“Can’t Ignore China’s Genocide” Says Former Global Criminal Justice Envoy

Until a few years ago Xinjiang, China’s westernmost territory, was an obscure part of the world few people were talking about. Revelations of China’s continuing genocide against the Uyghur people, a predominantly Islamic ethnic minority, changed that. Despite mounting international pressure, however, the Chinese government has continued to force perhaps millions of ethnic and religious minorities into reeducation camps.

On March 26th Morse Tan, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, delivered a speech to the Faith and Law Friday Forum, a platform for U.S. Congressional staff to discuss politics and theology. As Ambassador under the Trump Administration, Tan occupied the top position in the federal government regarding mass atrocities such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Tan described ongoing horrors of the Chinese attempts to fully assimilate Xinjiang’s population alongside the Han majority as well as international and American responses to the atrocities. 

“These sorts of mass atrocity crimes that we’re talking about, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, these are and should continue to be bipartisan and nonpartisan,” Tan stated. “If you’re a human being with a conscience, the law written on our hearts, it would be hard for one not to care about these sorts of issues to the extent that one is aware of it.”

Tan explained that there are several different legal definitions of genocide according to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is guilty. One such definition is when a government inflicts “upon the people pains that make it physically or psychologically hard to continue with their lives in various ways… Under that category, one of the things that is pointed to are the sexual crimes that are being committed, the rape, the torture of various kinds that have been committed against Uyghurs.”

He noted, however, that the definition of genocide entailing the active prevention of births, was the one former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had most focused upon. This “has been done whether through forced sterilization or IUDs (Intrauterine Devices).”

Shockingly, “80% of IUD’s in [China] have gone into 2% of the population… The way intrauterine devices work is they prevent implantation of the fetus into the uterus and so they are in that way beyond contraception because they operate after conception has occurred. There are also forced abortions that are occurring after pregnancy and implantation has occurred, there is also the injections that cause early menopause and make it so that the women in question are not able to reproduce subsequently. And, there’s a lot of widowing and a lot of creation of that sort of thing as most of those who are detained are men.”

As Tan described, much of the justification for the persecution of the Uyghurs comes from them running afoul of official Chinese policies regulating the number of children. However, in contrast to the rest of China, he said that “you see a very disproportionate application of population control measures for the Uyghurs.” 

Tan also said that the Uyghurs’ belief “that each child is a gift from God and they are ultimately not the ones to control when children are sent… is referred to by the Chinese Communist Party as a religious extremist view that is spurring them to have too many illegal children. It makes one think of the notion of wrongful life, and that should not even be a legal category, but it is, and its one that is talked about much.”

Tan also argued that the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang were just one part of a broader effort to bring more of the world under the hegemony of “Han Chinese Communism.” He said that, in addition to the persecution of Uyghur Muslims, China has also revamped its oppression against Christians and Buddhists. 

Particularly appalling examples of this include CCP editing of the Biblical text. The story of the adulterous woman saved from stoning by Jesus (John 8:1-11) is one such example. In a new CCP-sanctioned version for a Chinese ethics and law textbook used in Chinese vocational secondary schools, Jesus states that although nobody is perfect, we still must punish law-breakers and so he himself literally casts the first stone.

Towards the conclusion of his talk Tan turned towards a theological reflection on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the account of the Samaritan woman drawing water from the well. In both cases the Samaritan was viewed as being outside of Jesus’ Jewish society and not worthy of empathy. Yet. Jesus broke taboos by being willing to associate himself with Samaritans.

In the same way, the Turkic Islamic minorities who inhabit Xinjiang seem very foreign and far-off to Americans. Despite cultural and geographical distance, though, U.S. Christians must still be concerned about their persecution.