China’s Uyghur campaign continues

China’s government insists it is a “law-based country.” But in reality, China is governed by a secretive partystate that uses the law as a tool for political repression. In the case of prominent Uyghur ethnographer Rahile Dawut, the “law” has become a cover for injustice. Six years after she was first detained, we learn that Ms. Rahile was sentenced to life in prison — a shocking punishment for one of the world’s leading exponents of Uyghur culture.

The sentence adds to the evidence that China’s rulers are executing a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority, and others in the Xinjiang region, attempting to eradicate their language, culture and traditions. A human rights lawyer, Rayhan Asat told Voice of America, “If you look at historical examples, when the state attempts to commit genocide, they tend to go after the brightest and the finest of the society, who would preserve their culture, who would preserve the collective dignity of the people.” The Uyghur Human Rights Project has found that a minimum of 312 Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz intellectual and cultural elites were detained or imprisoned as of late 2021, and probably many more.

Ms. Rahile, 57, is a leading scholar of Uyghur culture and folkways. She had been exposed to vivid Uyghur folk stories, dances and literature when she was at Xinjiang University, which required students to immerse themselves in the rural lifestyle of the southern Xinjiang region. Later she earned a doctorate in Beijing in folklore, and returned to Xinjiang University and founded a folklore center there. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University and Indiana University.

China continues to deny any human rights problems in Xinjiang, saying the issues there are “countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism.” Mr. Xi visited Xinjiang in August, again demanding that local officials “effectively control illegal religious activities.”

The United States now has two laws responding to the Uyghur cultural genocide: the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, passed in 2020 and signed by President Donald Trump, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021, signed by President Biden. They provide for penalties against human rights abusers and contain provisions to block imports made by Xinjiang forced labor. For the sake of Ms. Rahile and millions of others who have suffered, these laws should be executed robustly.