How the Chinese Communist Party Has Botched Its Xinjiang Coverup

Shocking drone video footage of blindfolded Uighur prisoners being herded onto trains went viral this past week. The clip, which originally surfaced in September 2019 and which analysts confirmed was filmed in China’s Xinjiang region, has elicited comparisons to the Holocaust and calls to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Similarly eerie incidents abound. On July 1, 2020, U.S. customs agents seized a 13-ton shipment of beauty products made of human hair that originated in Xinjiang. As evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s conduct increasingly seems to meet the criteria for genocide set out in the Genocide Convention, CCP officials have attempted to deny clear-cut evidence, such as this video, in one case going as far as threatening to sue researchers. However, in an international environment increasingly wary of Beijing’s ambitions, this is a self-defeating strategy that has only galvanized international action.

While the U.S. government has spoken out against the “political re-education” camps in Xinjiang for a couple of years — imposing some visa restrictions in 2019 — and although knowledge of the camps has been commonplace outside of China for three years, minimal concrete action followed. But the tide started to shift this summer, as Beijing subjected itself to increased scrutiny with an increasingly assertive coronavirus-era grand strategy. The U.N.’s human-rights mechanisms started to turn its attention to China — a group of independent experts penned a letter calling for “renewed attention” to be directed to the situation in Xinjiang. A few days later, a top China scholar published a groundbreaking report showing that Uighur birthrates have plummeted in the past year — the result of government policy of forcibly administering birth control to Uighur women, in addition to injecting some with unknown substances that seem to have resulted in sterilization. Many observers have already applied the term “cultural genocide” to the situation in Xinjiang, but the June report added heft to the case for dropping that qualifier. The images circulating this week will add momentum to that push.