On his last day in office as US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo officially determined that China has committed both “crimes against humanity” and the more serious crime of “genocide”, as it targeted the “predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”
The United States thus becomes the first government to officially determine the Chinese government’s campaign amounting to genocide.
“I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state,” Pompeo said. The statement also made repeated comparisons between the actions of the Chinese government and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.
China has retaliated a day later by announcing sanctions against Pompeo, and 27 other Trump-aligned people, minutes after president Joe Biden was sworn in on Wednesday.
The sanctions prevent the individuals and their families from entering mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. It also stops the sanctioned and any entities that they are associated with from doing any business with China.
There has been a heated debate over what to call China’s atrocities against Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang, which include mass detentions, forced sterilizations, destruction of cultural heritage, and race- and religious-based targeting of Chinese citizens for extra surveillance. While the term “genocide” has been applied informally, it has a specific legal definition that centers largely on the question of intent. As the U.N. Office on Genocide Prevention notes on its website: “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group.”
Given the timing, it will fall on the Biden administration to determine how to actually give teeth to the genocide determination.
That “pressing question” is now the Biden administration’s problem to solve. It will be hard, for example, to justify taking part in an Olympic Games hosted by a government the United States has accused of genocide – but announcing an official boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics would dramatically increase tensions with China.
