Photographer: GREG BAKER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The world no longer has the excuse of ignorance about the cultural annihilation currently taking place in China’s western Xinjiang Province. Now it has to muster the courage to act on its knowledge.

The evidence is mounting that China is expanding its campaign against the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, Muslim minority. Testimonials of survivors describe torture and near-starvation at the province’s so-called “re-education centers.” Investigative reports detail the state’s separation of Uighur children from their families and forced attendance at high-walled kindergartens. Academic research has unearthed state documents showing this campaign is deliberate and escalating.

There is also open-source satellite imagery. This week the Washington Free Beacon reported that a separatist Uighur organization known as the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement has identified a network of 124 re-education camps in the province, almost all of them built since 2016. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has identified 28 such camps, noting that media reports have identified up to 180.

Last summer, United Nations investigators estimated that 1 million Uighurs were in the camps. In May, Randall Schriver, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security, estimated that at least 3 million Uighurs are being detained. (Other U.S. officials tell me this larger estimate includes people who are compelled to visit a re-education facility but still live in their homes.)

The Chinese claim the new centers are for vocational training. Survivors describe something closer to concentration camps. One, Mihrigul Tursun, told Congress last fall that she was forced to sit for hours in a chair where she suffered electric shocks and sleep deprivation.

This is, in effect, a campaign of mass child abduction. The grim details are laid bare in a study published this month by researcher Adrian Zenz in the Journal of Political Risk. Citing official documents, he writes that the government plan is “designed to systematically boost the ability of the state to house children of all ages in increasingly centralized and highly securitized educational boarding facilities.”

So far, the reaction of most of the world can be summarized thusly: It has shrugged. The most significant protest came last week from 22 democratic nations asking UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to keep the UN Human Rights Council informed about developments in Xinjiang. In response, 37 autocratic regimes signed a letter defending China’s human rights record.

There is a genuine question, of course, about what can be done, short of military confrontation, to deter China from its campaign to detain and re-educate its Turkic citizens.

For the U.S. at least, there are three steps that can be taken now. To start, the State Department’s Humanitarian Intelligence Unit has a program to release commercial satellite imagery to the public. There’s no reason not to publicize high-resolution photos of China’s Gulag Archipelago in Xinjiang and show how it has expanded in the last three years. Such a policy would help document a crime the Chinese have tried to keep hidden from the world.

The U.S. should also sanction the Communist Party officials in charge of  Xinjiang province under the Global Magnitsky Act, specifically governor Chen Quanguo. These officials and their immediate families should be deprived of the ability to travel or attend universities in America and the West. Eventually, the U.S. should apply Magnitsky sanctions to Chinese corporate officers whose companies build the province’s concentration camps.

Finally, President Donald Trump’s administration should heed the bipartisan advice of Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, who urged the Commerce Department in April to strengthen export controls on Chinese companies that “have provided technology, training, or equipment” to aid in the surveillance and detention of Uighurs.

Like the recent actions taken against on Chinese telecom giant Huawei, these actions should be non-negotiable. They cannot be bargained away as part of a trade deal with Beijing. Chinese companies that enable China’s war on its Uighurs should be toxic until that war ends.

To be clear, there are no indications that the Chinese state has committed a mass extermination of the Uighurs. But its campaign can fairly be called a “cultural genocide” — an attempt to exterminate every shred of the Uighurs’ language, society and history in Xinjiang. There is now vast public evidence that China’s campaign has been accelerating since 2016.

For the moment, this campaign is separating Uighurs from their children and concentrating them into re-education camps. But what if party officials decide to go further? That’s why it’s imperative for America and the world to impose consequences now. Indifference to this cultural genocide is not just cruel to the Uighurs. It’s provocative to their Chinese government oppressors.

To contact the author of this story:
Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net