A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers this week announced a bill that would broaden existing sanctions to combat what one senator called “a deliberate and systematic campaign to destroy the Uyghur people” — one of a set of bills targeting China over its treatment of minority groups, dissidents and Taiwan as bilateral trade negotiations continue.
The measure would expand the sanctions under a previous law to include actions like forced family separations and organ harvesting. It would also deny entry to the U.S. for people found to have participated in forced abortions or sterilizations. In interviews with RFA Uyghur, Uyghur women have detailed birth control procedures they say were forced on them by authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The bill would bar the U.S. military from buying Chinese seafood out of concern that Uyghur and North Korean forced labor is used in its production.
It would direct the State Department to create a plan for countering Chinese propaganda that denies “the genocide, crimes against humanity, and other egregious human rights abusese experienced by Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethic groups” in Xinjiang. It would also appropriate $2 million for the Smithsonian to create research and programs that would preserve Uyghur language and culture threatened by the Chinese government.
“The evidence is clear. The Chinese Communist Party has waged a deliberate and systematic campaign to destroy the Uyghur people through forced sterilization, mass internment, and forced labor,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), the chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a statement. “This legislation ensures the United States holds accountable not only the perpetrators of these horrific crimes but also those who support or profit from them.”
