Earlier this month, one of the most sanctioned men in China got a big promotion. Wang Junzheng was the party secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) — an organization integral to carrying out what U.S. officials have deemed a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in China — and, evidently, his higher-ups were impressed by his work. Despite sanctions from the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and the EU — all of which were intended to “discourage” Wang and “promote accountability” — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted Wang to Party chief of the entire Tibet Autonomous Region, an important job in another politically sensitive area for the Chinese government.
Wang’s promotion laid bare one of the central questions of Western efforts to stop the Uyghur genocide: Do sanctions actually change behavior? A big part of the answer, analysts say, is who you are sanctioning.
Wang’s organization, the XPCC, is a paramilitary force that has been
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
