Chinese authorities are undertaking "unprecedented" repression of ethnic minorities including Muslim Uighurs as authoritarian government tactics cause humanrights conditions to deteriorate across the country, a damning US congressional report released Wednesday concluded.
The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, in its annual report, said repression has actually worsened in recent years despite Beijing's dramatic economic growth and broader engagement with the world.
It highlights "the dire human rights situation inside China and the continued downward trajectory, by virtually every measure," since Xi Jinping became the Communist Party's general secretary in 2012 and president the following year.
"Of particular concern is the mass, arbitrary internment of as many as one million or more Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in 'political reeducation' camps in western China," committee chairman Senator Marco Rubio and co-chairman congressman Chris Smith said in the report's summary.
They warned that such abuses "may constitute crimes against humanity." And importantly, they stressed that the Communist Party "unflinchingly continues to preserve its monopoly on domestic political power through state-sponsored repression, surveillance, indoctrination and brutality."
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