Chinese official in Xinjiang slams UK genocide declaration
A spokesperson for the Xinjiang region called accusations of genocide "counter to the facts" as China came under more pressure this week over its treatment of the Uighur ethnic group in the remote border area.The British Parliament approved a nonbinding motion on Thursday (Apr 22) having said that China's policies amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.
Human Right Watch appealed to the UN earlier in the week to investigate the allegations of crimes against humanity. "The motion adopted by the British side was totally groundless," Xu Guixiang, the deputy director-general of the Communist Party's publicity department in Xinjiang, said on Friday.
"Your choice was made based on remarks by some politicians, some so-called academic institutes, some so-called specialists and scholars plus some so-called witnesses." In recent years, an estimated 1 million people or even more have been confined in camps in Xinjiang, according to foreign governments and researchers.
Most are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group, Authorities have been accused of imposing forced labor, systematic forced contraceptive and torture. The Chinese government has flatly rejected the allegations. It has characterized the camps, which it says are now closed, as vocational training centers to instruct Oriental, job skills and the law to support economic development and combat extremism. China saw a wave of Xinjiang-related terrorist attacks through 2016.
Xu said that hotels in Kashgar, a historic Silk Road city in Xinjiang, were empty a few years ago and entrepreneurs unwilling to get as tourism fell off because of terrorism fears. He said the government's policies have restored a hard-won stability. The Foreign Ministry labeled the genocide allegations "a monstrous lie concocted by international anti-China forces".
