Pompeo blasts China for rights violations after document leak
WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that a cache of leaked documents proves that Chinese authorities are engaged in massive and systemic repression of Muslims and other minorities in western China, as a number of foreign governments expressed serious concern about the scale of the campaign.
Pompeo said the documents underscored “an overwhelming and growing body of evidence” that China’s leaders are responsible for gross human rights violations in the Xinjiang region.
“They detail the Chinese party’s brutal detention and systematic repression of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news conference. “We call on the Chinese government to immediately release all those who are arbitrarily detained and to end its draconian policies that have terrorized its own citizens in Xinjiang.”
Pompeo’s comments come at a delicate time in U.S.-Chinese relations amid negotiations to end a trade war and U.S. concerns about Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protests have turned violent with clashes between police and demonstrators. Notably his criticism was not accompanied by a warning about possible sanctions for the mass detentions, although U.S. lawmakers are pressing for penalties to be imposed.
“There are very significant human rights abuses,” Pompeo said. “It shows that it’s not random. It is intentional and it is ongoing.”
The leaked classified documents reveal the camps in Xinjiang are not for job training as Beijing says. They show the camps are used for forced ideological and behavioural re-education. They illustrate how Beijing uses a high-tech surveillance system to target people for detention and to predict who will commit a crime.
Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslim. But a classified blueprint leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioural reeducation centres run in secret.
The documents lay out the Chinese government’s strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak. The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.
Pompeo said the documents should encourage other countries to come forward with their concerns. U.S. allies were among the first to step up.
“We have serious concerns about the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the Chinese government’s escalating crackdown, in particular the extra-judicial detention of over a million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities,” a British Foreign Office spokesperson said. “We want to see an end to the indiscriminate and disproportionate restrictions on the cultural and religious freedoms of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the German China Cables team that “if indeed hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are being detained in camps, then the international community cannot close their eyes.”