The House voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to pass a measure that would punish top Chinese officials for detaining more than one million Muslims in internment camps, sending President Trump a bill intended to force him to take a more aggressive stand on human rights abuses in China.
The House of Representatives voted with just one dissent in favor of the Uighur Human Rights Act, hours of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a major step to press China on another major issue -- the autonomy of Hong Kong.
Rights groups say at least one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in China's northwestern Xinjiang region have been incarcerated in camps in a massive brainwashing campaign with few modern parallels.
"If America does not speak out against human rights (violations) in China because of some commercial interest, then we lose all moral authority to speak out on human rights violations any place in the world," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
The message was bipartisan with Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accusing China of "state-sponsored cultural genocide."
Beijing is out to "completely eradicate an entire culture simply because it doesn't fit within what the Chinese Communist Party deems 'Chinese,'" McCaul said.
"We can't sit idly by and allow this to continue," he said. "Our silence will be complicit, and our inaction will be our appeasement."
The drive to pass the legislation has been a yearlong effort by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, especially China hawks, who have grown frustrated at the administration’s reluctance to punish human rights abuses by Beijing despite damning reports outlining a brutal indoctrination campaign against Uighurs.
The White House and the Treasury Department had previously refrained from imposing sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for the camps for fear of jeopardizing the chances of reaching a trade deal, though last year the Commerce Department blacklisted eight Chinese companies whose products have been used to surveil Uighurs.
Tensions have since risen with China during the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr. Trump’s campaign aides in recent weeks have taken up a partywide strategy of attacking Beijing, in part to divert from the administration’s own handling of the health crisis.
