A report published on February 14 revealed that the Chinese Communist Party is continuing to target and enslave Uyghurs through an expansion of forced labor in China. Published by The Jamestown Foundation and authored by Beijing-banned academic Adrian Zenz, the report concluded, “Xinjiang currently operates the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor.”
The atrocities that the Chinese Communist Party perpetrates against members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang have come to light in recent years, including mass imprisonment of more than 1 million civilians, forced sterilization, separation of children from their families, torture, abuse, restrictions on religious freedom, and forced labor.
While most of China is composed of the Han ethnic group, more than half of the population of the northwestern region of Xinjiang consists of ethnic minorities (predominately Muslim Uyghurs) – who the Party has long sought to control.
In 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined that the Chinese Communist Party was committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang – a determination that Secretary of State Antony Blinken upheld.
Though the horrific methods the Party wields to subjugate these minority groups vary, the objective remains the same.
“It’s a strategy of control and assimilation,” Zenz told The New Yorker. “And it’s designed to eliminate Uyghur culture.”