U.S. Select Committee holds session on ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Ongoing Uyghur Genocide’

The newly formed House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party met for the first time on February 28 for a hearing on the Party’s “threat to America.” On March 23, the committee met for a second session, titled “The Chinese Communist Party’s Ongoing Uyghur Genocide.”

Twenty-four representatives, united in bipartisan opposition to the CCP, quizzed academics and camp survivors for three hours.

Graphic accounts of cruelty and survivor trauma fueled the opening statements. Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s and Qelbinur Sidik’s respective tales of enforced incarceration and employment in a series of so-called “vocational training” or “reeducation” camps described torture, gender-based violence, illegal incarceration, and multiple other abuses.

This is a summary of some of the testimony given to the committee:

Gulbahar Haitiwaji

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who had been called back to China from her home in Paris in November 2016, to ostensibly sign pension release documents, was arrested soon after her arrival, and spirited away without trial into a camp near her hometown of Karamay. Her family would not hear from her again for two years.

There, with several hundred other detainees, between the ages of 17 and 70, she was shackled, chained to her bed for an extended period, and subjected to subzero temperatures, relentless interrogation, meager rations, and injections with unknown drugs. Eleven hours of daily political songs and speeches until she was “dead inside” were interspersed with violent interrogation sessions, often strapped to a “tiger chair,” where she was forced to admit to being a terrorist, bent on destroying the Chinese state. If she was caught speaking the Uyghur language, punishments were more tiger chair sessions.

Her weight dropped to 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

After two years of extralegal detention, she was sentenced to seven years for terrorism and plots to split the state. She was told to be grateful her time would be served in reeducation camps rather than in jail.

She was moved to a brand-new camp reeking of fresh paint, indicating to her that the facility had been newly renovated to accommodate prisoners for a long time. Four months later as another morning of interrogation dawned, she was shackled and hooded as usual. But then the hood was removed, her rusted manacles were beaten from her wrists, she was smartened up, and made to confess her crimes on video. After that, she was taken out of the camp, moved to an apartment, and given soft pillows and a bed to herself. Just as mysteriously as she had been arrested, she was fattened up with choice food for a few months, given a makeover, and allowed to call home, albeit under the watchful eye of 24/7 minders.

By August 2019, she was home in France, seemingly helped by her daughter’s half-a-million-strong petition and frantic French diplomatic activity behind the scenes. She was told as she left never to speak of her ordeal or her relatives would pay. She declined to obey, and has written a book. She campaigns for those she left behind and knows she will probably never see her loved ones again.

Qelbinur Sidik

Qelbinur Sidik, now in exile in the Netherlands, was wrenched from her career as a teacher in a primary school at the height of the roundups in Xinjiang, and commandeered to be a Chinese teacher in two separate camps, to teach “illiterate” Uyghurs. The only option she had was to obey or be interned herself.

In the camp, near her native Ürümchi, detainees young and old slept on cement floors, packed like sardines, and fed with one steamed bun and gruel three times a day. Chained and shackled, they shuffled to class, crawling under chains across the door, answering only to numbers printed on their jumpsuits.

Her lessons were punctuated by screams from a torture room, which was used to extract confessions. Armed soldiers surrounded the compound, manned the turrets, and lined the corridors and stairways of their captivity. “Students” would regularly disappear, never to return, and she witnessed regular weekly routines of injected medication and blood testing. In her second camp, the women’s hair had been shaved, and rape was regularly employed during torture.

She was forbidden from flinching, complaining, or showing emotion. Keeping her emotions to herself propelled her into deep depression from which she says she has still not emerged.

Life outside the camps was like “an open prison,” she said. Surveillance cameras and facial recognition software controlled and monitored her every move.

Sidik was forcibly sterilized together with hundreds of women from her housing complex. There was only one choice: Be sterilized or face the tiger chair.

On health grounds and because she had Uzbek roots, she was eventually allowed to leave the camp. She eventually left Xinjiang to join her daughter in Holland. She has been forced to divorce her husband, who remains in Xinjiang. He and the rest of her family were forced to delete her from their WeChat contacts. She regularly receives phone calls from police who threaten to make her relatives pay the price for her speaking out, and the government has organized several press conferences to discredit her.

Adrian Zenz

Adrian Zenz is the well-known researcher who was one of the first scholars to document the all-encompassing internment program set up by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

He summarized his evidence on the mass sterilization of Uyghur women, and the “political paranoia” that has beset Beijing since 2014. This has given rise to “preventative internment” to “suppress ethnic resistance,” a common tactic employed by repressive regimes uncovered by genocide scholars over the years, he said. He spoke of classified documents detailing Beijing’s “secret plan to subjugate the region,” by diluting Uyghurs with Han Chinese to mitigate their “security threat.”

Zenz said that American money, including the U.S. private sector funding of so-called “dual use” technology, continues to bolster China’s efforts to oppress its own people and roll out intrusive surveillance around the world. He called on the U.S. government to bar U.S. investors such as pension funds from investing in Chinese entities implicated in human rights violations, surveillance, and military modernization. This field, he warned, was “severely under-researched.”

Nury Turkel

Uyghur-American attorney Nury Turkel, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, described the current situation for Uyghurs in his homeland as bleak, with the death toll yet unknown.

He urged full implementation of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, whose brief is to keep updated Global Magnitsky sanctions on foreign individuals and entities responsible for human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. To date, a “pitiful” handful of 12 Chinese officials and entities had been sanctioned, he said.

Every Chinese hi-tech giant party to the Uyghur genocide should be punished, he said. “Making these companies ‘no-go’ zones is long overdue.” Two key pieces of U.S. legislation, the Uyghur Policy Act and the Uyghur Human Rights Sanctions Review Act, are still on the back burner, but should be accelerated and passed into law without delay, he added.

Turkel also wanted to see more stringent moves to curb the “transnational repression” of exiled Uyghurs and serious measures to deal with forced labor that was part of the supply chains of the world at the expense of his people.

Naomi Kikoler

Naomi Kikoler, a human rights lawyer focused on mass atrocity prevention, gave evidence on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation. The catchphrase never again following World War II is sounding increasingly hollow in the light of subsequent genocides since 1945: “Never again should have been a lasting commitment, even when the perpetrator was a superpower,” she said.

She called for the tactics of the P.R.C. in carrying out its assault on the Uyghurs to be recognised internationally, and for Beijing to be held to account through a global strategy to protect them. Citing world inaction over the visible horrors of World War II, she said, “Let history guide us today. Now that we know what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghurs, what will we do? This is our never again moment.”

Will the hearing make a difference?

Speaking to The China Project after the session, Rushan Abbas, the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, was heartened by the “palpable sense of responsibility to our future generations, and the Uyghur people to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its genocide.”

She was struck by the poignant Holocaust references throughout the event. “The consistent mention of the Holocaust served as a stark reminder of the duty we share to never forget the lessons of history,” she said. “It is something that can’t be unheard and I believe that this hearing will ultimately result in more measures to hold China accountable for its crimes, including sanctions against Chinese officials and companies implicated in the Uyghur forced labor.”

Adrian Zenz told The China Project he thought the event was “highly impactful.” Rather than the usual five to seven members at most hearings, he was impressed by the 25 “well-informed” members who asked “informed and challenging questions.” “This hearing is likely to result in substantive legislative action,” he concluded.