actual shares likely being much higher”.

Dr Zenz said that between 2015 and 2018, population growth rates fell by 84 per cent in the two largest Uyghur Muslim prefectures, with birth rates continuing to fall. He said that in 2020, one Uyghur region saw an “unprecedented near-zero population growth”.

“These findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” Dr Zenz said.

The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission added: “We believe that the CCP is committing mass atrocity crimes against the Uyghurs and others in [Xinjiang]… and that is evidence indicative of the crime of genocide.”

Religion as a whole has increasingly become a target of the communist regime, with Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) stating that “under Xi Jinping, there has been a new focus on religion at the highest levels of government”.

While the persecution of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang currently draws the most international attention, the CCP has systematically targetted Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners as well as Christians, of both Protestant and Catholic denominations.

CSW said that there has been a “fresh emphasis placed on the requirement that all religious communities in China ‘sinicise’ by becoming ‘Chinese in orientation’ and adapting to “socialist society” and to “bring all religious activities under state control”.

The China Aid Association said that the Chinese Communist Party “intends to bring Christianity under the full control of the government”.

“Both registered and unregistered Protestant churches have been individually and collectively penalised for peaceful religious activities,” the CSW said.

“Registered churches under the Three-Self Patriotic Movement have been forced to sing national and pro-Communist songs during services, to fly the national flag and remove religious images. Across the country, churches have had their crosses removed, and many report that under-18s are now banned from attending religious activities,” the Christian human rights group added.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide also told the Commission that so-called unregistered churches have been forcibly shut by the government, with their property confiscated by the state and their leaders have been subject to detention and even sentenced to prison terms.

Falun Gong, a spiritual Chinese religious movement in the Buddhist tradition, was outlawed by the CCP in 1999, with the government classifying the religion as an “evil cult”, prompting decades of persecution from the state.

“I have to make it very clear the Falun Gong is an evil cult,” then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the architect of the Tiananmen Square massacre, said in 2001.

The Falun Dafa Association UK told the Commission that while it is unknown how many Falun Gong practitioners have disappeared in the country, they believe the number is in the tens of thousands. The group said that many of the missing Falun Gong members are believed to have “met horrible deaths as a victim of state-run organ harvesting”.

The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience — known as the ‘China Tribunal’ — established by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, has estimated that there are between 60,000 to 90,000 organ transplants carried out per year in China.

The Tribunal noted that in 2017, there were only 5,146 eligible registered donors, representing an “incomprehensible gap” between the number of registered operations and the true number, meaning that it is likely the gap was filled by forced organ transplants.

While the Tribunal stopped short of accusing the regime of genocide, the report said the Tribunal “has no doubt whatsoever that physical acts have been carried out that are indicative of the crime of genocide”, specifically in the case of Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs.

Aside from being subjected to internment in concentration camps, torture, and forced organ harvesting, the Commission reports that Uyghurs have been used as modern-day slaves “on a massive scale” by the CCP.

The report cited a 2020 study from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which found that Uyghurs have been used as slave labour in factories that supply at least 83 well-known global brands. The ASPI estimated that between 2017 and 2019, alone, over 80,000 Uyghurs were shipped out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China.

In oral testimony provided to the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, the two authors of the Australian study, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu and Nathan Ruser, said that “it is a policy of the central government” to send Uyghurs to other provinces to work in factories.

They claimed that the government has embarked on a campaign that sees “tens of thousands of people pushed out of their homes every year and sent to eastern provinces to work in supply chains of international brands,” including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen.

The Uyghur workers are then allegedly forced to attend “Mandarin Chinese language classes and political indoctrination classes” and are monitored by guards in the factories who report daily on the “thoughts” of the Uyghurs and guard against spontaneous “mass instances”.

The Commission called on the British government to end all goods imported from China found to be using slave labour and to introduce sanctions on businesses found to be involved in the modern slave trade.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, the former leader of the Conservative Party, said: “The UK Government must lead the free world by sending a clear message that China must stop these abusive behaviours.”

The Commission also went onto accuse the Chinese Communist Party of committing a “grave violation” of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, the treaty between the CCP and the UK following the 1997 handover of the former British colony.

With the introduction of the draconian national security law, which the Commission noted was fast-tracked by the regime in Beijing without any scrutiny, debate, or accountability, the CCP has infringed on the basic rights and freedoms guaranteed to the city under the Joint Declaration.

The report claimed that in the brutal crackdown of the pro-democracy movement in the city, police brutality has become “persistent, widespread, systematic” and has been carried out with “impunity”.

The mass arrests against the pro-freedom movement have seen over 10,148 people in Hong Kong detained, with over 2,300 charged, according to the report.

In testimony provided to the Commission, The Democratic Party of Hong Kong alleged that “cases of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment were commonly seen during the protests” carried out by the Hong Kong Police Force.

The Progressive Lawyers Group also reported of “abuses committed against arrestees during police custody, including physical abuses (eg severe beatings resulting in hospitalisation), sexual assaults and obstruction of legal access”.

Professor Victoria Tin-bor Hui, an associate professor in political science at the University of Notre Dame, said that the arrest of the founder of the Democratic Party, Martin Lee, alongside 14 other in April of last year “should send the unmistakable signal that Beijing is reaching the end goal of its version of ‘one country, two systems’ — capitalism without freedom — on Hong Kong”.

The Commission noted that while the world has increasingly focussed on the oppression carried out in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, “it is vital we do not forget Tibet“.

According to testimony submitted from the Tibet Post International, Tibet has fewer foreign journalists than in North Korea and Reporters Without Borders lists Tibet 176th out of 180 on its Press Freedom Index.

The report said that since 2016, the repression in Tibet has “continued and intensified”, resulting in the further detention of monks and nuns and severe restrictions on freedom of expression and belief as well as on other human rights.

“Every aspect of Tibetan life is under siege and Tibetans have even fewer civil and political rights than Chinese people also ruled by the Communist Party. The regime enforces its control over every aspect through the threat and use of arbitrary punishments, at times including severe violence. Any act deemed to threaten its rule becomes a criminal offence,” Tibet Post International told the Commission.

Professor Dibyesh Anand, the head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster and an expert on Tibet, said that organised protests have become impossible due to heavy surveillance, with “cameras observing every house”.

Anand said that as a result, self-immolations continue “because other gatherings are not allowed”. He noted, however, that news of ritual suicides is often suppressed and said that entire villages are punished as a result.

Since 2009, at least 155 Tibetans have self-immolated (set themselves on fire), according to Human Rights Watch.

Writing in the Spectator, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission and founder of Hong Kong Watch, Benedict Rogers, said that the Beijing dictatorship’s “development and deployment of mass surveillance technologies lie at the heart of its intensifying repression”.

“China’s technology companies are at the very centre of this operation,” Rogers added, with the report pointing to Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, which has been accused of being involved in the mass surveillance of Xinjiang.

Dr Yang Jianli of the NGO Initiatives for China told the Commission: “China’s weapons of mass surveillance have already shown its ability to exert absolute control of populations… The system uses cutting-edge technologies to control almost every aspect of people’s lives.”

In response to the report, the last Governor of Hong Kong and a former Chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Patten of Barnes, said it demonstrated a “terrifying view of the cruelty of Xi Jinping’s brutal regime”.

“To try to preserve its grip on power the Chinese Communist Party has assaulted any sign of dissent and has set about building a totalitarian surveillance state beyond George Orwell’s imaginings,” he said.

“The report demonstrates exactly why we must be on our guard in democracies to protect our freedoms and values,” Lord Patten concluded.

Tom Tugendhat MP, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said: “The use of abhorrent practices such as the imprisonment and torture of dissidents, mass surveillance, organ harvesting, and the use of slave labour shows the Chinese Communist Party for what it is.

“It is clear that the Golden Era is over and the UK, and our allies, need to rethink our relations with China’s dictatorship.”

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here: @KurtZindulka

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