Leaders of a bipartisan U.S. commission are asking the State Department to advise Americans against traveling to the Xinjiang region of western China, where the U.S. authorities say genocide is taking place.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ohio), chair and co-chair, respectively, of the Congressional–Executive Commission on China, sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, requesting that he raise the travel advisory rating for Xinjiang to the highest level—“Level 4: Do Not Travel.”
The alert, according to the lawmakers, seeks to ensure that “no U.S. policies implicitly endorse” what the Chinese regime is doing.
“Tourism only serves to whitewash these atrocities—serving the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and government,” the letter says.
‘Propaganda Pawns’
The lawmakers also sent letters to three private travel companies providing package vacations that could bring U.S. visitors to Xinjiang.These package holidays, often called Silk Road tours, offered clients opportunities to visit Xinjiang’s mosques, which are off-limits to Uyghur communities to practice their faith but are used for commercial purposes, according to the letter.
Some tours even include visiting local Uyghur families, but “Uyghurs themselves are forcibly separated from their family members, both in the region and abroad,” the lawmakers said.
Moreover, the congressmen said they doubt that the Turkic and Muslim people involved in the tours were voluntarily doing so, “given the discontent of these populations with official policies.”
“Their participation could be coerced through risk of punishment from authorities for failure to comply,” the letter reads.
“It is our strong belief that well-intentioned tourists should not be put in the position of condoning or supporting atrocities—or be used as propaganda pawns—allowing the Chinese government to cover up its genocide and crimes against humanity.”
The lawmakers asked Geographic Expeditions and Abercrombie & Kent to stop selling tours to Xinjiang immediately and raised concerns about Wild Frontiers’ package holidays in the region. All three companies were flagged by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in its 2023 report. The U.S.-based rights advocacy group warned the travel firms of the risks of implicitly supporting “the normalization of genocidal Chinese government policies intended to destroy the Uyghur identity.”
Wild Frontiers, a London-headquartered firm, has issued a statement following the release of the UHRP report, saying the company was “currently conducting a full investigation” of its tours in the region.
The letter asked about the current status of Wild Frontiers’ investigation, how the probe was conducted, and why the tours with stops in Xinjiang are still advertised on its website. The lawmakers are also seeking information on whether there are monitoring mechanisms to ensure that local residents participating in its Xinjiang trip are chosen to do so freely.
Asked about the letter, a spokesperson for the State Department said it doesn’t publicly comment on specific congressional correspondence, but noted that its country information page on China includes information about Xinjiang, “including extraordinary security measures and invasive surveillance techniques against individuals, in addition to specific risks to travelers with ethnic ties to the region.”
“ More broadly, the United States condemns the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang, in addition to other human rights abuses,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
Officials at the three travel companies didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
