A new bill passed by the House seeks to shed light on communist China’s repression of minority groups and to preserve the identities of those groups threatened by genocide.
The Uyghur Policy Act aims to create concrete pathways for the United States to support Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities subject to mass human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The bill received overwhelming bipartisan support during a Feb. 15 vote, passing by a margin of 414–6. It will now move to the Senate for consideration.
Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.), sponsor of the bill, spoke on the House floor, saying that the legislation would help to preserve the Uyghur identity from CCP attempts to erase it from history.
“Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities—just because of their identity—are repeatedly silenced, detained, imprisoned, tortured, and brainwashed in concentration camps led by the Chinese Communist Party,” Ms. Kim said.
“This bill takes crucial steps to bolster American efforts to safeguard the distinct ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic identity of the Uyghur people and promote respect for human rights and religious freedom in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).”
The CCP has engaged in a series of repressive efforts against minority groups in Xinjiang following a terror attack in 2013.
Since then, the regime has forced more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities into re-education camps and prisons, where rampant psychological and physical abuse has been documented, including the use of forced abortions and sterilizations.
That campaign has gone hand in hand with a CCP policy designed to repopulate the XUAR with workers predominantly from the Han ethnicity.
The United States recognizes the CCP’s abuses in the XUAR as a genocide. Various U.N. bodies, meanwhile, have found the regime responsible for extensive human rights abuses.
The Uyghur Policy Act would mandate the creation of a strategy to raise international awareness about the CCP’s persecution of minorities and to coordinate responses to the regime’s human rights abuses in the XUAR specifically.
To that end, it would establish a Coordinator for Uyghur Issues within the State Department, who would also lead public diplomacy efforts in the Islamic world, highlighting the CCP’s actions against Muslims.
The bill does not include authorizations for any new funding and directs the position to be established with the State Department’s current allocation.
“[The] Government of the People’s Republic of China should recognize, and take tangible steps to protect and preserve the distinct ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic identity of Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in the XUAR,” the text of the bill reads.
The bill also “urges all countries, especially fellow democracies and those with sizeable Muslim populations, to condemn and address the plight of Uyghurs.”
