China's top diplomat Wang Yi dismisses European rights concerns over Xinjiang

China’s foreign minister defended detention camps in Xinjiang and Hong Kong’s new security law on Sunday (Aug 30), brushing off human rights concerns by European countries and cautioning against interference in Chinese affairs.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi is on his first European tour because the virus pandemic erupted, wanting to revive trade and relations strained by the resulting global health and economic crisis.

Speaking in Paris on Sunday, Wang repeated the claim that all those sent to reeducation centres in Xinjiang have been released and placed in employment - even as rights groups and families report on continuing detentions of Uighur Muslims and the increased loss of contact with family members.

“The rights of most trainees in the training and training curriculum, though their minds have already been encroached by terrorism and extremism, have already been guaranteed,” he told a conference at the French Institute of International Relations. “Now every one of them have graduated, there is no-one in the training and training centre now. Each of them have found jobs.”

The Chinese government has detained an estimated 1 million or even more members of ethnic Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, holding them in internment camps and prisons where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused. China has long suspected the Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, of harbouring separatist tendencies due to their distinct culture, language and religion.

Asked about Hong Kong’s security law, Wang said, “We certainly couldn’t sit idly by and allow chaos continue, so we enacted a law maintaining national security that especially suited Hong Kong’s situation.”

The law sometimes appears by many as Beijing’s boldest move yet to breakdown legal barriers between the semi-autonomous territory of Hong Kong and the mainland’s authoritarian Communist Party system.

Wang called both issues internal Chinese affairs and said foreign powers shouldn’t interfere.

At a meeting Friday with Wang, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed “his strong concern about the problem in Hong Kong, and around human rights, notably the Uighurs, and the necessity for China to respect its international commitments,” according to Macron’s office.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian raised similar concerns, as did officials on other legs of Wang’s Europe trip, which include Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.