In a powerful speech at the Human Rights Foundation, Rushan Abbas, Executive Director of the World Uyghur Congress and Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs, described China’s economic repression of the Uyghur people as “financial genocide in the modern era.”

Abbas emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using financial control as a deliberate tactic to suppress and erase Uyghur identity in East Turkistan.

“This is not just discrimination—it is financial warfare,” she declared.

She highlighted the arbitrary seizure of property, freezing of bank accounts, and systemic denial of economic opportunities as part of the CCP’s broader campaign of repression. Between 2001 and 2021, there was a 50-fold increase in land transfers, displacing thousands of Uyghur farmers and handing land control to the Chinese state. Property re-registration has become a forced requirement—often impossible for Uyghurs detained in camps—leading to the confiscation of their homes by Han Chinese settlers.

“Every bank transaction is monitored, every app is tracked. East Turkistan has become a full-fledged police state,” Abbas warned.

Abbas also criticized China’s “Poverty Alleviation Program,” which she described as a front for forced labor. Human rights scholar Adrian Zenz supports this claim, pointing to the mass transfer of Uyghurs into exploitative factory jobs under surveillance, without the freedom to refuse.

Uyghur professionals—from academics to farmers—are disproportionately targeted and economically displaced, she explained, with their livelihoods redirected into state-controlled labor pipelines.

Concluding her remarks, Abbas stressed that economic repression is central to China’s broader policy of cultural erasure:

“This is not development. This is modern-day slavery.”

China has long been accused of systemic human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan, including mass internment in camps, forced labor, and the suppression of religious and cultural identity. The United States and several other governments have formally recognized these actions as genocide.

Dilshat Sultan

April 19 2025