Select passages from the BBC article:
The UN has accused China of "serious human rights violations" in a long-awaited report into allegations of abuse in Xinjiang province.
China had urged the UN not to release the report - with Beijing calling it a "farce" arranged by Western powers.
The report assesses claims of abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, which China denies.
But investigators said they uncovered "credible evidence" of torture possibly amounting to "crimes against humanity".
They accused China of using vague national security laws to clamp down on the rights of minorities and establishing "systems of arbitrary detention".
The report, which was commissioned by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, said prisoners had been subjected to "patterns of ill-treatment" which included "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence".
Others, they said, faced forced medical treatment and "discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies".
The UN recommended that China immediately takes steps to release "all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty" and suggested that some of Beijing's actions could amount to the "commission of international crimes, including crimes against humanity".
...
China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.
China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.
It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.
China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".
Criticism of the report (Reddit comment):
A lot more underwhelming that I expected. Seems to boil down to a few main points:
- The XUAR has seen a large rise in acts of terrorism related to religious extremism
- To prevent this, China implemented a system of "Vocational Education and Training Centres" (VETCs) to rehabilitate and educate away the extremism
The concern then follows:
- China has implemented a system of policing that is overly vague and overreaching, that allows the government to easily place citizens in the VETCs.
- China trains their police force in ridiculous manners to identify religious extremism
- Once transferred to a VETC, the conditions there are brutal and more akin to a torturous prison.
- There are also concerns of erasure of religion and attempted forced birth control
My issue with the report, is the use of a small amount of interviews declared credible, to then corroborate the rest of the sources. These sources include the classic and long debunked Zenz, Xinjiang Police Files, unofficial document translations (long history of bias in translations), etc. Given the long history of terrible witness reliability (Nayirah testimony, SK $900,000 reward to NK defectors, Iraq's WMDs, etc), I'm still going to hold off on agreeing with the accusations of genocide.
I did some very cursory research, I couldn't really find any satisfying answers, but I think the state sponsored homophobia is tied with nationalism. Conservative politicians use the EU's support for LGBT rights as the boundary for the 'decadent' West vs the 'traditional' East
Interesting study
Nationalism and homophobia in Central and Eastern EuropeAbstract:
In terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, few organizations have done as much to promote the legal equality of sexual minorities as the European Union (EU). Especially since the inclusion of sexual orientation in the equalities agenda through Article 19 of Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU; formerly Article 13 TEC), there has been increased pressure at the European level for existing members and accession states to promote the equal rights of their LGBT citizens (Slootmaeckers and Touquet 2016). Despite similar top-down pressure, however, the degree of legal equality for LGBT individuals—not to mention social attitudes towards homosexuality—differs markedly across the region, with the situation particularly difficult in the states of the EU’s Eastern Partnership. The aim of this chapter is to suggest that the failure of Europeanization—understood here as the adoption of EU laws and values—to liberalize attitudes towards sexual minorities in Central and Eastern Europe can be explained in large part with reference to the nation. In line with the conclusions of Freyburg and Richter (2010) and Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) on the need to move beyond rationalist arguments and incorporate ideational factors to explain the relative success or failure of Europeanization, I argue that in many Central and East European member states and accession countries, homosexuality clashes with discourses of national identity, which have greater resonance among the population. This chapter will also demonstrate that EU support for LGBT equality can also have a negative impact on attitudes towards non-heteronormative individuals in states that are neither EU member states nor candidate countries, in that nationalist politicians use the EU’s more liberal position towards LGBT rights to draw a boundary between the ‘decadent West’ and ‘traditional East’ for their own social and political purposes. The analysis will focus in particular on the case studies of Latvia, Serbia and Russia to show that in each case, the marginalization of LGBT individuals is legitimized with calls to ‘the defence of the nation’.