China is back on the agenda in Westminster, with Liz Truss expected to make a speech on the subject later this month. This week, MPs have been rocked by the news that the Foreign Office has asked the governor of the Xinjiang region for talks. Erkin Tuniyaz – who has been sanctioned by the US – is planning to visit the UK next week, followed by trips to other European countries to meet ‘stakeholders’ to ‘discuss the situation in Xinjiang.’
Mr S scarcely need remind his readers about the region’s appalling treatment of Uyghur Muslims. Survivors of detention camps in Xinjiang have testified that prisoners there are routinely raped, tortured and forcibly sterilised. In 2021, when Tuniyaz was sanctioned, the US Treasury said that during his tenure ‘more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups have been detained in Xinjiang.’ That same year the House of Commons voted to declare the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of them as a genocide, but, in typical style, the Foreign Office has always resisted this description.
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