There was just one problem: the indigenous people – Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples – were the chief obstacle to Chinese hegemony over the 625,000-square-mile territory (almost as large as Alaska). Within the first few years, the Chinese executed about 150,000 “enemies of China” – but that was just the beginning of this ongoing genocide.
Chairman Mao quickly began moving ethnic Chinese into “Xinjiang Province,” increasing the Chinese population from 4% in 1949 to 33% by 1964 – and beginning to exploit its vast mineral wealth – lithium, beryllium, magnesium, silicon, aluminum, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, silver, gold, and lead – as well as its massive oil and gas resources.
Sadly, the Chinese were far from generous with the indigenous peoples whose land it had stolen. The cultural, social, and religious differences between the colonizers and the colonized posed a huge demographic hurdle until the Peoples’ Republic had greatly increased its military and economic presence.
The world, meanwhile, was preoccupied and paid little attention until recently, when Westerners began to realize that China had cornered the lithium-ion battery market and thus taken the lead in production of electric vehicles and solar panels.
While the Chinese have never really let up on their persecution of the indigenous Turkic peoples, the campaign of colonization, massacres, assimilation, and occupation escalated into full-scale genocide after 2014, according to Uyghur independence leader Salih Hudayar.
The assaults included mass internment of over 3 million Turkic peoples in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor camps; mass sterilization of Uyghur and other Turkic women; destruction of over 16,000 cultural and religious sites; widespread surveillance; systematic rape; and forced separation of over 880,000 Uyghur children from their families.
China’s communist government has repeatedly ignored protests from the U.S. government, more than a dozen Western parliaments, and the United Nations – while continuing to sell products of genocide to willing Western corporations. China’s mockery of the wimpy West may be best exhibited by its reelection in 2023 to the UN Human Rights Council.
President Nixon had made no demands concerning the Uyghurs and their fellows when he visited China in 1972, nor had President Carter when he opened up diplomatic relations in 1979. The big jump, however, came when President Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Council and awarded the genocidal nation Most Favored Nation status in his final year in office.
Only recently has the West begun to recognize China’s near-total control of critical minerals markets as a threat to global security – and to focus on its mistreatment of these indigenous peoples as a cause celebre.
According to a January 20, 2025, State Department fact sheet, during the Biden years the Chinese government continued its detention and indoctrination campaign against the remaining Turkic population in Xinjiang, including abducting and detaining more than a million Uyghurs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in as many as 1,200 state-run internment camps.
Global Rights Compliance counted 77 companies and downstream manufacturers of critical minerals-based products (lithium, titanium, beryllium and magnesium) operating in the occupied territory that were relying on forced labor. But Chinese geologists just uncovered a huge zirconium deposit in Xinjiang – yet another strategic mineral valuable for China’s high-tech military.
Zirconium alloys are prized for their exceptional resistance to heat, corrosion, and neutron absorption and are fundamental in manufacturing scramjet combustion chambers, thermal protection tiles, nose cones, and guidance components. A special use is as cladding fuel rods in nuclear reactors.
China continues to profit greatly from lands ceded by Stalin (and stolen from the East Turkistan government) over 75 years ago – but only because they have conducted a 75-year campaign of genocide and subjugation against its indigenous Muslim peoples.
Dr. Mamtimin Ala, an Australian Uyghur serving as the President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, says that China views the assimilation and genocide of all Turkic nationalities in East Turkistan as a “necessary and final solution” to the East Turkistan problem. As such, the Chinese continue relocating colonists into the region as they continue to decimate the indigenous populations.
Recognizing that no military help is coming to rescue the suffering millions, the Uyghurs’ best hopes remain in either collapse of the Chinese communist government or a total boycott by Western nations of products manufactured in Xinjiang and of raw materials mined by slave labor there.
Such a boycott is not without historical precedent.
A year before South Africa began enforcing its Apartheid policy in 1948, India had appealed to the UN complaining that South African Indians were wrongfully racially segregated and treated unjustly. In 1959 the British government, at the request of the African National Congress, committed to demanding the fall of Apartheid, and in 1968 the United Nations adopted its first resolution supporting sanctions against the Apartheid South African regime.
Finally, in 1980, the UN General Assembly issued a resolution urging all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa – and yet the lure of money led many entertainers and others to ignore the oppression of Blacks and Indians on the Horn of Africa. Yet not until 1994 did the Apartheid government fall.
The Uyghurs and their fellow East Turkistanis are still waiting on the West to deem their lives more valuable than the products of Chinese slave labor and genocide.
But help may be on the way.
On April 15, the Trump administration initiated an investigation into imports of processed critical minerals and their derivate products – furthering efforts begun earlier in the decade. The White House is evaluating national security risks posed by import reliance and assessing domestic mining and refining potential. Separate initiatives seek to permit and open (or reopen) American mines – all with a focus on reducing import reliance, and dependence, on Chinese goods.
European governments, too, are increasingly aware that cheap Chinese goods (notably electric vehicles) – coveted as a hedge against climate change – may not be worth the benefits. Even so, the focus on stopping China remains largely economic, with human rights concerns on the back burner.
China’s ability to hold the world hostage to its compromised minerals industry may be the chief hindrance to justice for the Uyghurs and their fellows. Reducing that dependence is critical to anyone seeking to pressure the Chinese to end their genocidal exploitation of a people who never wanted to be part of China in the first place.
Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. This article was first published HERE
Chairman Mao quickly began moving ethnic Chinese into “Xinjiang Province,” increasing the Chinese population from 4% in 1949 to 33% by 1964 – and beginning to exploit its vast mineral wealth – lithium, beryllium, magnesium, silicon, aluminum, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, silver, gold, and lead – as well as its massive oil and gas resources.
Sadly, the Chinese were far from generous with the indigenous peoples whose land it had stolen. The cultural, social, and religious differences between the colonizers and the colonized posed a huge demographic hurdle until the Peoples’ Republic had greatly increased its military and economic presence.
The world, meanwhile, was preoccupied and paid little attention until recently, when Westerners began to realize that China had cornered the lithium-ion battery market and thus taken the lead in production of electric vehicles and solar panels.
While the Chinese have never really let up on their persecution of the indigenous Turkic peoples, the campaign of colonization, massacres, assimilation, and occupation escalated into full-scale genocide after 2014, according to Uyghur independence leader Salih Hudayar.
The assaults included mass internment of over 3 million Turkic peoples in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor camps; mass sterilization of Uyghur and other Turkic women; destruction of over 16,000 cultural and religious sites; widespread surveillance; systematic rape; and forced separation of over 880,000 Uyghur children from their families.
China’s communist government has repeatedly ignored protests from the U.S. government, more than a dozen Western parliaments, and the United Nations – while continuing to sell products of genocide to willing Western corporations. China’s mockery of the wimpy West may be best exhibited by its reelection in 2023 to the UN Human Rights Council.
President Nixon had made no demands concerning the Uyghurs and their fellows when he visited China in 1972, nor had President Carter when he opened up diplomatic relations in 1979. The big jump, however, came when President Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Council and awarded the genocidal nation Most Favored Nation status in his final year in office.
Only recently has the West begun to recognize China’s near-total control of critical minerals markets as a threat to global security – and to focus on its mistreatment of these indigenous peoples as a cause celebre.
According to a January 20, 2025, State Department fact sheet, during the Biden years the Chinese government continued its detention and indoctrination campaign against the remaining Turkic population in Xinjiang, including abducting and detaining more than a million Uyghurs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in as many as 1,200 state-run internment camps.
Global Rights Compliance counted 77 companies and downstream manufacturers of critical minerals-based products (lithium, titanium, beryllium and magnesium) operating in the occupied territory that were relying on forced labor. But Chinese geologists just uncovered a huge zirconium deposit in Xinjiang – yet another strategic mineral valuable for China’s high-tech military.
Zirconium alloys are prized for their exceptional resistance to heat, corrosion, and neutron absorption and are fundamental in manufacturing scramjet combustion chambers, thermal protection tiles, nose cones, and guidance components. A special use is as cladding fuel rods in nuclear reactors.
China continues to profit greatly from lands ceded by Stalin (and stolen from the East Turkistan government) over 75 years ago – but only because they have conducted a 75-year campaign of genocide and subjugation against its indigenous Muslim peoples.
Dr. Mamtimin Ala, an Australian Uyghur serving as the President of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, says that China views the assimilation and genocide of all Turkic nationalities in East Turkistan as a “necessary and final solution” to the East Turkistan problem. As such, the Chinese continue relocating colonists into the region as they continue to decimate the indigenous populations.
Recognizing that no military help is coming to rescue the suffering millions, the Uyghurs’ best hopes remain in either collapse of the Chinese communist government or a total boycott by Western nations of products manufactured in Xinjiang and of raw materials mined by slave labor there.
Such a boycott is not without historical precedent.
A year before South Africa began enforcing its Apartheid policy in 1948, India had appealed to the UN complaining that South African Indians were wrongfully racially segregated and treated unjustly. In 1959 the British government, at the request of the African National Congress, committed to demanding the fall of Apartheid, and in 1968 the United Nations adopted its first resolution supporting sanctions against the Apartheid South African regime.
Finally, in 1980, the UN General Assembly issued a resolution urging all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa – and yet the lure of money led many entertainers and others to ignore the oppression of Blacks and Indians on the Horn of Africa. Yet not until 1994 did the Apartheid government fall.
The Uyghurs and their fellow East Turkistanis are still waiting on the West to deem their lives more valuable than the products of Chinese slave labor and genocide.
But help may be on the way.
On April 15, the Trump administration initiated an investigation into imports of processed critical minerals and their derivate products – furthering efforts begun earlier in the decade. The White House is evaluating national security risks posed by import reliance and assessing domestic mining and refining potential. Separate initiatives seek to permit and open (or reopen) American mines – all with a focus on reducing import reliance, and dependence, on Chinese goods.
European governments, too, are increasingly aware that cheap Chinese goods (notably electric vehicles) – coveted as a hedge against climate change – may not be worth the benefits. Even so, the focus on stopping China remains largely economic, with human rights concerns on the back burner.
China’s ability to hold the world hostage to its compromised minerals industry may be the chief hindrance to justice for the Uyghurs and their fellows. Reducing that dependence is critical to anyone seeking to pressure the Chinese to end their genocidal exploitation of a people who never wanted to be part of China in the first place.
Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. This article was first published HERE
2 comments:
Oh, Come On, the Chinese can't be brutal settler-colonisers, nor can Arabs....
There is certainly a lot going on in the world that I for one was ignorant about. Thank you for the insight.
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