Amid the Chinese regime’s ramping up of its largest leadership reshuffle before the 20th National Congress, the recent appointments of two Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cadres aroused great concern in the international community over China’s worsening human rights situation.
The National Congress is theoretically the highest body of the CCP and is held once every five years, at which changes of top-level Party leadership and Party Constitution are discussed and finalized. The 20th National Congress is to be held in the fall of 2022, with the exact date not announced.
A week later, on Oct. 26, state-run mouthpiece People Daily reported that Chen Quanguo was elected again as Party Secretary of China’s western Xinjiang Region at a plenary session of the region’s Party Committee.
Both Wang and Chen are on the sanction lists of multiple Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom (UK), and the European Union (EU) for their human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet.
One of his publicly known practices in Tibet was setting up police stations every 500 meters, according to researchers.
In 2018, a group of Western envoys in Beijing requested “an explanation of alleged rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs” in a letter to Chen Quanguo, Reuters reported in November 2018.
Australia-based Chinese law expert Yuan Hongbing said that the Chinese regime has kept Chen in Xinjiang and promoted Wang to Tibet because they have been connected to human rights abuses and sanctioned by the international communities.
“The CCP needs them in place to show it’s countering the sanctions,” Yuan said in a recent interview with the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times, “What Xi Jinping cares about is if they are loyal to Xi and if they are useful to demonstrate the CCP’s tough stance against the West.”
