Members of the Uyghur community and supporters organized a protest in front of the White House on Sunday urging the administration of President Joe Biden to take “meaningful action” to end the genocide of their people in China, as well as condemn American corporations such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Tesla for profiting from business with the Communist Party.
“We urge the U.S. government, especially the Biden administration, to uphold their promise of ‘never again’ by taking strong and meaningful actions to end China’s ongoing campaign of colonization, genocide, and occupation in East Turkistan,” the event’s speakers demanded.
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese Communist Party killed thousands of peaceful protesters, most of them young students, who had assembled in the capital calling for democracy and freedom. The protesters, members and supporters of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, observed a moment of silence for the majority Han victims of Tiananmen Square and used the occasion to remind the international community of the horrific abuses that Beijing has engaged in for nearly a century under communism.
The Chinese Communist Party has for decades used brutal repression – including mass killings, forced sterilization, imprisonment, and live organ harvesting – to erase the people of East Turkistan specifically. Late communist mass murderer Mao Zedong occupied East Turkistan in 1949, after the killing of most of the country’s leaders. It has since administered the region under the Mandarin name “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” In addition to the Uyghur people, other Turkic ethnic groups, most prominent Kazakh and Kyrgyz people, are indigenous to the Central Asian territory.
The inhabitants of East Turkistan are now experiencing one of the most prolific acts of genocide in the world. Extensive evidence compiled by human rights lawyers and eyewitnesses to the abuse indicate that the Communist Party, under Xi Jinping, has imprisoned as many as 3 million people in concentration camps, where many are killed, tortured, sterilized against their will, and have had their children killed in and out of the womb. Many survivors say they experienced or witnessed brutal gang rapes and sexual torture including the use of electric decides to rape women.
“Women detainees have had their vaginas and rectums penetrated by electric shock rods and iron bars. Women were raped by men paying to be allowed into the detention centre for the purpose,” the Uyghur Tribunal, a coalition of human rights law experts, wrote in 2021 after hosting a trial to compile evidence on the genocide. “One young woman of twenty or twenty-one was gang raped by policemen in front of an audience of a hundred people all forced to watch.
Outside of the camps, the use of Uyghurs as slave labor is pervasive nationwide and of particular concern in the electric vehicle industry – implicating Tesla – and in the manufacture of solar panels and cotton picking. The Chinese government sells Uyghurs as slaves on state-hosted websites in “batches of 50 to 100 workers.”
The protesters on Sunday targeted Chase and Tesla in particular over the recent visits of their respective CEOs, Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk, to China, promoting business with the Communist Party. Musk’s visit – a bombastic three-day spectacle featuring high-level government meetings and a highly publicized 16-course feast in Beijing – is especially offensive as Tesla operates a car showroom in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkistan.
“We must demand more than mere words and sanctions. The United States and other nations must go beyond lip service and take tangible, meaningful action to address and end the ongoing genocide,” Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, said during an address to the assembly. “Appeasement and complacency have no place in the face of genocide. We must condemn the actions of U.S. companies like Tesla, Chase, and dozens of others which choose profit over principle by turning a blind eye and even being complicit to China’s ongoing Uyghur genocide.”
“We must hold them accountable and demand that they prioritize human life over financial gain,” he continued. “Furthermore, we call on the United States government, particularly the Biden administration, to demonstrate true strength and courage by ceasing appeasement and taking a firm stance.”
Tesla chief Elon Musk – who also claims to run the social media site Twitter, the SpaceX exploration company, public transit experimentation group Boring Company, and implantable computer project Neuralink – is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of business with the Chinese Communist Party active in the United States. Musk regularly promotes business activity in the company and has disparaged American workers as “complacent” compared to Chinese workers, many of whom are victims of slavery.
“China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard-working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent,” Musk said in 2020, “whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement, especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.”
In Beijing last week, Musk, according to Chinese government statements, proclaimed himself against “decoupling” supply chains from the genocidal slavery that fuels the Chinese economy.
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While less vocal than Musk, Dimon, the Chase CEO, also recently visited China, a trip Chinese state-run propaganda outlets used to encourage the West’s top companies to invest in its genocidal regime.
“JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made his first visit to China in about four years, during which he met with Shanghai Party chief Chen Jining on Tuesday and attended a two-day summit convened by JPMorgan,” the state-run Global Times reported in May. In light of Dimon’s visit, J.P. Morgan sent a statement to the iGlobal Times celebrating that “deeper understanding of the Chinese market is of unprecedented significance to global investors” and China’s “opening-up” represents a critical profit opportunity for morally apathetic corporations.
At the event on Sunday, Hudayar lamented that the Biden administration, and the U.S. government generally, “has not been taking enough meaningful actions to address the existential threat that China poses to America’s freedom, to America’s principles, to America’s very own sovereignty.” He noted that the lack of “meaningful action” in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre preceded a host of other atrocities by Beijing: the Uyghur genocide, the end of capitalism in Hong Kong, and ethnic cleansing campaigns in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, among other regions.
“Weakness only emboldens and empowers the Chinese government [to] perpetuat[e] the genocide in East Turkistan … jeopardizing the very principles and freedoms on which America is built,” Hudayar asserted, adding that the “only viable solution” to end the genocide in East Turkistan is to restore sovereignty to the region and grant it the status of an occupied country, similar to neighboring Tibet, which was colonized in 1951.
In remarks to Breitbart News last week, Hudayar noted that Tesla is particularly implicated in the Uyghur genocide due to the nature of electric vehicle supply chains that run through China.
“Tesla’s demand for lithium batteries is feeding the very system that exploits these victims. Most lithium used in Tesla batteries comes from occupied East Turkistan,” Hudayar explained. “Chinese companies, including Tesla’s main supplier Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), have invested $2 billion in lithium mining and production in East Turkistan, further exploiting East Turkistan’s resources while fueling the genocide.”
“With a showroom in Urumchi, the capital of Occupied East Turkistan, and increasing presence in China, Tesla’s economic endeavors directly contribute to the brutal genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples,” he concluded. “Tesla’s actions make them an accomplice in China’s horrifying campaign of genocide.”