The Global Outrage Machine Skips the Uyghurs
8 min read
China has exploited the crisis in Gaza to present itself as a defender of the Palestinians and a champion of the oppressed. That posture appears to be benefiting China in its geopolitical competition with the United States—even though Beijing is guilty of human-rights abuses against a Muslim community within its own territory. The Uyghurs of China suffer mass detention, population suppression, and cultural assimilation under a brutal authoritarian regime. Yet few protests on university campuses demand their freedom, nor do major diplomatic efforts seek to alleviate their misery.
How does China get away with it? The widespread indifference to the Uyghurs’ predicament exposes double standards, not only among today’s prevailing political ideologies, but also within the international politics of human rights. And it flags the danger that China presents to the very principle of universal values.
The issue is not a matter of which group—Palestinians or Uyghurs—is more worthy of the world’s concern. Both suffer, and their suffering is awful. The Palestinian cause is important and deserves the attention it receives. Yet the Uyghurs could use some outrage, too. Isolated in remote Xinjiang, their historic homeland in China’s far west, the Uyghurs have no hope of defending themselves against Beijing’s repression without support from the international community.
The United States has tried to pressure China’s leadership to end the Uyghurs’ mistreatment—for instance, by barring companies from importing products that originate in Xinjiang into the U.S. But most world leaders have ignored the Uyghurs’ plight. Many of the same diplomats who oppose Israel at the United Nations then vote in favor of China when the Uyghurs come up for debate. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, took Beijing’s position on Xinjiang during a visit to China in 2023. In a joint statement he issued with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Abbas asserted that Beijing’s policies toward Muslims in Xinjiang have “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.”
Some advocates of the Uyghurs have tried to get attention by drawing parallels between Gaza and Xinjiang. “The suffering of Palestinians reverberates with a familiar pain,” Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human-rights lawyer, recently wrote on the website of Dawn, an organization dedicated to human rights in the Middle East. “The dehumanization of the Palestinian people and the collective punishment they endure from Israel’s war have shattered the very fabric of their society, much like what China has inflicted upon my people.” The Georgetown scholars Nader Hashemi and James Millward, in a recent essay on the same site, weave a parallel narrative of colonization, repression, (sometimes violent) resistance, and more repression. That world leaders deny the true brutality of one group’s repression or the other—depending on their geopolitical perspective—“reveals the hole at the heart of the supposedly rules-based international order,” they wrote.
This viewpoint overlooks some fundamental differences. Israel was formed by Jews who saw the region as their historic homeland and who were fleeing persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust in Europe, and persecution throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The map of the area today has been drawn by a convoluted history of interstate wars, outside interference, contentious politics within both the Israeli and Palestinian communities, and aborted attempts at a peaceful resolution. By contrast, Xinjiang was conquered in the mid-18th century by the Qing dynasty (around the same time the British were marching on India) and then claimed by the current People’s Republic of China after its formation in 1949. Now the Communist Party insists that Xinjiang is an integral part of China. Beijing has imposed its political system and Chinese language and culture on the Uyghurs, who are a Central Asian people and speak a language related to Turkish. The community of less than 12 million is also under pressure from an influx of migrants (you could call them “settlers”) from the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group. Official census data from 2020 show that the Han population in Xinjiang expanded by 25 percent over the preceding decade, while the number of Uyghurs grew by only 16 percent.
At the moment, the most obvious difference between the Palestinians and the Uyghurs is that Xinjiang is not at war. But there is also no Hamas in Xinjiang to start a war. Rather, Xi has greatly intensified repression of the Uyghurs in recent years in an effort to tighten his control of the region. A million or more Uyghurs were arbitrarily detained in “reeducation camps” and then imprisoned or pressed into a system of forced labor. The Israelis keep the Palestinians something of a people apart; Xi seeks to assimilate the Uyghurs into a broader “Chinese” identity by suppressing their language, history, and religious life. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute described the strategy as a “systematic and intentional campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage” of the community. Perhaps the most chilling element of Beijing’s program is a concerted effort to curtail the growth of the Uyghur population through forced sterilization and other means. The pressure has contributed to a sharp reduction in the number of Uyghur births. The goal of these policies, as one Chinese official put it, is to “break their lineage, break their roots.”
The Chinese government denies that it commits these human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and insists that it is merely rooting out terrorism. A concerted propaganda campaign on state-owned media platforms presents Xinjiang as a model of peaceful economic development. Meanwhile, Beijing has erected a police state that has effectively sealed off the region from international scrutiny. With journalists, activists, and officials from international agencies unable to freely investigate or monitor conditions, the stream of stories and images that might fuel anger is limited, and the Uyghurs’ plight is kept largely out of sight. Beijing’s “slow, horrifying obliteration of cultures and peoples,” Hannah Theaker, a historian of Xinjiang at the University of Plymouth, explained to me, “does not produce images of destruction that are likely to seize attention in a crowded news environment.” By contrast, she said, “the horror of Gaza is unfolding in real time to the international public eye.”
Still, the evidence of Chinese abuses is substantial, and the reasons for ignoring it run deep into ideologies about the injustices of a postcolonial world, at least among some elements of the political left. Israel, from this viewpoint, is an outgrowth of European colonialism; it represses and displaces a local people, with the backing of the United States, which is seen as the successor to the empires of the West. China doesn’t fit neatly into this narrative. As a socialist state (or so many believe) also victimized by Western imperialism, China is perceived by elements of the left as less malign than Israel, however terrible its human-rights abuses might be.
In this view, China’s “ethnic policy may be misguided at some points, it may be imperfect, it may be worth improving,” but it “cannot be worse than what the former Western colonial powers have done or are doing,” Adrian Zenz, the director of China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a leading expert on the Uyghurs, told me. Gaining greater empathy for the Uyghurs “would require a total reversal of ideological categories that would crumble the left-wing ideological world.”
In this respect, the Uyghurs are treated differently from another oppressed people of China, the Tibetans. The appeal of Buddhism, and admiration for the Dalai Lama, once helped make “Free Tibet” a rallying cry that Richard Gere, the Beastie Boys, and other Western celebrities could embrace. Some parts of the far left did adopt Beijing’s line that China had “liberated” the Tibetans from feudal “serfdom.” But for the most part, Tibetans have enjoyed a sympathy that the Muslim Uyghurs, who lack a charismatic, internationally recognized leader—or a comparably long history of activism, given the recency of the campaign against them—do not.
The Uyghurs do receive attention from some members of the political right, including President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio. But such conservative backing may hurt the Uyghur cause in the eyes of activists on the left, who view U.S.-government support with particular suspicion. Within certain activist circles on the far left, “there is a hesitancy to want to recognize that what’s happening to the Uyghurs is a type of genocide,” Sang Heae Kil, a justice-studies professor at San Jose State University, told me. She surmised that some activists believe that “what’s happening to the Uyghurs might be overblown,” based on “suspicions that the U.S. media is just trying to kind of knock down China as a Communist country.”
The Uyghur cause is also hampered by the hard realities of Chinese global wealth and power. Unlike Israel, which is largely diplomatically isolated beyond a handful of major supporters, China is a growing force in international diplomacy. Many world leaders’ silence about Xinjiang has, in effect, been purchased. These governments know that China could cut off the gravy train of aid, investment, and financing if they publicly criticized Beijing’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs. Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, admitted as much in a 2021 interview. Asked why he criticizes the West’s attitude toward Muslims but not China’s abuse of the Uyghurs, he responded, “Whatever issues we have with the Chinese, we speak to them behind closed doors. China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times. When we were really struggling, our economy was struggling, China came to our rescue.”
For its part, China has aimed to capitalize on the turmoil in Gaza in order to win international support in its geopolitical competition with the United States, especially in the global South. Beijing’s diplomats have vociferously supported the Palestinians throughout the Gaza conflict and carefully avoided criticism of Hamas and its October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians, in sharp contrast to Washington’s backing of Israel, which is widely unpopular around the world. The strategy has succeeded in bolstering China’s image. A survey of public views in the Middle East by Arab Barometer found that China’s standing in the region has risen since the Gaza crisis began, while the U.S. is seen less favorably. (China’s boost seems to be more a reaction to U.S. policy than a response to anything Beijing has actually done. At most, 14 percent of respondents in the Arab Barometer survey believed China was committed to defending Palestinian rights.)
The fact that China’s leaders even attempt to champion the Palestinians while treating Muslims in their own country as enemies of the state is an indication of how steep the Uyghurs’ climb will be to win international support and sympathy. For now, advocates for the Uyghurs will find it hard to overcome this combination of ideological certainties and raw Chinese political and economic power. The Uyghurs will remain outsiders to the global outrage machine, and some injustices will be considered less unjust than others.
