China

Snapshot

Since 2016, the Chinese government has carried out an unprecedented ethnic cleansing campaign against its Uyghur (or Uighur) Muslim minority in the semi-autonomous, resource-rich province of Xinjiang. The crackdown reportedly followed closed-door pronouncements by Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in 2014 to show "no mercy" to millions of Uyghur Muslims, with the goal of killing "one-third" of the population and imprisoning or forcibly converting the remainder. These shocking claims are backed up by an ominous network of concentration camps - dubbed "re-education" camps - and vast crematoriums built at a feverish pace. Millions are unaccounted for in a shocking demographic shift that indicates that Chinese authorities may have been successful in carrying out an unprecedented extermination of Uyghur Muslims while fervently denying any such thing.

Genesis

China's notoriously sealed-off government and media apparatus experienced a rare breach in 2019, with the leak of thousands of pages of files, known as the Xinjiang Papers. Perhaps because of the revolting nature of the crackdown, the leak revealed damning evidence of government policies that amount to genocide and mass atrocities against the Muslim minority. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs have been subjected to torture, child abductions and separations, sexual violence, forced sterilizations, impossible living conditions with live-in government minders, and countless other assaults on their dignity and very existence.

While evidence is very hard to come by, demographic research and internal sources show that the Uyghur population has shrunk by up to an astounding 80%. Some of the evidence include:

Over million Uyghurs are detained in concentration camps, permanently separated from their children, tortured, and subjected to forced labor and organ harvesting. See report.
Uyghur women face systematic rape and sexual abuse as well as widespread forced sterilizations and abortions. See report.
China's massive COVID-19 response may have been facilitated by the use of Uyghurs as guinea pigs for vaccine testing and medical experimentation. See report.
In the process of diversion and denial, China has built a theme park populated by Communist Party members posing as Uyghurs and conducted propaganda campaigns with Western social media personalities and others to hide the genocide. See report.
Leaked documents indicate that the government is following the American "War on Terror" template. See report.