Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has made it onto this year’s Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People. His profile commended him for “rewriting the way the world works,” but it notably omitted any reference to the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs.
Mr. Xi is viewed as the most powerful dictator in China since Mao Zedong and has spent nearly ten years dismantling indigenous communities in East Turkestan. His methods have included slavery, forced sterilization, and destroying cultural and religious sites. While China claims to have reduced the visibility of these concentration camps, evidence from human rights organizations suggests that the repression has merely gone underground.
Moreover, there are similar oppressive policies affecting non-Han ethnic groups in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where locals are compelled to use the dominant language and their children are often sent to “boarding schools” that enforce communist indoctrination and, in many cases, forced labor.
Time releases its list of the 100 Most Influential People every year, featuring major political leaders, tech moguls, artists, athletes, and other notable figures. The magazine’s editor pointed out Xi’s actions, such as “purging generals” and “reinforcing the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance,” yet didn’t address the genocide of the Uyghur people.
According to the magazine, Xi is striving to “rewrite the way the world works,” commending him for leveraging China’s dominance in rare earth materials, capitalizing on the U.S. tariffs to establish new trade agreements, and advocating for the renminbi to replace the U.S. dollar in global transactions.
Interestingly, Xi was absent from Time‘s previous list, where his profile included casual references to the Uyghur genocide. Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s book mentioned some of Xi’s more significant failures, including criticisms of his zero-COVID strategy and his handling of Xinjiang, a region beset by severe human rights violations, and even distancing himself from Vladimir Putin.
The term “Xinjiang” is the Chinese name for East Turkestan, where human rights abuses are widely recognized as genocide by many in the global human rights community. Genocide is defined under international law as actions intended to destroy a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Engaging in just one of these actions is enough to constitute a crime, including killing, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children. Evidence from East Turkestan indicates the Communist Party is guilty of all these offenses, including the enslavement of a large number of people and the destruction of cultural sites.
In 2021, the Uyghur Tribunal found China guilty of genocide, highlighting the harsh treatment within “re-education” centers that reportedly held up to 3 million Uyghurs.
The tribunal disclosed horrific accounts, including cases of electric shocks and gang rapes in front of audiences. Pregnant women faced coerced abortions, sometimes even in the final stages of pregnancy, with newborns reportedly killed post-birth.
Despite China’s claims that concentration camps no longer exist, recent reports indicate ongoing persecution. A recent article in the Spectator shared testimony from former Chinese police officer Zhang Yabo, who noted that rather than maintaining large facilities visible via satellite, the state has begun to erase records of these camps, subjecting residents to brief but violent detentions.
“By keeping individuals locked up for short periods, the state instills widespread fear while creating an illusion of normalcy… This system effectively serves as a vast mechanism for state-imposed forced labor and demographic engineering,” Zenz noted in his findings.
