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The outgoing US government’s assessment that China has committed “genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang was among the last acts of the Donald Trump administration that observers said could cement its legacy on Beijing and reduce Joe Biden’s ability to change course.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has used his final days in office to define the ruling Chinese Communist Party as the “central threat of our time”, crediting the Trump administration for “changing the global conversation on China”.Pompeo announced on Tuesday that Beijing’s policies against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang constituted genocide, following days of placing sanctions on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong officials for the political crackdown in Hong Kong, restricting visas for Chinese individuals responsible for militarisation of the South China Sea, and removing restrictions on US officials engaging with Taiwanese counterparts.Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the big stories originating in China.Beijing has bristled at Pompeo’s statements, with Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying calling his legacy one of “lying diplomacy” that has “not only bankrupted his own reputation but also rendered irreversible damage to the national image and interests of the United States”.Hua on Wednesday dismissed the Xinjiang designation as a “waste of paper and a lie” and described Pompeo as a “doomsday clown”.China’s embassy in the United States said on Wednesday that Pompeo had “disregarded facts, groundlessly attacked and deliberately smeared China’s policies”, insisting Beijing’s actions targeted ethnic separatists, religious extremism and terrorism rather than ethnic minorities.Observers said the final salvoes fired by Trump’s administration would push Biden to take stronger action on issues such as Xinjiang after he is inaugurated as president on Wednesday, but that he would still have room to reshape China policy to address its failings.As the strategic rivalry has intensified between China and the US, a bipartisan consensus in Washington has grown for a tougher China policy, albeit through differing methods.Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, said at a Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he was “very much in agreement” with Pompeo’s determination that Beijing’s abuses against Uygurs and other minorities in its Xinjiang region amounted to genocide.He said that the US needed to ensure it was not importing goods made with forced labour in Xinjiang, avoid exporting technologies to further Chinese repression, and ensure Taiwan had the ability to defend itself.“I also believe that President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Blinken said. “I disagree very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”Scott Kennedy, senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a commentary on Tuesday that although the Trump administration sought to “intentionally handcuff its successors”, Biden’s government had room to reshape policy around its belief that US-led multilateralism was needed to meet the challenge of China.This would mean working more closely with allies on China, as well as reversing certain Trump actions by rejoining the World Health Organization and rolling back tariffs, while maintaining and expanding others such as delisting Chinese firms and sanctioning China over human rights abuses, he said.“Although the departing team deserves credit for loudly sounding the alarm bells on the dangers presented by a Xi Jinping-led China, on many issues but particularly on economic ones, it did not address that challenge with effective policies that changed the facts on the ground in America’s favour,” Kennedy wrote.“A China that ignores the rules, does not provide reciprocity, and is a threat to the international order requires a clear-eyed and firm response from the United States, but it does not justify policies that do not work simply because they can be labelled ‘tough’.“The transition from one administration to the next should not simply add up to more or less decoupling with China but [involve] potentially a new conception of the relationship and how it fits into the larger plans the administration has for the country and the world at large.”On Xinjiang, analysts said that the new US designation would help the US to lobby other countries to work more closely against Beijing’s treatment of its ethnic minorities.Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said the Biden administration could hit the ground running, including by sanctioning more individuals and entities for human rights violations in Xinjiang, designating Uygurs as a priority group for refugee status, and working to combat forced labour in Xinjiang.“They can move straight to next steps for US policy,” Enos said. “Now China knows that there are consequences for its actions, and should it consider taking similar moves against other ethnic and religious minorities, it will not be without foreign policy and national security consequences.”Genocide and crimes against humanity are both serious crimes codified under international law after World War II.Darren Byler, a researcher at the Asian studies centre at the University of Colorado, said the genocide assessment would probably be used in legal actions to force multinational firms to assess their supply chains to Xinjiang, but that the impact for Uygurs in the region was not yet clear.“I expect to see other nations such as Canada and the United Kingdom make similar determinations,” he said.“It is a bit too soon to tell what other ramifications might come from it down the line. It will certainly make Uygur asylum claims stronger and I anticipate calls to relocate the 2022 Winter Olympics [from Beijing] will grow in the coming months, but I don’t know what it will mean for Uygurs in China.”Additional reporting by Catherine WongMore from South China Morning Post: * China sanctions US lawmakers, officials over Hong Kong, Taiwan moves * Mike Pompeo’s curiously timed Taiwan shift turns focus on Biden’s approach * China calls Xinjiang camps training centres, but government’s own documents say otherwise, researcher findsThis article How Mike Pompeo’s ‘genocide’ label for China over Xinjiang may set tone for Joe Biden first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday accused China of “genocide and crimes against humanity” for the country’s treatment of Uygur Muslims in its far-western region of Xinjiang, using his last full day as America’s top diplomat to issue a final blow against Beijing.Pompeo’s accusations include arbitrary imprisonment of more than a million Uygurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang, as well as torture and forced labour inflicted on these groups, and is consistent with comments President-elect Joe Biden has made.“Since at least March 2017, local authorities [in China] dramatically escalated their decades-long campaign of repression against Uygur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups,” Pompeo said.Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the big stories originating in China.“Their morally repugnant, wholesale policies, practices, and abuses are designed systematically to discriminate against and surveil ethnic Uygurs as a unique demographic and ethnic group, restrict their freedom to travel, emigrate, and attend schools, and deny other basic human rights of assembly, speech, and worship,” he added.“Since the Allied forces exposed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, the refrain ‘Never again’ has become the civilised world’s rallying cry against these horrors.”Spurred by deadly measures taken against Jews and other minority communities during World War II, the Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, signifying “the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed” during the global conflict, according to the UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.The convention requires all countries “to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, ‘whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals’,” according to the UN office’s website. Chinese state media denies BBC reports of Xinjiang forced labourPompeo’s move further escalates pressure against China’s government, which had already been voiced its displeasure both with sanctions Washington has placed on government officials deemed responsible for repressive policies against Uygurs and further reactions by Europe and Britain to reports of these policies.Last week, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, announced a ban on all imports of Xinjiang cotton and tomato products, even if they are routed through third countries or used in products finished outside the region, which borders Afghanistan and other central Asian countries.A representative of the Chinese embassy in Washington slammed Pompeo’s move, calling the accusation a “lie” and measures taken by authorities in Xinjiang “anti-violence, anti-terrorism, anti-separatism and de-radicalization”.Pompeo “ignores facts and makes groundless attacks on the Chinese government’s policy on Xinjiang,” the representative said. “This is a gross interference in China’s internal affairs and a serious violation of international law and basic norms governing international relations. The Chinese side expresses its strong concern and firm opposition to it.”Other US government measures aimed at halting possible human rights violations in Xinjiang include passage of the Uygur Human Rights Policy Act, which requires greater US scrutiny of potential human rights abuses in the region and demands that Chinese officials deemed responsible for violations be subject to economic sanctions and barred from entering the US. President Donald Trump signed that bill into law in June.Beijing has consistently denied the existence of forced labour camps in Xinjiang, and says that actions rolled out in the region are educational measures to tackle terrorism.The Chinese government is fighting other rules and guidelines aimed at halting at blocking exports of products from Xinjiang.Citing evidence of forced labour in Xinjiang, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab recently announced new rules that force government suppliers to switch their supply chains away from Xinjiang, a sweeping directive that applies to all companies around the world that supply the British government.Reports of human rights abuses also became a key source of contention in a tentative investment agreement that Beijing reached with the European Union after promising to pursue the ratification of key global human rights conventions starting this year. Can US go big on wind power without turbines from Xinjiang?US lawmakers of both parties, many of whom have sponsored or supported legislation that restricts companies from sourcing products that might have been produced through forced labour in Xinjiang, praised Pompeo’s move.“The United States does not apply these terms lightly,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I hope today’s designation will motivate the nations, businesses and people of the world to reconsider the ways they entangle themselves with a brutal communist dictatorship that is guilty of committing genocide against its own people.”“The State Department said today what we have known for some time,” Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from New York, said on Twitter. “China’s mass internment camps, forced labour, and forced sterilization of over 1 million [Uygurs] in Xinjiang is genocide.”In his account of the alleged brutality, Pompeo’s announcement highlighted the treatment of Uygur women.> China’s internment of nearly one million Uighur Muslims is among the worst abuses of human rights in the world today. The U.S. cannot be silent — we must speak out against this oppression and relentlessly defend human rights around the world. https://t.co/PQp04TWjyd> > — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 18, 2019He decried “coercive population control measures, including forced sterilisations, forced abortion, forced birth control and the removal of children from their families” in Tuesday’s announcement, touching on a recent claim by the Chinese embassy in Washington that Beijing’s efforts to deradicalise Uygurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang have benefited women there.A since-deleted tweet by the Chinese mission this month asserted that a recent study by the state-affiliated Xinjiang Development Research Centre showed that “in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines”.China’s diplomats will likely not be able to change Washington’s position after Biden assumes office.In response to reports in August that the Trump administration was planning to label China’s treatment of Uygurs as genocide, his campaign representative agreed with the designation.“The unspeakable oppression that Uygurs and other ethnic minorities have suffered at the hands of China’s authoritarian government is genocide and Joe Biden stands against it in the strongest terms,” Andrew Bates told Politico.“If the Trump administration does indeed choose to call this out for what it is, as Joe Biden already did, the pressing question is what will Donald Trump do to take action. He must also apologise for condoning this horrifying treatment of Uygurs,” Bates said.More from South China Morning Post: * US bans all imports of cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang, citing allegations of forced labour * Britain introduces new policies to end supply-chain links to Xinjiang * As US moves to renewable energy, wind turbines from Xinjiang may get caught in political tempest * Britain to ban China imports linked to Xinjiang Uygur camps over forced labour, reports sayThis article US declares China has committed genocide in its treatment of Uygurs in Xinjiang first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
Single Singaporeans need to be at least 35 years old before they can be eligible to buy an HDB flat. Just turned 35? Read this to decide whether a BTO or resale flat is better for you.
Hong Kong no longer has the busiest airport for international traffic in Asia after the coronavirus pandemic wiped out travel, leaving South Korea’s Incheon International Airport in top spot.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday said it has issued leases covering nearly 685 square miles (1,770 square kilometers) in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a move denounced by critics in the waning hours of the Trump administration. Lesli Ellis-Wouters, a spokesperson for the agency in Alaska, said leases were issued for tracts for which it had received required paperwork.
A Moscow court on Wednesday postponed the start of the trial of detained Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on charges of defaming a World War II veteran, his lawyers said.
Israel has issued tenders for 2,500 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, a watchdog said Wednesday, on the eve of Joe Biden's swearing-in as US president.
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