VOC Scholar Links Sexual Violence Against Uyghurs to Beijing’s Campaign of Attritional Genocide
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New research from a leading China expert details widespread sexual abuse and torture against Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s mass internment camps. According to analysis by Dr. Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), systemic sexual violence in Xinjiang may be conceptualized as a component of Beijing’s long-term strategy to erase Uyghur culture through forced assimilation and attritional genocide.
Dr. Zenz’s research, published in the Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art, draws on new and existing survivor testimony as well as the Xinjiang Police Files—a cache of internal Chinese files analyzed and published by VOC in partnership with a media consortium including the BBC—to detail instances of sexual violence in the camps including rape, forced marriages, genital torture, forced sterilization, sexual assault, and forced abortions.
Eyewitness and victim accounts analyzed in the article depict brutal acts such as guards gang-raping chained female inmates, guards forcing men to rape other prisoners, and men outside the camps paying to “sleep with the most attractive detainees.”
“The CCP has shown that it is targeting the Uyghur people for elimination by suppressing their intellectual, spiritual, and cultural identity including through mass internment, sexual assault, forced sterilization, and attacks on reproductive capacity,” said VOC’s Dr. Adrian Zenz. “The evidence and witness testimony suggest that these are not isolated incidents, but rather a widespread, systemic component to a mass atrocity as part of Beijing’s strategy of population optimization and attritional genocide.”
As the report documents, sexual violence against the Uyghurs extends beyond China’s internment camps. Beijing forces Uyghur women into marriages with Han Chinese men to dilute their ethnic bloodline, thereby eroding Uyghur identity, tearing apart families, and inhibiting the inter-generational transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge.
Beijing’s subjugation of the Uyghurs is driven by ethno-nationalist plans for a “national rejuvenation,” under General Secretary Xi Jinping, which emphasize the dominance of Han culture, and pursue coercive “Sinicization” of ethnic cultural practices through state policies. Its tactics—cataloged in official party documents, Chinese national policy, and statements from central government leaders—are directed from the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
According to Xi, population proportion and population security are “important foundations for long-term peace and stability.” Past VOC research papers and Congressional testimony have linked the mass atrocities in Xinjiang to political paranoia and an “exaggerated threat perception” of the Uyghur people as “untrustworthy” and a “human threat” to social stability and the dominance of the Han majority.
“The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation solemnly stands with the Uyghur people who have long been victims of the CCP’s systemic campaign of violence,” said VOC President and CEO Dr. Eric Patterson. “Subjugation of the Uyghurs is deeply rooted in the Chinese Communist Party system and will continue unless international action is taken to stop these grave human rights abuses.”
For press inquiries contact Lily McHale at lily.mchale@victimsofcommunism.orgor (202) 629-9500.
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