Why Gaza gets more attention than Xinjiang

Condemnation of Israel’s invasion of Gaza has dominated the news, mobilized civil society groups to launch protests, and drawn rebukes from world leaders.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called the death and destruction in Gaza “unprecedented.” On June 10, the foreign ministers of the BRICS countries similarly criticized the “unprecedented escalation of violence” in Gaza and “Israel’s continued blatant disregard of international law.” 

In December 2023, the UN overwhelmingly approved a demand for a humanitarian cease-fire.  On May 10, by a vote of 143 to 9, the UN General Assembly voted to urge the Security Council to upgrade Palestine from an observer to a UN member state. (The US voted against both measures.)

This contrasts with the world’s reaction to another case of “blatant disregard” for the human rights of a colonized population: China’s mistreatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minority peoples in Xinjiang Province. 

In October 2022, by a vote of 19 to 17 (with 11 abstentions), UN member states blocked the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from debating the issue of PRC government policy in Xinjiang. Of the 19 countries that voted against debate, nine are Muslim-majority and two others are nearly half Muslim. 

The relatively lower levels of global visibility of and outrage over Xinjiang versus Gaza are explained by two features of today’s international political landscape:

• the ideological fault line between the democracies and the Global South; and
• China’s ability to leverage its economic and diplomatic power to support Beijing’s foreign policy goals.

The severe and widespread mistreatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang by the Chinese government is well–documented. The crackdown stemmed from Beijing’s conclusion that politicized Islam was radicalizing Uighurs to favor separatism and to commit terrorist acts in China.

The Chinese government’s response includes the mass incarceration of one to two million Muslims, often on flimsy pretexts. There are many allegations of forced labor, rape and torture of detainees. The Chinese government is also trying by various means to eradicate core Islamic religious beliefs and practices.

There is evidence of unusually large numbers of deaths of Uighurs in detention. The number of fatalities caused by PRC officials is likely in the thousands and could plausibly be higher than the number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. 

An important difference, however, is that the Hamas government in Gaza has an interest in reporting and even inflating the number of Palestinians killed in the war, while the Chinese government has every incentive to hide the deaths of incarcerated Uighurs. 

Sympathy for the Uighurs fits into the pre-existing agenda of the industrialized democracies. These governments have a decades-old project to promote liberal values globally and to exert pressure on illiberal regimes to comply with international laws, treaties and covenants based on liberal norms. 

They expect bad behavior by the authoritarian states, and have built up systems to monitor and publicize it. They view the PRC as a habitual human rights abuser. The discovery by Western human rights activists and journalists of large-scale persecution of Uighurs beginning around 2014 was only the latest case in a familiar pattern.

There is a parallel intellectual framework on the other side. Sympathy for the Palestinians flows easily from a longstanding set of related grievances among Arab states over Western imperialism in the Middle East and the state of Israel’s alleged illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

Specific grievances toward America include anger over US military interventions in the Middle East intended to shape the region to suit US interests, resentment over US support for Israel and perceived US animus toward Islam. These Araab states have no comparable grievances toward China.

In short, the Global South has long been primed to criticize Israel but not China, while the industrialized democracies are the opposite.

This difference was already evident in the UN, where Global South states outnumber the democracies, before the outbreak of the war in Gaza. In 2022, the UN General Assembly passed 15 (nearly identical) resolutions condemning Israel, but none condemning human rights violations in China.

An illustrative showdown over Xinjiang occurred in July 2019, when 22 countries sent a letter to the UNHRC condemning China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. All were liberal democracies and US allies or close security partners.

A few days later, a different group of 37 countries sent a dissenting letter to the UNHCR. The second letter expressed “firm opposition to relevant countries’ practice of politicizing human rights issues, by naming and shaming, and publicly exerting pressures on other countries,” and demanded that “relevant countries … refrain from employing unfounded charges against China.”

Except for the Philippines, then led by the pro-China President Rodrigo Duterte, the signatories of the second letter were non-democracies from the Global South, plus North Korea and Russia.

China has successfully managed its relationships with the Global South states to suppress criticism of PRC misdeeds in Xinjiang. The obvious explanation is that these governments, many of which have poor human rights records themselves, care far more about access to Chinese investment and markets than about advocating for oppressed minorities inside China. 

Nevertheless, given the importance of religious solidarity as a force in international affairs — as seen in the support of Muslim communities around the world for their co-religionists in Gaza – the failure of even the Muslim-majority states to press Beijing on its conduct in Xinjiang is especially disappointing.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is fundamentally hostile toward religion, including Islam. Even in the 1980s, when the Chinese government was far more tolerant toward religion than it is today, the Party’s Document 19 described religion as a “primitive” holdover of pre-socialist history that “will eventually disappear from human history” and specified that “a Communist Party member cannot be a religious believer.”

Later, the Chinese government would view religion through the harsh lens of “the three evil forces of terrorism, extremism and separatism.” More recently, PRC propaganda replaces the term “extremism” with “religious extremism,” implying an unwillingness to passively wait for religion to “disappear.”  

The rollback of civic space for religion has increased under Xi Jinping. Xi’s policy aims to preserve a controlled form of Islam as a showpiece while discouraging it from spreading and ensuring that it amplifies the Party’s social and political agenda. In new regulations enacted this year, the Chinese government requires that religious instruction must be “patriotic” and religious texts interpreted “in a correct manner.”

Religious buildings must incorporate Chinese styles in their architecture and ornamentation. In practice, government authorities have for several years removed the minarets and domes from mosques throughout the country, a physical manifestation of the Communist Party doctrine that religion should have Chinese characteristics – meaning fealty to the party, not some foreign-based clergy, as the ultimate authority. In the case of many other mosques, particularly in Xinjiang, the government has simply destroyed them.

None of this – not the outright persecution of Muslim Chinese, not the distortion of religious teachings into cheerleading for the Chinese government, not the attempt to usurp the ecclesiastical authority of Muslim leaders outside of China – should be acceptable to the Muslim world.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has 57 member countries, 48 of which have Muslim-majority populations. The organization’s stated purpose is “to assist Muslim minorities and communities outside the member states to preserve their dignity, cultural and religious identity.” 

In August 2023, the Chinese government took delegates from the OIC on a government-managed tour of parts of Xinjiang. Beijing apparently achieved its presumed objective.  According to various media reports, the delegates had nothing but praise for PRC government policy in Xinjiang. 

They noted “the prosperity and development of China’s Xinjiang under good governance” as evinced by “the smiles on the faces of people of all ethnic groups.” A Pakistani delegate said the tour would “help to address the misconceptions attached with the region.” 

All but three OIC member states signed agreements to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To augment its economic leverage, Beijing employs several diplomatic tactics to win over Muslim countries. Beijing claims to be a champion of the Third World and specifically extolls the non-intervention of countries in each other’s internal affairs. 

While angry at the US, many Arabs see China as a benign outside power that only wants mutually beneficial trade and investment and is therefore a welcome counterweight against US domination.

China has cultivated media partnerships in the Middle East in which Arab countries disseminate Chinese propaganda. Consequently, media in these countries often amplify the Chinese narrative on Xinjiang, treat Western allegations about human rights abuses as propaganda or avoid reporting the allegations altogether.

In an interview with a Saudi newspaper in 2019, for example, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi served up Beijing’s spin, saying China’s management of “terrorist organizations” in Xinjiang “is essentially in tune with Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts” and “has been welcomed and supported by people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, including the Muslim community.” 

The PRC government uses its Chinese Islamic Association to reinforce the message to other governments that China is a benign and legitimate host of Muslim communities. The PRC government also sponsors conferences in Muslim countries that bring in Chinese Uighurs who speak in support of Beijing’s narrative. While destroying mosques in China, the Chinese built one in Algeria.

Such efforts help preclude pressure that might otherwise arise from Muslim societies on their national leaders to voice support for the Uighurs.

The group of states that most explicitly dismisses criticism over Xinjiang and also supports Hamas is the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Anti-Israel and more general anti-Semitic messaging from China has increased dramatically since the beginning of the Gaza war. 

On the other hand, the countries that most strongly support Israel and the Uighurs are the Western liberal democracies, including the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia, which see the authoritarians as potential military adversaries.

Tragically, human rights are becoming one of several ways the new cold war is bifurcating the political world, with each part of the world caring about certain oppressed communities but not others.

Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu.