ARGUMENT: Biological destructionThe Importance of “Biological Destruction” in Responsible Coverage of Xinjiang

Recent news coverage of the ongoing situation in Xinjiang has focused on whether or not those events meet the international legal definition of genocide. Declarations by both the Trump and Biden administrations, Canada, and the Netherlands have all stated that China’s treatment of the Uighurs constitutes genocide. Thoughtful and well-researched media coverage of the Xinjiang crisis is extremely important. Jackson Neagli writes in Lawfare thatthe majority of nonacademic pieces seem to presume, however, that if genocide is occurring, it must be a particular kind of genocide—the kind with torture and mass killings, like we saw in the Holocaust, Yugoslavia or Rwanda. As a recent article in The Economist put it, “‘genocide’ means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific …. But it is not slaughtering them.” 

It’s not just the Economist: There is a common disconnect between popular definitions of genocide—which typically draw comparisons to atrocities like the Holocaust—and the more nuanced definition of genocide in international law, established by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (to which China is a party) and restated in the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (to which China is not).

Neagli notes that the Genocide Convention, and relevant provisions of the Rome Statute, articulate a much broader definition of genocide than is commonly understood. Thus, Article II of the Genocide Convention, and Article 6 of the Rome Statute, identify five actus rei, each independently sufficient to constitute genocide. Among those guilty acts are birth prevention and the forcible transfer of children, both of which carried out by the Chinese government in Xinjiang.

He writes that while there have indeed been allegations of deathand torturein China’s archipelagoof “vocational training centers” in Xinjiang, which would satisfy subsections (a) and (b) of the Genocide Convention. He adds:

The existing evidence potentially supporting a finding of genocide in Xinjiang largely goes to so-called “biological destruction,” the amalgamation of sections (d) (birth prevention) and (e) (forcible transfer of children) under Article II of the Genocide Convention. An unnamed American official recognized as much, noting that these provisions undergirded the State Department’s rationale for applying the genocide label. However, Euro-American news coverage of birth control efforts in Xinjiang (for example, hereand here) tends to focus on the events as existing alongside genocide, rather than as evidence of genocide itself.

Neagli notes that given how unlikely it is that an international tribunal would hold the Chinese state or officials responsible for atrocities in Xinjiang,

it may seem pedantic to highlight the relative lack of emphasis on “biological destruction” in Euro-American media. There are, however, two reasons why the media coverage of events in Xinjiang remains important. 

First, as Foreign Policy noted, there is a pervasive misconception of genocide as limited to mass killings. Without more nuanced, accessible analysis of the definition of genocide in international law, this misconception is likely to persist, and, as a result, heinous acts of biological destruction will not be appropriately condemned as genocide. 

Second, the failure to consider biological destruction is especially concerning in light of an emerging discourse describing the situation in Xinjiang as “cultural genocide,” a term that is not mentioned in the Genocide Convention and that remains debated by international criminal law scholars. “Cultural genocide” has been named in only one international instrument—the nonbinding 1982 UNESCO Declaration of San José. Even more concerning is the description of events in Xinjiang as “demographic genocide,” another term that doesn’t appear in the text of the Genocide Convention but that, under any reasonable reading, would appear to fall within subsection (d) on prevention of births or (e) on transfer of children, rendering the “demographic” qualifier superfluous. These constructions are likely to further complicate an already delicate area of international law, with the result that the condemnatory power of “genocide”—that is, “the crime of crimes”—will be irreversibly diluted.