© Reese ErlichUighur students learn computer skills at the government supported Muslim Institute, Urumqui, Xinjiang.
In the final days of the Trump Administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
denounced China for carrying out "genocide" against its Uighur minority. He accused the Communist Party of China of engaging in "forced assimilation" and other crimes, providing a
laundry list of alleged offenses but no proof.
Antony Blinken, Biden's Secretary of State, told a Senate committee that he agreed China was engaged in "genocide."
But Zhun Xu, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College, says politicians are seeking scapegoats for serious U.S. economic and other problems. Creating or
exaggerating human rights violations is one way to "play the China card," he tells me in a phone interview from New York.
"There is bipartisan support to create an outside enemy," he says.
In 2008, on assignment for the
San Francisco Chronicle, I reported from Xinjiang, the predominantly Uighur province. It sits in China's far northwest. Uighurs are ethnically linked to Turks, and have their own language and culture separate from China's dominant Han nationality.
A few years prior to my trip, two terrorist groups had murdered civilians in knife and bombing attacks. These groups called for independence of "East Turkestan" (Xinjiang) and the expulsion of Han Chinese. The groups distorted Islam to justify their actions.
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