All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Uyghur genocide

The Uyghur genocide is the characterization of the series of human rights abuses committed by the government of China against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang as genocide. Since 2014, the Chinese government under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping has pursued policies that incarcerated more than an estimated one million Muslims (the majority of them Uyghurs) in internment camps without any legal process. This was the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. Thousands of mosques were destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.

Government policies have included the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion. Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%. In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%, from 12.07 to 10.9 per 1,000 people. Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide. Birth rates in Xinjiang fell a further 24% in 2019 (compared to a nationwide decrease of 4.2%).

At first, these actions were described as the forced assimilation of Xinjiang, and an ethnocide or cultural genocide. As more details emerged, some governments, activists, independent NGOs, human rights experts, academics and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile termed it genocide, pointing to the definition laid out in the Genocide Convention.

Americans have never exactly excelled at understanding other societies, and a few Chinese bad guys in James Bond movies obviously won’t shed the light we need. But Hollywood’s supine attitude toward Chinese power is a useful window into a larger problem: We need to see our great 21st-century rival clearly, and too often we see only through a glass darkly, if at all.

A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as well as other evidence now available that from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs aimed first and foremost to exploit the tensions to carry out nuclear strikes against Chinese nuclear military targets deep in highly-populated areas.

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang regime and the Joint Chiefs were allies in wanting to embroil the United States in a war with China. (...)

According to the account authored by Halperin, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, told State Department officials in an August meeting that the third phase would require nuclear strikes on Chinese bases as far north as Shanghai.

The Joint Chiefs played down the threat to civilian casualties from such tactical atomic weapons, emphasizing that an airburst of tactical atomic explosions would generate little radioactive fallout. But the account indicates that they provided no concrete information on expected civilian casualties.

Given the fact that both the Chinese gun emplacements across the Taiwan Strait and a key airbase serving the Chinese military forces in any conflict over the offshore islands would have been located close to significant population centers, such atomic explosions would have certainly caused civilian casualties on a massive scale. (...)

When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that Japan would object strongly to using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland, and forbid the launching of nuclear weapons from their territory, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke suggested that the opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan was “inspired by the Communists,” and that foreign leaders would soon recognize that the use of nuclear weapons by the US “was in their interests”.

Burke closed his argument by claiming that if the US did not maintain the threat of tactical nuclear weapons in conflicts, it would “lose the entire world within three years.” That obviously absurd argument suggests that the intense desire among the Joint Chiefs to use nuclear weapons against China was less motivated by any threat from Communist Chinese than by their own institutional interests. (...)

But more frequently than not, the companies comply with law enforcement demands. And that underlines an awkward truth: As their products become more central to people’s lives, the world’s largest tech companies have become surveillance intermediaries and crucial partners to authorities, with the power to arbitrate which requests to honor and which to reject.

But the White House cited no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement among the United States and its allies about how to respond to China’s rising power.

Mr. Biden has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism. Beijing, for its part, has pointed to the poor U.S. response to the pandemic and divisive American politics — particularly the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — as signs that democracy is failing.

Faced with an urgent competitive threat from China, the Senate is poised to pass the most expansive industrial policy legislation in U.S. history, blowing past partisan divisions over government support for private industry to embrace a nearly quarter-trillion-dollar investment in building up America’s manufacturing and technological edge.

The legislation, which is scheduled for a vote on Tuesday afternoon, is expected to pass by a  large margin. That alone is a testament to how commercial and military competition with Beijing has become one of the few issues that can unite both political parties.

It is an especially striking shift for Republicans, who are following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump and casting aside what was once their party’s staunch opposition to government intervention in the economy. Now, both parties are embracing an enormous investment in semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence research, robotics, quantum computing and a range of other technologies.

And while the bill’s sponsors are selling it in part as a jobs plan, the debate over its passage has been laced with Cold War references and warnings that a failure to act would leave the United States perilously dependent on its biggest geopolitical adversary.

Ms. Fazili said that cabinet departments had embarked on a governmentwide effort “to really diagnose the problems, understand what’s going on out there in these markets, and see what actions can be taken to close those vulnerabilities.”

As part of the initiative, the Department of Agriculture has allocated more than $4 billion to bolster “a resilient food supply chain” that would prevent or lessen shortages, she added.

The initiative was bundled with the creation of “trade strike force” targeting China and other countries to push back “on unfair foreign competition, unfair foreign subsidies and other trade practices that have adversely impacted U.S. manufacturing.”