Mass detention of Uighurs has been superseded by trade talks

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing China Sanctions
BY AMY MACKINNON

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood participates in a protest march demanding the European Union take action against China in support of the Uighurs, in Brussels, on April 27, 2018.

Two human rights advocates who focus on China issues say they were told by U.S. officials last year that the Trump administration was preparing to impose sanctions on Beijing in December over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the country’s western region of East Turkestan.
The advocates were given to understand that the sanctions would fall under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. government to place travel bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers.
But when International Human Rights Day came and went on Dec. 10—the day the United States customarily unveils a tranche of such sanctions each year—no announcement was made. 

The administration squelched the plan in order to avoid harming trade talks with China.
“Discussions with government officials indicated that there would be sanctions forthcoming in December,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

A second human rights advocate, who did not want to be named, heard similar things in briefings with government officials.
Richardson said she has since heard from officials who expressed frustration that the sanctions issue was off the table due to the trade talks. 

She declined to identify the officials who had briefed her.
Rob Berschinski, the senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said his organization had also been “cautiously optimistic” that the sanctions on Chinese officials would be announced in December under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The U.S. failure to impose sanctions over China’s actions in East Turkestan—where it has forced up to a million Uighurs into internment camps—has been a big disappointment for the human rights community.
“While the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements, I think it’s important to remember that history is not going to remember the details of the negotiations but where the United States was on this massive human rights issue,” said Francisco Bencosme, the Asia-Pacific advocacy manager at Amnesty International USA.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was considering imposing Magnitsky sanctions in many places, including China.
A spokesperson for the State Department said: “The United States is developing a whole-of-government strategy to address the unprecedented campaign of repression in East Turkestan.”
“In regards to specific actions by the United States, the State Department does not forecast potential sanctions.”
At the Treasury, a spokesperson said officials would not “telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.”
A United Nations human rights panel has said China has turned East Turkestan, home to some 11 million people, mostly Uighurs, into a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

The Daily Beast has reported that China is also seeking to build a worldwide register of Uighurs who live abroad and has threatened to detain their relatives if they do not comply with requests for information from the Chinese police.
Many Uighurs living in the United States have family in the camps and face the dilemma to speak out—at the risk of more harm to their relatives—or keep silent.
“Every Uighur in the USA has family members in the concentration camps,” said Murat Ataman, whose brother, Dilshat Perhat Ataman, was taken to a camp in June 2018. 

Dilshat, an editor of a popular Uighur website, served a four-year sentence in prison between 2010 and 2014 on charges of endangering state security.
It took four months for Murat to learn that his brother had been taken to a camp. 

Uighurs in East Turkestan are forced to install monitoring apps on their cellphones, limiting their ability to communicate freely with the outside world and making it hard for their families abroad to track their whereabouts.
On March 27, Pompeo met with members of the Uighur diaspora. 

Among the group was Ferkat Jawdat, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2011. 

His mother and four of his father’s relatives are currently being detained in East Turkestan.
Five days after the meeting, Jawdat received a message from contacts in China that his aunt and uncle had been sent to the camps. 

Jawdat said that members of his family have previously been questioned about his activism in the United States.
“I decided to go public because I don’t know if I can save my mom or not, but I want to save the other people,” he said.
“China’s plan is to wipe out the whole nation. This will be written in the history books as a genocide... My children, your kids, they’re going to learn about this. I don’t want my daughter to one day ask me, ‘What did you do to stop this?’” Jawdat said.
Commenting on the suggestion that trade talks had been given priority over the mass incarceration of Muslims in China, he said: “The U.S. should give up some economic development to save our next generations.”
Members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeatedly called on the Trump administration to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in East Turkestan and have introduced sanctions bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“For nearly a year I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in demanding the Trump Administration impose sanctions on Chinese officials directly involved in putting roughly a million Uighurs into internment camps,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, said in a statement to Foreign Policy.
At a rally in support of the Uighurs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, successive speakers called for the United States to place sanctions on Chinese officials.
“Each time the world swears never again. When will we actually mean it?” said Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress.
Given China’s influential economic clout, many members of the Uighur community see the United States as their only hope.
Among Muslim countries, only Turkey has sharply condemned China for its treatment of the Uighurs and other Muslims. 

Muslim-majority states have even supported it. 

In 2017, Egypt detained and deported dozens of Uighur students back to China. 

On a visit to China this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom supported China’s right to undertake anti-terrorism measures. 

Last month, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose 57 member states have substantial Muslim populations—passed a resolution that commended China’s efforts to care for its Muslim citizens.
China has invested heavily in countries across Central Asia and the Middle East as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Berschinski of Human Rights First, who previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said 2018 was the first year that no sanctions were announced under the Magnitsky Act or the Global Magnitsky Act on International Human Rights Day.
No official explanation was given, although Berschinski suggested that perhaps a work overload at the Treasury Department may have been a contributing factor.
The Magnitsky Act takes its name from a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison after exposing widespread corruption. 

Passed in 2012, the law enabled the U.S. government to place sanctions on human rights abusers. 

The Global Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2016, extended that ability to the rest of the world.
“People are starting to get concerned that the administration is giving up on Global Magnitsky sanctions,” Berschinski said.

Two Chinas Policy

Taiwan President Stops in U.S. as Relations Warm

By Chris Horton
President Tsai Ing-wen in Paraguay earlier this month, after a stopover in Los Angeles.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — President Tsai Ing-wen visited Houston over the weekend, her second brief stop in the United States in one week, a sign of efforts to deepen relations between Washington and Taipei despite enraged opposition from China.
Ms. Tsai stopped in Los Angeles last Monday, on her way to Paraguay and Belize, and then in Houston on Saturday on her way back home. 

During the earlier stop, she met with three California lawmakers, including one, Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, who called on the United States to formally invite her to Washington, which would break with decades of American practice.
The United States has not officially recognized Taiwan since 1979, when it shifted to recognizing China’s Communist government. 

China hopes to absorb the self-governed, democratic island, which it has never controlled, and has campaigned to erase any recognition by other countries or corporations of Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The visits to Houston and Los Angeles are considered “transit stops” rather than official visits, part of a longstanding restriction imposed by the United States to maintain better relations with China. 

But Beijing has objected even to such brief stopovers, and the most recent ones came after President Trump demonstrated willingness to provoke China’s anger.
Mr. Trump has imposed heavy tariffs on Chinese goods, touching off a trade war, and in March he signed the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages the kind of high-level, official visits the United States and Taiwan have not had in many years. 

Ms. Tsai’s most recent transit stops were her first since Mr. Trump signed the act into law.
While there were no expectations that Mr. Trump would meet his Taiwanese counterpart, there were indications that the United States was willing to be more welcoming to Taiwanese presidents.
In a first, Taiwanese journalists were permitted to follow Ms. Tsai and report from the sites of events she attended. 

She visited Taiwan’s de facto consulate in Los Angeles — another first — and she addressed American media at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library near Los Angeles.
“There were pictures of her meeting crowds of local Taiwanese, accompanied by police escort, and giving a speech at the Reagan library,” said Julian Ku, professor at Hofstra Law School. 

“All of that significantly raised her public profile and made her seem more like a normal leader making a normal visit to a foreign country.”
She met with Republican and Democratic members of Congress, underscoring the strong bipartisan support for Taiwan.

In China, however, Ms. Tsai elicits hateful commentary on a level that perhaps only the Dalai Lama can match. 

Shortly after she visited a Los Angeles location of the Taiwanese coffee chain 85C, the Chinese internet erupted with anger, calling for a boycott of the chain’s several hundred locations in China, its largest market.
That day, 85C’s parent company, Gourmet Master, whose stock trades on Taiwan’s exchange, lost $120 million in share value. 

The company promptly apologized and expressed support for peaceful unification.
Many Taiwanese were upset by the company caving in to Chinese pressure, with some also calling for a boycott of the chain. 

Polls consistently show that the overwhelming majority of people in Taiwan, a multiparty democracy, oppose being absorbed into China’s one-party, authoritarian rule.
The episode is the latest example of the Chinese government using its grip on the country’s enormous market to pressure corporations into serving its political agenda. 

In recent months, companies including international airlines, hotels and other brands have begun referring to Taiwan as a province of China in response to threats from Beijing. 

The White House called China’s tactics “Orwellian nonsense,” but did little else to back up American corporations.
If China fines United States companies or restricts their access to Chinese markets for refusing to call Taiwan a province, then the Trump administration should retaliate in kind against Chinese companies, said William Stanton, a former director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial United States diplomatic presence there.
“China’s trying to make both Taiwan and the government of Tsai Ing-wen persona non grata throughout the world,” he said. 

“There’s just no end to it.”
Bonnie Glaser, senior Asia adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Trump administration’s approval for Ms. Tsai’s visits to the Reagan library and the Johnson Space Center in Houston showed that “they trusted she would not say or do anything that would increase cross-strait tensions.”
Congress, which has been a staunch supporter of Taiwan since the United States broke formal ties almost four decades ago, has become increasingly open to taking a new approach toward Taiwan.
“At some point we’re going to have to recognize the independence of Taiwan,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said in a July speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
Earlier this year, Mr. Ku of Hofstra Law School was one of several experts who testified at a House hearing on strengthening relations with Taiwan.
“There is an appetite in Congress to do more for Taiwan, and that the opposition to China in Congress is allowing pro-Taiwan congressmen to think bigger about how to help Taiwan,” he said.
Congress has limited direct powers over American foreign policy, but inviting foreign leaders to address it is one authority it has exercised, with or without presidential approval.
Mr. Ku said he thought that if Congress were to invite Ms. Tsai to address a joint session, it would be “something they would work up to.”
“Congress is eager to do things to help Taiwan,” he said, “so nothing, not even a Tsai address to Congress, can be ruled out in the current environment.”