China denies the accusations, which are based on evidence including interviews with survivors and photos and satellite images from Uyghur’s home province of Xinjiang, a major hub for factories and farms in far western China.
The accusations also include draconian birth control policies, all-encompassing restrictions on people’s movement and forced labour.
“For a long time, some US politicians have repeatedly used Xinjiang-related issues to stir up rumours and engage in political manipulation under the pretext of human rights, in an attempt to tarnish China’s image and curb China’s development,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
The Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang were about “countering violence, terrorism, radicalisation and separatism,” the embassy spokesman insisted.
The early focus on the plight of Uyghurs by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is designed to show the Chinese government’s true nature, said Rep Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the committee’s Republican chairman.
“They are the first-hand witnesses to the systemic, unimaginable brutality, witnesses to the attempted elimination of a people, a culture, a civilisation,” Gallagher said Thursday.
Between one to two million members of China’s Uyghur minority have been held in mass internment centres, said Adrian Zenz, a researcher on the Xinjiang camps at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. More exact estimates are not possible, given China’s concealment, Zenz said.
Expert witnesses praised US actions, including passage of a bill on forced labour and the levying of penalties on companies shown to be using the forced labour of Uyghurs. They denounced businesses and investors still profiting from suspect supply chains and possibly complicit Chinese enterprises there.
Nury Turkel, chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and an Uyghur-American, said crimes against humanity could not be treated merely as an area of disagreement or an irritant in a bilateral relationship. “Genocide is defined as an international crime for a reason,” Turkel said. “Confronting is not an option”, it’s a necessity, she said.
And Naomi Kikoler, director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, which is affiliated with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, urged the US to start working with allies in a more comprehensive way to confront China.
“The United States alone cannot prevent these crimes,” Kikoler said. “We must work with other governments, Uyghur civil society and the private sector to develop a swift, coordinated and global strategy to protect the Uyghur community. Thus far no such strategy exists.”
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