The Canadian House of Commons on Monday last week voted 266-0 to declare Beijing’s ongoing persecution of its Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including Uighurs, to be genocide within the 1948 Genocide Convention. The motion also called on the Canadian government to push for relocation of the 2022 Winter Olympics out of Beijing if this crime against humanity does not cease.
Chinese “President-for-life” Xi Jinping (習近平) is attempting to change the narrative by asserting that his government has eliminated extreme poverty. However, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) in May said that “there are over 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 yuan [US$155], not enough to rent a room.”
The Dutch parliament was the first European body to declare the persecution genocide; other democracies should do likewise. US President Joe Biden’s administration has already accepted former US president Donald Trump’s genocide designation for what is happening in Xinjiang.
Mass slaughter of a minority community is the most common feature of a genocide, such as Rwanda in 1994, but murdering large numbers of specified groups to sell their organs should also qualify. China is unique among about 200 independent countries today in that its organ transplant commerce system is government-run rather than a criminal offense by unscrupulous surgeons.
Enver Tohti, a Uighur, has detailed how in 1995, as a surgeon in a Urumqi hospital in Xinjiang, he was sent to an execution ground to remove the kidneys and liver from a living prisoner. In 2019, Tohti publicized a photograph of the “Human Organ Transportation Green-Path” at Urumqi Airport, which expedites the transport of organs to global recipients.
Radio Free Asia reported that a hospital for infectious diseases in Aksu City was transformed into an internment camp with a large crematorium nearby and a “green corridor” for expedited organs at nearby Aksu Airport.
In 2014, Ethan Gutmann, in his book The Slaughter, placed the persecution of the Falun Gong, Uighur, Tibetan and Christian communities in context. He explained his “best estimate” that organs of 65,000 Falun Gong, and 2,000 to 4,000 Uighurs, Tibetans and Christians were pillaged from 2000 to 2008.
In 2017, Beijing began erecting a “re-education” gulag for Muslim communities similar to that established for Falun Gong practitioners after mid-1999. Both networks receive inmates arrested by police without a hearing, trial or appeal — a totalitarian practice invented in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Encircled by barbed wire, surveillance cameras and armed guards are labor camps where Turkic minorities work for little or no pay.
Recent news items have had a major effect on international opinion. Uighur women now living as refugees outside China describe inhuman rapes and torture they and other victims experienced in concentration camps.
Xinjiang refugees describe DNA and blood tests during their internment.
Gutmann has said the tests are “indisputably for tissue typing,” adding that as organ tourists often pay much higher prices than most Chinese citizens, each prisoner could be worth about US$750,000 for their vital organs.
Maya Mitalipova, director of the Human Stem Cell Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed, saying that “entire population of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims ... [has] been forcefully health checked and ... blood samples ... withdrawn... These procedures were performed only [on the] Muslim population.”
All governments should join the countries that ban “organ tourism” to China for transplant surgery. Any bilateral or multilateral agreement with Beijing must insist that this barbaric practice stop immediately, coupled with a mechanism whereby the termination is verifiable.
Responsible governments and businesses worldwide should join the US and Australia in boycotting anyone doing business in Xinjiang. Forced labor in its internment camps is poisoning the supply chain of numerous well-known companies from democracies.
On Sept. 22 last year, the US House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which states that unless the US Customs and Border Patrol can verify that goods are not produced using forced labor, they cannot enter the country.
The UK-based Independent People’s Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting, under chair Sir Geoffrey Nice, concluded that Falun Gong members were the primary victims of the harvest, but since 2017, a comprehensive DNA collection of everyone from Xinjiang’s Uighur community has created a large pool of potential donors from which evidence of harvesting might emerge.
All nations with Magnitsky laws should apply targeted sanctions against any Chinese government official known to be involved in organ harvesting. If democracies, including Muslim-majority ones, show more commitment to their values, the despicable commerce might soon end.
David Kilgour is a former Canadian federal lawmaker from Alberta and Cabinet minister.
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) on Wednesday last week announced it is launching investigations into 16 US trading partners, including Taiwan, under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to determine whether they have engaged in unfair trade practices, such as overproduction. A day later, the agency announced a separate Section 301 investigation into 60 economies based on the implementation of measures to prohibit the importation of goods produced with forced labor. Several of Taiwan’s main trading rivals — including China, Japan, South Korea and the EU — also made the US’ investigation list. The announcements come
Taiwan is not invited to the table. It never has been, but this year, with the Philippines holding the ASEAN chair, the question that matters is no longer who gets formally named, it is who becomes structurally indispensable. The “one China” formula continues to do its job. It sets the outer boundary of official diplomatic speech, and no one in the region has a serious interest in openly challenging it. However, beneath the surface, something is thickening. Trade corridors, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) cooperation, supply chains, cross-border investment: The connective tissue between Taiwan and ASEAN is quietly and methodically growing
RSS