A Pew Research Center poll of 25,000 adults across 19 countries found that nearly 80 percent of respondents viewed China’s human rights violations as a “serious problem,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Thursday.

A median of 79 percent of the poll’s respondents considered China’s human rights abuses a “serious problem” while 47 percent viewed them as a “very serious problem.”

Pew Research Center conducted the survey between February 14 and June 3 and published its results on June 29. The Washington D.C.-based think tank interviewed people from the following 19 nations: the U.S., Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, Hungary, Poland, Israel, and Australia.

The participants were asked questions concerning their opinions of China and its “policies on human rights,” among others. Pew Research Center surveyed respondents about “China’s military power, economic competition with China and China’s involvement in domestic politics in each country.”

Uyghur Turks who say they haven’t heard any news our families and relatives in Eastern Turkistan attend a protest near the Chinese embassy, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, May 24, 2022. (Burhan Ozbilici/AP)

“[M]ore people label the human rights policies [of China] as a very serious problem than say the same of the others,” the organization noted.

Protestors march with placards during a demonstration against the planned construction of the Chinese Fudan University campus on June 5, 2021 in Budapest, Hungary. (Janos Kummer/Getty Images)

Continuing, Pew Research Center wrote:

Unfavorable views are also closely related to concerns about China’s military power – something that a median of 37% say is a very serious problem. Worries are particularly acute among China’s neighbors – especially Japan (60%), Australia (57%) and South Korea (46%) – though nearly half in some non-geographically proximate countries like Spain (47%) and the Netherlands (46%) also feel this way.

Economic competition with China is seen as a less serious problem. A median of 30% describe it as
very serious, and outside of Israel, it is not seen as the top problem among the four tested in any of
the 19 countries.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) routinely violates the human rights of its citizens, most egregiously committing genocide against the ethnic groups native to occupied East Turkistan. The territory is located along China’s western boundary with Central Asia and thus is home to a number of regional ethnic minorities, including the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz people. Chinese government-run concentration camps have funneled members of these groups into slave labor conditions across factories and farms in East Turkistan and greater China in recent years years. Human rights organizations estimate that up to three million of the region’s Uyghurs have been subjected to this system since 2017.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in January 2021 he had “determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”