US imposes Visa Restrictions on Chinese Officials

By TMO Staff

The United States government has stated that it will impose visa restrictions on Chinese officials that been allegedly involved in the persecution and oppression of Uighurs in China.

The Chinese government has stated that it has been working to collect Uighurs and place them in camps, so they do not become radicalized. The Uighurs are a minority in the Xinjiang region of China and are predominately made up of Muslims. It is unclear when the Chinese government decided and started to implement these camps, that many have called concentration camps that are similar to the camps that Nazis in Germany used in WWII.

There has been footage exhibiting the conditions and practices of these camps. Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz Muslims and other minority Muslim groups are captured and placed in these camps and separated from their families. They are forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which both are prohibited in Islam. Muslim women are forced to marry atheist/communist Chinese men and abandon their religious beliefs and practices such as fasting and prayer. The Chinese government had prohibited fasting in the holy month of Ramadan and has often been caught force-feeding Muslim minority groups in China as well as forcing them to drink alcohol during Ramadan. Most recent reports have stated that the Chinese government has been harvesting organs from the people they have locked up in the camps.

The Chinese government has allowed news media to look into the camps and have said that the camps are to “transform thoughts” and deny that they violate any human rights.

The United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a statement where he called the actions of the Chinese government “a highly repressive campaign” which includes “mass detentions in internment camps; pervasive, high-tech surveillance; draconian controls on expressions of cultural and religious identities; and coercion of individuals to return from abroad to an often-perilous fate in China”.

The Chinese government’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Geng Shuang, rebutted that “there is no such thing as these so-called ‘human rights issues’ as claimed by the United States… These accusations are nothing more than an excuse for the United States to deliberately interfere in China’s internal affairs.”

The visa restrictions on Chinese Officials was made official after the United States decided to blacklist 28 Chinese organizations that are linked to the allegations of abuse in the Xinjiang region. The United States is actively working to not allow the Chinese officials into the United States and to bring more international attention to human rights violations.

Americans have been protesting the Chinese government and have been telling Congress to be active in condemning the actions of the Chinese government against Muslim minority groups in China and surrounding Asian countries.

The Chinese government continues to dismiss the allegations and claims that all allegations regarding the camps are false.