The Uyghur Genocide: The Headlines Have Faded, the Atrocities Haven’t

The Uyghur people of northwestern China continue to endure horrifying persecution at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, even as global attention has drifted away, a new analysis by gzero Media shows.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim people native to Xinjiang. They regard this area as their rightful homeland, but the Chinese Communist Party maintains an iron grip over the region and is working to strip religion from the Uyghurs’ identity and transform them into compliant subjects.

“There is no God in communism,” Uyghur American diplomat Salih Hudayar told the Trumpet. So the Chinese regime wants Uyghurs to forget their religion and “literally worship the Chinese state as the highest being.”

This effort has led to one of the most extensive and brutal crackdowns in modern history, turning Xinjiang into one of the world’s most strictly controlled surveillance states. Uyghurs are now surrounded by hundreds of thousands of security checkpoints and millions of surveillance cameras. Government operatives monitor and interrogate them as they walk or drive to schools, offices, mosques, shopping centers, train stations or just down the street.

Even more chilling than the totalitarian security apparatus are the hundreds of euphemistically named “vocational training facilities” and “reeducation centers,” at least one of which has been built in every district of Xinjiang. In reality, these are concentration camps.

Hudayar said this label is accurate because “people are being sent without any charges.” Inside, Chinese agents use psychological and physical force to indoctrinate them “to denounce their ethnic and religious identity and to embrace the Chinese state.”

Between 1.1 and 3 million Uyghurs have been held in these centers. Inside, detainees have reported beatings, forced medication, forced sterilization, starvation, forced labor, rape and torture. Any who refuses to abandon his or her beliefs in favor of “superior” mainstream Han Chinese culture may be killed.

Well-Deserved Label

In early 2021, during the final days of United States President Donald Trump’s first term, the State Department—led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—formally designated these systematic abuses as “genocide.”

The Department of Justice defines genocide in Section 1091 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code; it includes “violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The facts studied by Pompeo’s team show that this is indeed underway in Xinjiang. Chinese leaders, Pompeo said, “are engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group.”

The genocide label prompted a host of nations to sanction goods that China produces using the Uyghurs’ forced labor. Media outlets and human rights organizations regularly highlighted evidence of forced labor, mass detention and systematic cultural destruction.

But today, that attention has all but vanished. gzero Media found that only 0.03 percent of English-language news coverage now concerns the Uyghurs—less than a sixth of the percentage in the months following the genocide designation.

Three major factors explain this collapse in attention.

First, China has invested heavily in reshaping the narrative. The government has flown in numerous foreign journalists and influencers for carefully managed tours—Potemkin-style trips that sanitize reality and depict Xinjiang as peaceful and thriving. At the same time, China has leveraged its economic heft to discourage governments and corporations from criticizing its policies.

Second, the current Trump administration has shown significantly less interest in human rights than the first. The cabinet is starkly different, and officials who pushed for accountability—such as Mike Pompeo—are no longer in place. With Trump 2.0, human rights issues have been deliberately deprioritized, contributing to the near-silence surrounding the ongoing atrocities.

Third, there is a finite amount of “atrocity attention” in the world. In recent years, crises committed by Russians, Islamists and others have dominated headlines. This is partly because these atrocities are more visible and accessible than what is happening inside China’s remote and tightly controlled Xinjiang region.

But the fading attention doesn’t mean the suffering has faded. The Uyghur people continue to face abuses that are almost beyond comprehension, and the silence surrounding them is deeply troubling.

‘The Times of the Gentiles’

In his article “The Climax of Man’s Rule over Man,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry examined biblical prophecies about the “times of the Gentiles”—a period in which merciless powers will rise and impose brutality on a global scale. He discussed how American and British leadership helped steady the world for decades through their biblically influenced belief in individual rights, the rule of law, etc.

But that era is ending, and in this new era, ruthless governments like China’s are growing more powerful and more determined to extend their power over more people. Mr. Flurry specifically identified the horrors in Xinjiang as a warning sign, evidence of how dark this new era will become.

But he also showed that these developments ultimately lead to the very best news. To understand, read “The Climax of Man’s Rule Over Man.”