(LifeSiteNews) – China’s Olympics ended last week, but in the country’s western outskirts, a genocidal nightmare is far from over.
Over the past five years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has worked tirelessly to detain and eradicate the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking, largely Muslim ethnic group of around 13 million people in the remote Xinjiang province.
Based on Chinese government documents, satellite footage, and survivor testimonies, the PRC is thought to have abducted millions of Uyghurs, often for little more than having unapproved phone apps or too many children. Victims are arbitrarily detained across a sprawling network of up to 1,200 state-run gulags, where some never make it out alive.
“Authorities use threats of physical violence, forcible drug intake, physical and sexual abuse, and torture to force detainees to work in adjacent or off-site factories or worksites,” where Uyghurs produce everything from face masks to “green energy” technology, the U.S. State Department has said.
And according to a new report from the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO), China is nowhere near finished.
The report, released last month, accuses China’s Communist regime of “engaging in a widespread and systematic program involving the extensive use of forced labor” throughout Xinjiang into 2021. The PRC is housing some 1.8 million Uyghur and other ethnic minorities in internment or “re-education” camps, prisons, and other “workplaces,” the report charged.
The camps come with “extraordinary hardship,” including “physical and psychological torture” and serve as part of a broader strategy for indoctrinating and “cleansing” religious groups. Individuals may be subject to confinement simply for “praying regularly,” the ILO said. The entire program is backed by a region-wide biometric surveillance system.
An estimated 80,000 or more Uyghurs and other minorities have been transferred from Xinjiang to factories in Eastern and Central China, held in “dormitories” guarded by state security officers. “They are subject to impossible production expectations and long working hours,” and they are paid “almost nothing,” the ILO report said. Those who resist can face detention of themselves or their families.
The number of people swept up into China’s genocidal project in Xinjiang may be higher than the ILO indicates. An average of 1.29 million people underwent “vocational training” in the region each year between 2014 and 2019, based on PRC government data cited by the State Department.
While Beijing appears to have increasingly shuttered camps amid mounting international scrutiny, at least 380 remain active, according to recent analysis by the Rand Corporation.
Little action from the ‘woke’ West on China’s atrocities
Untold numbers of detainees have reportedly been killed in the internment camps, where rape of female prisoners is systematic policy. On the outside, a so-called “Pair Up and Become Family” policy requires Uyghur families to house members of the CCP, resulting in widespread sexual abuse.
Some women say that officials have forcibly and brutally aborted their unborn babies in the PRC’s quest to eliminate what it considers undesirable religious and ethnic minority groups.
One Uyghur woman was prohibited by Chinese authorities from having a fourth child, she said in a 2019 interview with the Washington Post. Doctors “cut [her] fetus out” without anesthetic the next month, the woman related. “Two humans were lost in this tragedy, my baby and me.”
Hundreds of thousands of women are also believed to have been involuntarily sterilized during the years-long ethnic cleansing of Xinjiang. Publicly accessible Chinese data in 2020 revealed a massive surge in sterilization and IUD implants in the province, starting in the mid-2010s and coinciding with a staggering 60 percent drop in the Xinjiang birth rate.
China’s genocide comes amid nearly unprecedented persecution of Catholics and other Christians. In the past two years, the PRC has demolished Catholic shrines, launched a tracking program for pastors, banned children from entering churches, and conducted mass arrests of underground Christian groups, among other things. Advocates and Christian leaders have described the recent crackdown as the worst attack on religious liberty in China since the Cultural Revolution.
The U.S. has formally recognized the Xinjiang atrocities as genocide – a designation made among the final actions of the Trump administration.
But the Biden administration has been criticized for failing to hold Beijing accountable and has at times downplayed China’s human rights abuses, as Joe Biden has done in the past.
Meanwhile, “woke” corporations pushing far-left racial ideology in the West still maintain supply chains in Xinjiang. A few, like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola, have lobbied Congress against action on the Uyghur genocide.
Big business is sponsoring the #Beijing2022 Olympic Games, despite the host state committing human rights violations against Hong Kongers & Tibetans & genocide against Uyghurs.
Top sponsor @Airbnb denies business to Uyghurs, as they require passports to rent their accommodation. pic.twitter.com/sSzLiBNsug
— Stop Uyghur Genocide (@UyghurStop) November 24, 2021
Six U.S. companies – Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Visa, and Snickers – sponsored last month’s genocide games, even while continuing their condemnation of “racism” at home. The World Bank, for its part, has injected hundreds of millions of dollars into Chinese companies linked to Uyghur forced labor.
Olympic Sponsors Intel, Coca-Cola, Toyota, P&G, and others released a statement condemning communist China.
Just kidding, they don't care about actual slavery.
— Nick Adams (@NickAdamsinUSA) February 6, 2022
“How many Uyghur families were destroyed, men made slaves, women sterilized, and people tortured?” said Campaign for Uyghurs’ executive director Rushan Abbas, whose sister remains detained in Xinjiang. “All of these crimes will be done, this genocide continued indefinitely, just so corporations can make money and the CCP can enforce their reign of terror.”