The human rights organization Freedom House ranked China one of the world’s least free countries in the 2024 edition of its flagship Freedom in the World report published Thursday, giving it a negative numerical score on political rights as a result of its genocidal policies against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and other non-Han ethnic groups.
Freedom in the World assesses every state government’s treatment of its citizens during the previous year – the 2024 report is a study of the situation in each country and disputed territory throughout 2023 – using detailed categories that evaluate how much citizens can freely move, assemble, choose to worship or not, express themselves, build families, build businesses, and engage in other activities that indicate a healthy, free society. This year’s report found a global decline in freedom for the 18th year in a row, the result of, among other complex issues, the spread of electoral violence, a spate of coups and other military interventions, and deteriorating circumstances in disputed territories.
In China, Freedom House found no significant changes between 2022 and 2023 in the status of individual rights in the country. China received a score of nine out of a possible 100 on the freedom index for a second year in a row. The Chinese Communist Party received its highest scores in categories such as allowing citizens to choose their marriage partner and control their appearance, “equality of opportunity,” and “freedom of assembly.” Even in these categories, however, Freedom House noted that Beijing uses advanced technology for the surveillance and monitoring of all citizens and violently crushes assemblies meant to protest even against local governments.
Freedom House also gave China some points for an “independent judiciary” and “safeguards against official corruption,” as dictator Xi Jinping regularly purges thousands of Communist Party officials – including the foreign minister and defense minister last year – and often uses corruption as an excuse.
China received one of four points for allowing citizens to “own property and establish private businesses,” but in its assessment Freedom House observed that Communist Party leaders “dominate the economy through state-owned enterprises in key sectors such as banking and energy, state ownership of land, and political and regulatory control.”
“Chinese citizens are legally permitted to establish and operate private businesses. However, all enterprises are vulnerable to political interference, arbitrary regulatory obstacles, debilitating censorship, negative media campaigns, demands for bribes, and other forms of corruption,” Freedom House documented.
China’s score on political freedom took a nosedive in the study as a result of an additional question necessitated by Xi’s genocide of Turkic people in East Turkistan and ethnic cleansing operations in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. Freedom House gave China a “-3” score on the question: “Is the government or occupying power deliberately changing the ethnic composition of a country or territory so as to destroy a culture or tip the political balance in favor of another group?”
This photo taken on May 31, 2019, shows the outer wall of a complex which includes what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. As many as one million ethnic Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities are believed to be held in a network of internment camps in Xinjiang. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty)
“Chinese authorities have aggressively pursued policies to deliberately alter the demographics of ethnic minority regions, particularly in Xinjiang [East Turkistan], Tibet, and Inner Mongolia,” the organization observed, noting the use of “boarding schools” to separate children from families and indoctrinate them into atheist communism, the implementation of forced sterilization to limit the non-Han population in East Turkistan, and “forced labor, heavy surveillance, violence, and degrading treatment” against slaves stolen from the region.
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Freedom House also documented extreme abuses against non-Han children:
Increasing numbers of ethnic minority children in Xinjiang and Tibet have been separated from their parents and forced to attend state-run boarding schools, where Mandarin is the sole language of instruction and where students are subject to intense political indoctrination. Those who protest are subject to detention and other forms of punishment. In recent years the Ministry of Education has required preschools across China to make Mandarin the language of instruction, reflecting an ongoing push to impose Mandarin as the dominant language at all educational levels and further weaken the cultural identities of ethnic minority groups and individuals. A multiyear campaign of detaining and imposing long prison terms on ethnic minority writers, scholars, musicians, and religious figures continues to damage the cultural, religious, social, and economic leadership of these communities.
Freedom House does not refer to the situation in East Turkistan, which the government administers under the colonialist name “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR), as a genocide, though many genocide scholars and foreign governments such as America have ruled the situation a genocide. In its 2021 decision ruling the situation a genocide beyond a reasonable doubt, an independent organization of human rights experts dubbed the Uyghur Tribunal accused the Chinese government of “acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity, and inhumanity” against the population of East Turkistan, many of them committed in concentration camps that Beijing insisted were “vocational and educational training” facilities. It ultimately ruled that the crimes against humanity amounted to genocide because of the forced sterilization, forced abortion, and infanticide documented in an attempt to limit the Turkic population.