Dharamshala, 19th December: The US has launched a barrage of moves to condemn China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority, with legislators moving to stifle trade and imposing additional penalties on the Chinese government. The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to make the US the first country to prohibit practically all imports from China’s Xinjiang region due to worries about forced labor. China, on the other hand, dismisses all such charges, claiming that Xinjiang is purely a domestic issue with which it will not tolerate foreign intervention.
“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 driving force behind the bill, which has already cleared the House of Representatives and is expected to be signed by Vice President Joe Biden, according to the White House.
The act, which has alarmed some US firms, prohibits the import of all items from the region unless corporations provide verifiable confirmation that no slaves were used in the manufacturing process. Xinjiang is a key supply of cotton, with the province accounting for approximately 20% of all clothes imported into the United States each year.
More than one million Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims are detained in camps, according to rights experts, witnesses, and the US government, in an effort to eradicate their Islamic cultural traditions and forcefully homogenize them into China’s Han majority.
Beijing refers to the locations as vocational training institutes and claims that, like many Western countries, it is trying to limit the appeal of radical Islam in the aftermath of deadly attacks. The US has condemned the effort as genocide and has announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games next year, along with Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
China has traditionally been suspicious of ethnic minorities, believing that they harbor separatist and radical impulses. Despite the fact that Tibet and Xinjiang are designated as “autonomous” regions inside China, meaning that they are self-governing, the Chinese state is perceived as controlling them with a heavy hand, subjecting minorities to constant surveillance and examination. Beijing is accused of implementing a resettlement scheme in order to entice ethnic Chinese to relocate to these areas, further marginalizing the ethnic populations already present.