China’s Other Human Rights Atrocity

Apart from its treatment of the Uyghurs, crackdowns in Hong Kong, and threats to China, there’s one issue not many people are talking about.

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Amid all the attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s oppression and authoritarianism—crackdowns on free speech and self-governance in Hong Kong, threats to Taiwan, and its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, among other examples—one of its human rights atrocities remains underreported.

Using their vast surveillance state, the Chinese government is rounding up Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to pressure them to renounce their religious beliefs. While enslaved in these camps—the largest mass internment since the Holocaust—they are subjected to horrifying abuse including torture, systematic rape, forced sterilization, and forced abortions.

These conditions alone should have disqualified China from hosting the just-completed Olympics Games. But China’s human rights abuses aren’t limited to those languishing under its influence. As a faith leader and a climate scientist, I can tell you that China’s treatment of the environment is a human rights abuse that threatens all of us. 

China leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions, which make temperatures hotter, sea levels higher, and natural disasters more severe—for everyone. In fact, China emits more heat-trapping gases than all of the developed world combined. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I thought India was the second largest emitter. Not the US. To be honest, I think the author meant well and made some good points but I found the argument weak and I’m surprised the Dispatch published it. Perhaps that’s a bit harsh and I mean Dr. Moerman no disrespect, but think she’s being too simplistic.

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    Narwhal

    Good article. However, I disagree with one section.

    “Although China has pledged on paper to peak its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and hit net zero by 2060, President Biden is naive to take these promises at face value.”

    My belief that the PRC will reach its peak greenhouse emissions before 2030 and hit net zero by 2060 does not come from any trust I place in their word.

    I believe they will reach their peak emissions before 2030 because they will switch from, to the greatest extent possible, coal to natural gas for their power generation over the next four to eight years. This will allow them to switch from coal imports from the US, Canada, and Australia to natural gas imports from Russia, the Caucuses, and elsewhere. If and when this occurs then the big news won’t be the PRC being more environmentally responsible, not for long anyway.

    As for their distant net zero pledge, my hunch is they are banking on experimental fusion power projects which are in the works now eventually bearing fruit. And that pledge is essentially meaningless given how far off it is.

    I don’t think President Biden is naive to publicly take them at their word on their near term pledge. I do think we and our allies must be prepared for what may come, and it may come sooner than we expected.

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  3. Pohl

    While there may be some laudable aims expressed here, and I’m all for practical measures and any progress we can make with China on any front, I have practically zero enthusiasm for climate-change issues in general and am much more concerned with China’s horribleness towards people via the old-fashioned ways of repression and physical torment. Godspeed on this lesser stuff, though.

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  4. Avatar photo
    BethFreitag

    Sure the Holocaust was bad. But the real problem was all the pollution caused by those camp smokestacks.

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  5. Avatar photo
    BethFreitag

    No, China's emissions and pollution problems absolutely should not be compared with the genuine human rights abuses that China is committing right now. And if we are going to put pressure on them to do anything it should be to put an end to the internment camps and oppression of the Uighurs.

    Maybe we could get them to reduce emissions if we made that our cause, but at what cost? As other commenters have pointed out those results could have real human costs and could give China some moral maneuvering room. Will it be any kind of victory if we can breathe a little easier here while millions of people are being held, raped, and torture there? It is our shame that we care so little.

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  6. Avatar photo
    CP

    I really appreciate the author's hard line on the CCP here. I agree that we need to push back on them a lot more than we have been, and we need to call U.S. companies to account who profit from the CCP's practices.

    However--with respect--this clouds the issue a bit, so to speak. Pollution in China _is_ awful (as it will be in any state where government is in bed with business). All other things being equal, sure, let's hold Xi and the CCP accountable for emissions. But even though the author is not explicitly saying that emissions are on the same level as enslavement and genocide, criticizing the CCP for this is something like the equivalent of chiding people who have broken into your home and killed your dog for not wiping their feet on the mat first.

    Our most important concerns (military aggression and human rights abuses that involve abusing humans directly and taking away their rights--rather than via smog) are liable to lose their effects if we end up criticizing the CCP for _everything_ it's doing--especially when we became so wealthy through manufacturing in the 19th and 20th Centuries. This is how the concept of "human rights abuses" gets muddied, so that autocratic, genocidal, expansionist dictators can simply shrug and say, "Everyone has a different definition of human rights abuses, don't you know." They can point to this sort of rhetoric and say, "See the West is simply calling everything we do a 'human rights abuse.'"

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    1. Frank Furman

      agree 100%. The author calls this an "atrocity", which rhetorical excess aside, is at best a difference in degree from every nation and every person on earth (in that we all do something to impact the environment). They're worse, in absolute numbers and in how we're trending relative to them, but they'd argue, with reason, that they're better in terms of per capita performance and stated ambition. So the recourse the author seems to recommend is 1) Generally be angry about it. 2) Reclaim innovation leadership. So...criticize them in a way that won't sway the facts on the ground, and...emulate their state-fun investments and regulatory dicta?

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      1. Frank Furman

        also, a little disappointed in the dispatch, tbh. This is probably the most click-baitey article I've seen, with a provocative lede and kinda meh content.

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        1. terikin

          Seconded - I just read Jonah's very well-articulated piece, "Yada Yada-ing Tyranny," and this piece was mostly a waste of time.

          (I don't disagree that China's environmental behavior is terrible, but I think it's profoundly unwise to call it a human-rights abuse. And the US's reduced emissions over the past 15 years have been helped by exporting our "dirty" manufacturing to places like China.)

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  7. Avatar photo
    The Bell Tower

    China has over a billion people. Those people must be clothed, fed, housed and otherwise accounted for. Putting pressure on an authoritarian autocracy that puts its people in prison camps, harvests their organs, and forcibly aborts their children to reduce emissions seems absolutely unconscionable.

    How do you know that in response to such pressure they won’t simply ramp up their human rights abuses? After all, the best way to reduce a carbon footprint is to eliminate the foot making it.

    I can’t agree with this.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Paul Reichardt

      China wants to assert itself as a global leader and the problem of air pollution is pretty obvious to the Chinese public (it’s obvious to them that foreigners notice it too), so the incentives for serious and sustained government action are there.

      One can imagine framing a global program of emissions reductions as a “space race” like technological challenge to align environmental goals with Chinese nationalism and pride.

      Of course, as you suggest, the Chinese government might just allow 10 million people in western China to freeze in the winter to bring down emissions artificially.

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      1. Avatar photo
        The Bell Tower

        Yep. I definitely understand why we would want them the cooperate but I don’t think we respect the alternative ways organizations like the CCP might to seek to accomplish the objectives we see as desirable.

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  8. Avatar photo
    Victor Clairmont

    We have not been serious in any real way about this great power competition with China.

    Either we reverse course here, or China shall be the power that stretches across the world with an iron claw.

    Welcome to the new Cold War.

    Our enemies have been fighting it against us for years already.

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