Uyghur minorities in China continue to make headlines as the newest challenge they face is surveillance, according to a report in Modern Diplomacy.
In an opinion piece in Modern Diplomacy, author Vaishali Basu Sharma, an analyst of strategic and economic affairs, writes that as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to eradicate cultural, linguistic, and religious deviations from the nation’s dominant Han culture, Uyghur Muslims are subject to intense surveillance.
On May 24, reports criticising Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities were approved by a newly formed US congressional committee on China. The committee has brought attention to the alleged ongoing genocide of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, which Washington claims is occurring, the analyst writes.
China has come under growing attention in recent years for how it treats both the Buddhist population in Tibet and the Muslim Uyghur community in Xinjiang.
The CCP’s worries about the threat organised religion poses to its power have led to the development of China’s policies towards religious minorities as a whole, the analyst opines.
Following Xi Jinping’s 2016 order for Party members to operate as “unyielding Marxist atheists,” China stepped up its anti-religious campaigns. Since then, Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries have become the targets of increased persecution.
At Kirti Monastery, Yarchen Gar, Shak Rongpo Gaden Dargyeling Monastery, as well as other monasteries, Chinese military surveillance equipment have been installed.
Religious practices of Uyghurs are suppressed, and political indoctrination is stepped up through arbitrary incarceration of Uyghurs in camps run by the Chinese government, forced work, harsh abuse, forced sterilisation, forced contraception, and forced abortion, reported Modern Diplomacy.
Diverse ethnic and religious groups are considered threats to China’s regime legitimacy, and a challenge to Han-centric ethnocentrism. China’s repressive policies in Xinjiang were the subject of a landmark report by the United Nations Human Rights Office in November 2022, the analyst added.
According to the US State Department’s annual report on religious freedom around the world violations of human rights in China and Iran have become a major cause of concern in recent times.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that most oppressive nations around the world are growing even more dire. “Governments in many parts of the world continue to target religious minorities using a host of methods, including torture, beatings, unlawful surveillance, and so-called re-education camps,” he said.
Blinken underscored abuses against the predominately Muslim Uyghur minority group in the Xinjiang province of China, a country one senior State Department official described as “one of the worst abusers of human rights and religious freedom in the world.”