Will Congress task U.S. spies to dig deeper in Xinjiang?

American spies would gather intelligence on the Uyghurs’ ongoing oppression by China and report to Congress if a bill introduced by a Democratic representative in the U.S. House of Representatives in May were to become law.

The Uyghur Genocide Intelligence Review Act was introduced on May 15 by Rep. Ritchie Torres of the South Bronx to spur the federal government to action against China’s mass detention of its mostly Muslim ethnic minority in the northwest.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uyghur people is a crime against humanity that’s too grave to be ignored,” Torres, 35, a sophmore lawmaker and member of the Committee on Financial Services and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told The China Project. “The story of the victims must be fully told.”

As many as 1 million Uyghurs are believed to have been detained by the Chinese government in labor camps and prisons in their homeland, Xinjiang, an area the size of Alaska that had been under effective martial law at Beijing’s command since 2016.

Members of the U.S. Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party were appalled by Uyghur witness testimonies given by two “reeducation” camp survivors to Congress in March, a spokesman for Rep. Torres’s office told The China Project.

In March 2021, U.S. President Joseph Biden signed a bill into law punishing China by imposing sanctions on those people responsible for forced labor in Xinjiang and barring the imports into the U.S. of goods made there under duress. Around the same time, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, called China’s suppression of Uyghurs “genocide.”

“Once the United States invokes the term ‘genocide,’ we have a special obligation to galvanize the federal government and the international community into action,” Torres said.

Since spring 2021, the international community has “lost its shock and horror” over the Uyghur situation, Torres’s spokesperson said.

The need to tap the resources of the U.S. Intelligence Services in China comes because China bars most journalists from traveling to Xinjiang and monitors all electronic communications in and out of the region. State surveillance causes many Uyghurs to choose to self-censor about what’s going on around them for fear of reprisal from the state.

China’s lockdown in Xinjiang coupled with Beijing’s COVID-zero policy during the pandemic combined to make the country’s northwest region into a “black box” where the “scope and severity of the situation has been hard to fathom,” Torres’s spokesperson said.

Much of what is known about the mass detentions in Xinjiang came from satellite imagery, leaked government documents, and officials’ incriminating speeches found on Chinese government websites. These formed a picture of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 plan to Sinicize the Uyghur region, and camp survivor testimony, as it trickled out, put a human face to the result of the government’s actions.

But open-source intelligence is limited in its ability to show the world what China is doing to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the U.S. intelligence services can play a crucial role, Torres’s spokesman said.

Torres introduced bill H.R. 3349 on May 15, “To require the Director of National Intelligence [DNI] to submit to Congress an annual report relating to the Uyghur genocide.”

​​Avril Haines was sworn in as the director of national intelligence on January 21, 2021. She is the seventh Senate-confirmed DNI in U.S. history and the first woman to fill the post.

The bill asks that the DNI investigate the major indicators of genocide against the Uyghurs of northwest China, including forced sterilization, birth control, and abortion, together with forced transfer of Uyghur children from their families, forced Uyghur labor in and outside Xinjiang, physical and psychological torture, surveillance in all its forms, and actions that “infringe on the rights of Uyghurs to live freely in accordance with their customs, culture, and religious practices.”

The spokesperson said Torres drew hope from the recent three-hour hearing on the genocide of Uyghurs held by the bipartisan China Select Committee, and that the Democrat from one of the country’s smallest districts hopes to garner bipartisan support to “legislate for justice.”

“I am hopeful my legislation will build on the bipartisan work of the Select Committee to confront the human rights abuses by the CCP against ethnic and religious minorities,” Torres said.

Cautious reactions

Uyghur rights groups are both excited and cautious about the bill calling on U.S. intelligence services for help.

Rushan Abbas, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU), told The China Project that Torres’s bill would unearth “hidden layers of truth” and empower human rights groups to “delve deeper into the situation.”

Abbas said that CFU “wholeheartedly supports” the bill and “urges its swift passage.”

“While open-source research has been instrumental in uncovering the horrors of the Uyghurs, there remains a shroud of darkness enveloping East Turkestan,” Abbas said, using the name many Uyghurs assign to their homeland when speaking English.

Peter Irwin of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, also in Washington, said that while the Torres bill’s potential to expose fully China’s genocide against Uyghurs was welcome, some are concerned that Beijing might use its passage to push the narrative that the West, led by the United States, aims to take China down.

Irwin said there are many unanswered questions about life on the ground for Uyghurs — about the extent of the destruction of their culture, the Uyghur birth rate since the government stopped publishing data, the suppression of religion, and the degree of self-censorship exercised by writers, teachers, and religious leaders afraid to cross invisible lines that could land them in jail.

“I can foresee a situation where the U.S. intelligence agents put out a report on the situation in the Uyghur region and it being used by the Chinese government as a way to say this is not about human rights, this is so clearly now about U.S. politics and the geopolitical relationship between the two countries,” Irwin said.

Rahima Mahmut, the head of the World Uyghur Congress in London, was positive about the bill.

“It is extremely important to reveal the truth of the CCP’s crimes against the Uyghur people, the genocide and the crimes against humanity that they are doing everything they can to cover up,” she said.

“It has been impossible to put investigators on the ground to find out exactly what happened to those detained in their millions,” Mahmut said. “Countless numbers have been traumatized and we still have no idea of the fate of the disappeared. We hope the intelligence agencies with their own unique methodology will be able to find the truth.”

Adrian Zenz, the director in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told The China Project he was doubtful that much new evidence could be gathered from within China.

Zenz, a leading researcher on the crackdown in Xinjiang, said that there was still more to be gleaned from a more intensive analysis of open-source material. He welcomed the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community but cautioned against endangering people on the ground.

“It is beneficial to have the intelligence community contribute to your knowledge, but, of course, this should not involve a disclosure of how they obtain non-public information, or else those sources would be put at risk,” Zenz said.

If the Torres bill were to garner bipartisan support and safely navigate the Republican-majority House, it would then have to run the gauntlet of the Senate before reaching President Biden’s desk. This could take a matter of days or weeks.

If enacted as a law, the Torres bill would mobilize the U.S. intelligence services under DNI Haines to present their findings to Congress after 180 days. Further annual reports would be required, “until the President (in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of State) determines the Uyghur genocide is no longer a matter of concern.”