Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo handed the Biden Administration a great gift. The question now is whether Team Biden is wise enough to accept it. Pompeo declared at the last-minute that the Chinese Communist Party’s atrocities against the Uighurs can be formally characterized as a genocide. This gives President Biden and his team a chance to place our country on the right side of history.
Most Westerners have only a vague idea of who the Uighurs are and the ferocity with which China’s Communist Party is abusing them. China is, of course, more than a country; it is an empire. The eastern part of the country is China proper, but as a colonial power it occupies Manchuria, Tibet, and parts of central Asia. For thousands of years, the Uighurs have lived in central Asia, in a nominally autonomous region that used to be called East Turkestan but the Chinese now call Xinjiang. Communist China annexed the region in 1955, and allowed the Uighurs, Turkish speaking and largely Muslim, to live mostly in peace. That is, until recently. Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has launched a massive effort to Sinicize — or acculturate as Chinese — the Uighur people.
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