On Tuesday (January 19), in one of Mike Pompeo’s final acts before leaving office, the US State Department formally declared China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang “genocide” against ethnic Uighur Muslims. In a statement, Pompeo accused the Chinese state of committing “crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang” as far back as March 2017. He alleged that China was guilty of “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.” Despite being an eleventh-hour announcement of the outgoing Trump administration, the designation is expected to be retained by the new Biden government; as a matter of fact, Biden labelled Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang “genocide” as early as in August last year.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a backbench rebellion by Conservative MPs in the House of Commons over China’s persecution of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang had narrowly failed to bar the government from signing a trade deal with China. The genocide amendment to the Trade Bill, which originated from the House of Lords, would have allowed judges to stop ministers signing trade deals with regimes that are deemed genocidal by the courts; had the amendments been approved by the Commons on Tuesday, it would have handed English courts the power to decide what state actions would count as genocide and force the government to withdraw from commerce with countries that are involved in it. The amendment was devised by Lord Alton, a crossbencher in the House of Lords, as a legal instrument to fill the loopholes in the existing systems which allow perpetrators of genocide to escape with impunity – international courts are often impotent in enforcing rulings on genocide, for nation states such as China do not recognize the authorities of the relevant courts.

The British government argued that the passage of the bill would infringe upon parliament supremacy, in the sense that it could potentially open the door to the automatic revocation of international trade agreements that were approved by parliament. Greg Hands, the trade minister, told MPs: “To accept this specific amendment would allow the high court to frustrate, even revoke trade agreements entered into by the government and approved after parliamentary scrutiny. This is a completely unprecedented and unacceptable erosion of the royal prerogative and not something the government could support.” The government also put forward the argument that the amendment would be immaterial insofar as China is concerned: the British government has no intention of brokering a free trade deal with Beijing.

All the same, that the amendment bill was within a hair’s breadth of being approved by the Commons is itself a marvellous achievement in the ongoing struggle against China’s barbarism and its appalling human rights violations, when one considers the fact that only a year and a half ago, the government was defending having Huawei as one of the providers of UK’s 5G network. The bifurcation of the Conservative backbench, as clearly demonstrated in this vote, is a good bellwether of the prevalent sinosceptic sentiments of the British public. With China’s barbaric human rights violations being gradually exposed and its blatant disregard of the rules-based international order better understood, regarding China as a threat to the free world is going to become a staple of British foreign policy in years, if not decades, to come. The unanimity of the opposition parties on the issue also shows that a change of government is not going to lead to a reversal of this policy.

It is also worth mentioning that the declaration by the US state department that China was carrying out a genocide against Uighurs and other Muslim peoples has a huge implication. In the nineties, the US government was reluctant to describe crimes committed by Yugoslavia and the Hutu-led Rwandan government against Bosnian Muslims and the Tutsi population respectively as “genocide”, for fear of being compelled by the UN genocide convention to engage in military intervention. By declaring the atrocities happening in Xinjiang as “genocide”, the US government has, to all intents and purposes, crossed the Rubicon with regards to, albeit very unlikely, the use of military force as an option. As the incoming Biden administration has indicated its general agreement with the designation, one thing to observe is whether the new administration will lead in an international response to confront China over Xinjiang, in a way the Trump administration did not.

For Xi and his cronies in Beijing, they’d better be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong.)

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