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https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-its-allies-sanction-china-over-treatment-of-uyghurs-in-collective-action-11616440582

The U.S., Canada and allies in Europe leveled sanctions against Chinese officials over the repression of mainly Muslim Uyghurs in a coordinated blacklisting that is part of Biden administration efforts to forge coalitions against Beijing.

Monday’s barrage of sanctions from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the European Union target current and former officials and a paramilitary organization involved in carrying out the mass detention campaign against Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

For the EU and the U.K., the decision marks the first use of human rights sanctions against China since the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called out China for “industrial-scale human rights abuses” against the Uyghurs.

The U.S., which has applied similar penalties over the past year, has gone further than its allies in labeling China’s actions genocide.

China has dismissed the allegations of abuses and immediately retaliated Monday for the EU action by blacklisting 10 European lawmakers, as well as several think tanks and academics, proscribing them from business with or travel to China. A Chinese foreign ministry statement said the EU move was “based on nothing but lies and disinformation,” meddles in China’s internal affairs and undermines China-EU relations.

The allied move—which freezes any assets held by those targeted and bans their travel—is the type of collective action the Biden administration says the U.S. and its allies need to take to counter Beijing as it applies increasingly coercive measures at home and abroad.

“A united trans-Atlantic response sends a strong signal to those who violate or abuse international human rights,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was arriving in Brussels on Monday for discussions with the EU and the NATO security alliance.

The Biden administration has placed working with allies and like-minded partners at the forefront of its China strategy. One of President Biden’s first multicountry meetings was with the leaders of Australia, India and Japan, three countries struggling against China over territory or facing economic punishment. At their meeting this month, the so-called Quad countries agreed to coordinate on vaccine production and distribution to vie with China’s vaccine diplomacy.

Separately on Monday, Mr. Blinken and the foreign ministers of Canada and the U.K. said in a statement that the evidence of China’s abuses in Xinjiang is overwhelming; it cited satellite imagery, Chinese government documents and eyewitness accounts. The foreign ministers of Australia and New Zealand then issued a separate statement in support of the sanctions. The countries are members of the “five-eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance.

In addition to the Chinese targeted on Monday, the U.S. and EU also sanctioned senior figures in Myanmar’s military for last month’s coup. The EU added a Libyan militia and its leader to its blacklists that the U.S. had previously designated, and sanctioned two North Korean officials under its three-month-old human rights sanctions regime.

While the Biden administration coordinated with the EU on sanctions against Russia earlier this month over the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, moving together against China is more challenging and delicate, given its economic heft.

The EU and the U.K. are both seeking to boost commercial ties with China, with its large market and deep pool of investment. Both are trying to maintain a delicate—and frequently divisive—balance by confronting China on human rights and other issues while pursuing trade and investment.

The U.K.’s post-Brexit foreign policy blueprint, laid out last week, called China an important commercial partner, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned against a cold war with Beijing. But Britain has also opened its doors to as many as five million Hong Kong residents after Beijing clamped a new security law on the former U.K. colony.

Canada, meanwhile, is in the crosshairs of the U.S.-China dispute, with two of its citizens detained for more than two years and recently tried on espionage charges—which Ottawa has said is in retaliation for Canada’s role in the arrest of Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer at the behest of U.S. authorities.

Starting with the Trump administration, the U.S. began imposing sanctions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang and Hong Kong. The sanctions, however, haven’t deterred Beijing, which has continued its clampdown in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and many of the blacklisted Chinese officials are believed to have few assets overseas.

The Biden administration sees particular need for collective action with sanctions to ensure they are effective and, if less financially punitive, at least to create a diplomatic cordon of censure, according to U.S. officials.

“Nowhere in the world have unilateral sanctions actually led to a democratic transition in the absence of a multilateral and coordinated approach,” a senior administration official said.

Monday’s actions by the EU, U.K. and Canada listed four current and former senior Xinjiang officials involved in directing police and security work in Xinjiang, citing them for human rights violations, implementing forced labor programs and mass detention programs.

Also blacklisted was the public security division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organization that operates detention centers and runs a network of cotton and other farms rights groups say use forced Uyghur labor.

The U.S. also sanctioned two of the officials, having previously blacklisted the two others under human rights sanctions, as well as the Construction Corps.

In its retaliation against the EU, Beijing blacklisted a leading critic in Europe, Germany’s Green lawmaker Reinhard Bütikofer, who is in the European Parliament, and a Dutch lawmaker Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a leading advocate of the EU’s new human rights sanctions.

The Dutch government summoned the Chinese ambassador over the move. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, condemned China’s response as “regrettable and unacceptable,” and it was condemned by a range of European Parliament lawmakers, who will need to approve a China-EU investment accord finalized in December.

The E.U. was first to move, saying early Monday that it would hit four Chinese officials and a public security bureau with travel bans and asset freezes — its most significant measures since an arms embargo following the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square.

China quickly responded, leveling similar measures against a list of its European critics.

Not long after, the United States, Canada and Britain jumped in. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced midday that the United States will add two names to its Xinjiang sanctions list.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/xinjiang-sanctions-european-union/2021/03/22/1b0d69aa-8b0a-11eb-a33e-da28941cb9ac_story.html

I hope everyone notices how ridiculously insulting it is that they will sanction a handful of people but trade must not be affected.

budaatum:
I hope everyone notices how ridiculously insulting it is that they will sanction a handful of people but trade must not be affected.

Hahaha... the biggest joke. You know many Europeans need chinese money and trade to resuscitate the dying economy, they dare not touch that angle. China is not Africa, where bombs and rockets would have been flying

If there is anything China hates......It is Criticism

They love it when you talks and write nicely about them, if you chides them, they will deny you entry into their country. It way of man kind.


Open praises for monetary reward

Olominira:
Hahaha... the biggest joke. You know many Europeans need chinese money and trade

China's economy rests squarely on Euro and North American desire for their cheap labor. Their labor now poses too high a risk to be worth it.

China...where bombs and rockets would have been flying

China would plunge back into the stone age if they made the slightest move towards that. They pose no real military threat to America or its Euro allies.