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Uyghurs Wonder: Does the US Still Care About Human Rights in China?

After a disappointing Trump-Xi summit, Uyghurs in the United States are divided on Washington’s commitment to ending abuses in China. 

In this Jul. 13, 2024 file photo, a Uyghur protester at the White House calls for a boycott against China for its mistreatment and confinement of the Uyghur people.

WASHINGTON – Before U.S. President Donald Trump flew to Beijing last month, Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas hoped the summit would bring a breakthrough for her imprisoned sister, who has been detained in a Chinese prison for nearly eight years. 

Both the Senate and House passed resolutions just days before Trump’s departure urging him  to push for the release of six Chinese Communist Party detainees – including her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas.

“I am asking the leader of the free world to look a dictator in the eye and demand the return of my sister, a soul who has been stolen by the machinery of hate,” Rushan Abbas wrote in a May 14 commentary in The Hill. 

Trump’s meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, however, failed to produce any immediate breakthroughs for the Uyghurs’ decade-long plight, and neither side mentioned human rights even coming up. 

The news hit Uyghurs living in the United States differently. Some were bitter, but Abbas said she was trying to remain hopeful. 

“I still believe that the people in the White House and the State Department are still trying everything they can. Not everything is public – there are both public and private conversations,” Abbas told The Diplomat a week after the summit.

Abbas now lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with her five children. She’s one of roughly 12,000 Uyghurs estimated to be living in the United States. Her sister, a retired medical doctor,  was arrested days after Abbas spoke about the government’s persecution of Uyghurs at a think tank in Washington.

“It’s really frustrating, but we don’t see any other way but continuing to use our voices on every platform we have to keep reminding Americans and politicians to continue paying attention to this atrocity,” she said.

Like Abbas, some Uyghurs still hold out hope that the Trump administration, which was first to label China’s persecution of Uyghurs a “genocide,” will eventually return to its former toughness. 

But several other Uyghurs told The Diplomat that they’d lost faith in lobbying Washington, and have turned elsewhere to aid friends and family detained or surveilled in China’s Xinjiang autonomous region. 

“The fact that he [Trump] met with Xi, in spite of the ongoing genocide, is itself the biggest loss for us,” said activist Salih Hudayar, who left his hometown in southern Xinjiang as a child and grew up in Oklahoma. He lost all contact with relatives in China almost a decade ago.

“The prerequisite should have been, you end this genocide, and then come sit down and talk with us,” said the 33-year-old, who lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his parents, wife, and three children. 

Since 2017, the Chinese government has reportedly imprisoned more than one million members of Turkic ethnic groups, most of whom are Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Many have been arbitrarily detained in a network of “re-education camps” in the name of combating extremism, and subjected to forced labor, surveillance, family separation, religious restrictions, and sterilization. 

The U.S. State Department declared the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide in 2021, and a United Nations report later determined they could amount to crimes against humanity. Beijing strenuously denies these claims. 

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act – sponsored by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state – became law in 2020, requiring the government to compile reports on the crackdown in Xinjiang, and sanctioning Chinese officials thought to be responsible for human rights abuses there. Two years later, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act came into force, aiming to block the import of goods manufactured through forced labor from Xinjiang. The law also ordered the creation of a list of entities manufacturing merchandise with forced labor. 

However, the labor law’s entities list has not been updated since Trump took office last January. Following the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, official reports from the White House and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no mention of Chinese human rights issues, including that of the Uyghurs, being discussed. Instead, the U.S. president appears to have struck a friendlier tone toward his Chinese counterpart, recently calling leader Xi Jinping a “friend” and a “good man” on June 3. 

Before the trip, the Chinese Embassy in Washington had taken to social media to warn the United States not to challenge China on the issue by declaring four “red lines in China-US relations,” among them “democracy and human rights.” 

“Why doesn’t the United States admit that, hey, we are scared of China, and we cannot do anything? Just say it,” said Uyghur journalist Tahir Imin, 45. More than 20 of Imin’s relatives are imprisoned in China. 

He acknowledged that the U.S. government has been the country most supportive of the Uyghur cause, but expressed frustration that in recent years some lawmakers and activists have made optimistic but redundant statements “as if liberation day is coming next week.” These fed the diaspora false hope, he said. 

“We became disappointed when we were overwhelmingly dependent on somebody who doesn’t know us, whose plans may change over time,” said Imin, referring to U.S. lawmakers.  

Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who led the Senate resolution alongside Senator Dick Durbin of the Democrats, told The Diplomat on May 19 that he had not received a detailed readout on “the discussion the president was able to have in favor of releasing the detainees.” 

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said he had hoped Trump would use the opportunity to discuss the release of political prisoners with........

© The Diplomat