China and US swap accusations of genocide, but does it make any sense?

The last official act of out-going US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was to accuse China of perpetrating "genocide" against its Uyghur population. China was quick to point to the US's treatment of its own indigenous people, to the American history of slavery and discrimination. The increasingly vitriolic war of words adds to the ongoing deterioration of ties between Beijing and Washington. 

In a strongly worded press release published on 19 January - a day before Pompeo left office - the US State Department accused China of "crimes against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang," including "arbitrary imprisonment ... of more than one million civilians, forced sterilisation, torture, forced labour" and other humen rights violations, which, according to Pompeo, add up to "genocide".

Beijing countered swiftly. "The Uyghur population has grown by six million in 40 years," fumed China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian during a press conference.

The US government "has long implemented policies of forced genocide, segregation, and assimilation," said Zhao, adding that "in the nearly one hundred years since the founding of the United States, the government used the Westward Movement to expel and kill Indians. By the beginning of the 20th century, the American Indian population had plummeted from 5 million in 1492 to 250,000."

So who is right?

America's bloody past

According to the eminent Smithsonian Magazine, the history of the brutal conquest of American Native lands may be a "blur" in the minds of many Americans, but increasingly, activists and researchers are producing studies that raise awareness about America's darkly violent past.

Books like The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous History of the US, bluntly describe the brutal conquests carried out by settlers and rangers, with the backing of the regular army commanded by American icons such as Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson (known for the "Indian Removal Act",) not shying away from using words like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" when describing the plight of the gradually decimated indigenous population.

Today, 574 Indian tribes are legally recognised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the United States, totalling some 3 million people, or about 1 percent of the US population of 331 million. Many of them live in the 326 officially registered Reservations administered by the BIA.

The tribes enjoy the legal status of "autonomous nations,"  with their own rules of governance. The relationship between Washington and the tribes is based on treaties, just like those between the United States and other sovereign nations. However, legal questions over land use and the limits of Indian sovereignty remain in dispute. The Indian Nations are directly under the authority of Congress, and don't have hierarchical links with the states in which they are located.

Today, members of the tribes come together in organisations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), a cross-tribal organisation created to resist federal government pressure for termination of tribal rights.  

Recent US administrations have been careful to pay at least lip service to the indigenous people. Two months before the 2020 elections, US President Donald Trump issued a 3-page pledge to "fight for Indian Country" through "core principles" such as "respecting tribal sovereignty and self determination," promoting better infrastructure, investment, healthcare and "respect" for "Native American Culture," a gesture which rang hollow since Trump revived the bitterly contested Keystone XL Pipeline project, involving hundreds of kilometres of oil transport that would run through land sacred to the inhabitants of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation in North Dakota.

Current President Joe Biden was quick to react with a more detailed 15-page "Plan for Tribal Nations" in which he promised to strenghten the "nation-to-nation" relationship, improve self governance and restore tribal lands, address climate change, and safeguard natural and cultural resources.. Biden has so far kept his word: in an Executive Order on his very first day in office, he revoked the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, saying that the project "disserves national interest".

China's suffocating present

By venturing into America's historical "Western Movement“ to find arguments for human rights violations, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson finds himself on very thin ice. 

China itself, in its current shape, is the product of centuries of ruthless western expansion into the lands of Uyghurs, Tibetans and other peoples, culminating in the ultimate control of de Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Xinjiang (in 1949) and, after a short but extremely bloody campaign, over Tibet (in 1959.)

And where America's indigenous peoples today can live in relative independence from the central government in Washington, Beijing has a much more hands-on approach to its "national minoirities".

China's Minority Affairs Commisison has fixed the official number of minorities, according to a rigid classification system, at 55, totalling 98 million people, about 7 percent of a population of 1,4 billion people according to the latest figures by China's State Statistical Bureau.

There are some 13,5 million Muslim Uyghurs, most of them living in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the west of China. The “Autonomous Regions” have limited self-government, and while a minority representative is the nominal leader, a Han-Chinese pulls the strings as local CCP secretary. 

China claims the Han-Chinese and the 55 designated minorities live in peace together, jointly making up the harmonious "People's Republic of China". But increasingly, cracks within this "unity" - especially those between Beijing and the Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian peoples - are being exposed. 

Currently, China seems to want to increasingly tighten the screws on these three minorities. 

Western criticism of China's human rights situation has shifted over the past few years from Tibet to Xinjiang. 

One million Uyghurs in detention?

The most prominent critic of Beijing's treatment of the Uyghurs is probably the German researcher Adrian Zenz.

His September 2018 report on China's political re-education campaign in Xinjiang came up with the figure of "between several hundred thousand and just over one million" detainees who had been arrested, separated from their families and forcibly brainwashed in re-education centers.

This 'one million' figure was almost universally copied by the western press. Initially, China denied the existence of the camps, but an article in the state-sponsored Global Times in July 2018 had already confirmed that “1.1 million citizens for start-ups, college students and those who had difficulty finding a job” would be provided with “special training". Another report focused on slave labor on cotton farms.

Beijing's response arrived swiftly. A blistering attack from the Chinese state-controlled media, led by the vitriollic Global Times, in an article by Lian Yuchun, Li Yuanbin and Li Dabiao of the Beijing-based 'Xinjiang Development Research Center' alleged that "so-called scholar" Zenz was "fabricating unfounded reports to slander China's policies in Xinjiang and cater to the US and some Western countries' aim of attacking China."

'Farfetched assumptions'

"Zenz's 'reports' that have been cited and hyped by some Western media are full of lies, farfetched assumptions, and baseless accusations," the article continues, aimed at inciting "attacks and pressure on China by using the so-called 'human rights problems of Uygurs'."

In fact, say Lian and Li, "Xinjiang people enjoy social stability, economic development, and harmony among ethnic groups, Zenz's wretched interventions should be despised by Chinese people and the international community."

China's claims cannot be independently verified. According to the 2019 report by the Beijing-based Foreign Correspondent's Club of China (FCCC,) that goes by the cynical title “Control-Halt-Delete – Reporting in China under threat of expulsion,” authorities have developed a broad array of tactics to monitor journalists and interfere with their reporting,'' including “refusing to accommodate visiting journalists, staging traffic accidents” in order to block access roads, and reporters “being followed by plainclothes police in unmarked cars”.

According to the report, 84 percent of journalists who went to Xinjiang in 2019 were “visibly followed,” 68 percent had “interviews visibly monitored” while 20 percent “were detained” for several hours or more, questioned by police and send back to Beijing. Members of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondent's Club trying to go to Xinjiang reported similar incidents. Academics face similar problems and must be careful in choosing their research topic, knowing that Beijing can revoke their visa - along with access to libraries and archives - at will.

China - EU trouble

Unfortunately for Beijing, Zenz's findings were supported by research of Human Rights Watch into Xinjiang's omnipresent police surveillance of the Uyghur population, several batches of leaked internal Chinese government documents (accessible in The Xinjiang Papers published by The New York Times) and eyewitness accounts, most recently the testimonies of Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman living in France, who wrote about her detention in Xinjiang in Survivor of the Chinese Gulag.

The latest collateral victim in the vicious stand-off between the US and China and the criticism of the treatment of the Uyghurs may be a massive China-EU investment deal.

German weekly Der Spiegel reports that over 100 "renowned China experts, researchers and human rights activsts" wrote to the European parliament requesting rejection of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) treaty over human rights concerns - singling out the problems of China's Muslim population. 

Despite this appeal, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed "in principle" on 30 December.

But the Eurpean Parliament, which overwhelmingly voted for a resolution critical of the "situation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang" on 17 December, still  has to ratify the treaty.