Now the international community is on notice that another massive human rights outrage is being committed before its eyes in East Turkestan, now called Xinjiang, in western China. To achieve what the UN has called “cultural genocide,” China employs methods ranging from sophisticated propaganda techniques to “wash clean the brains” of detainees to the brutally primitive practice of mass rape. In recent weeks, the US Senate unanimously passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who have engaged in violations of the rights of Uighurs. On Dec. 4, by a vote of 400-1, the House of Representatives passed an even stronger version, called the Uighur Act. If the legislation is allowed to languish for technical procedural reasons, Beijing surely will view the bills’ demise as a “prudent” US response to China’s “principled” opposition, and Uighur human rights activists will see it as a defeat and moral abandonment.

Source: Taipei Times December 15, 2019 15:56 UTC