WASHINGTON, D.C.— State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters yesterday in a press briefing that “in his confirmation hearings,” the “Secretary [of State Tony Blinken] has made clear that, in his judgment, genocide was committed against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.” (Relevant excerpts of the press briefing are included below and in the PDF at the bottom of this page and here.) When pressed whether the Secretary thought genocide was still being committed by the Chinese Communist Party against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the region historically known as East Turkistan, Price declined to do so. Instead, he declared that “We are closely evaluating, analyzing what may be going on in [sic] the ground in Xinjiang, elsewhere in China, elsewhere around the world.”
The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC, presentdangerchina.org) asks the obvious question: What has happened to raise any doubt whether what Secretary Blinken characterized – as did Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Deputy Treasury Secretary-designate Adewale Adeyemo in their respective confirmation hearings – as “genocide” continues to be genocidally occurring in Xinjiang now?
- Have the scores of concentration camps incarcerating, torturing, brainwashing and enslaving perhaps as many as 3 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Tajiks and other ethnic minorities been closed, with their prisoners liberated as with the Nazi death camps of the Third Reich?
- Have the women of East Turkistan ceased to be serially raped, compelled to share their beds with Han Chinese men while their husbands are imprisoned, forcibly sterilized and subjected to involuntary abortions?
- Have the Chinese factories using Muslim Uyghurs and others in the region and elsewhere in China to perform slave labor for, among others, U.S. companies like Apple and Nike been shut down?
There is no publicly available information to substantiate that any of such genocidal practices have ended. The only obvious thing that has occurred since Cabinet-level officials assured Senators they agreed that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in genocide is that President Biden had a two-hour phone call with the Party’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping. In the absence of a transcript of the call or a detailed read-out on its contents, we do not know exactly what was said by the two leaders.
What we do know, however, is that Mr. Biden publicly asserted afterwards that China had different “cultural norms” than we do in the West. The clear intent of that comment was to give the CCP a pass for its myriad and ongoing crimes against humanity, including its genocide in Xinjiang.
Another factor at work surely was the intense lobbying Wall Street unleashed on the Biden-Harris administration in recent weeks. The object was to avoid the problem an affirmation of the Trump designation of genocide would cause for U.S. financiers intent on continuing to underwrite the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese corporate human rights abusers with American public and private pension funds, mutual funds, Exchange Traded Funds, other index funds and retail investors’ money.
In short, the United States government has kowtowed to the Chinese Communist Party and its “old friends” in the U.S. capital markets and other American businesses who profit at the expense of the oppressed people of China and its Captive Nations – in addition to East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia and Tibet. The territory of Hong Kong must now be added to that list.
The CCP is certain to respond to such tangible evidence of submission from a President it has deeply compromised and his many subordinates who also have extensive ties to Beijing and/or alignment with its policy preferences. The Party’s response will surely be: intensified repression at home, including quite possibly the murder of large numbers of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang; heightened risks that the PRC will move violently to seize Taiwan; and intensified dangers for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Not least of the latter concerns is the prospect that, with Wall Street’s active help and connivance, millions more Americans will find themselves with a financial vested interest in keeping the CCP happy – a lobby that is already formidably opposed to holding the Chinese Communists to account, let alone decoupling from China.
The United States government – presumably led by bipartisan and veto-proof majorities on Capitol Hill – must swiftly repudiate any effort to back away from the accurate characterization of the CCP’s atrocities in Western China as genocide, a designation officially declared by the Trump administration and endorsed in sworn testimony by no fewer than three Biden Cabinet officers.
