30 United States The EconomistFebruary 13th 2021
H
aving brandedChina with commit-
ting the most heinous of crimes, the
Biden administration is confronting dip-
lomats and multinational firms with a vex-
ing question: how do you compartmental-
ise genocide? The term was first applied by
Mike Pompeo, the outgoing secretary of
state, in his last full day in the job. The Bi-
den administration has declined to rescind
it. Thus the question is likely to haunt
Olympic sponsors and athletes too, as next
year’s winter games in Beijing draw closer.
The administration contends it can
work alongside China on matters like cli-
mate change, while excoriating it as geno-
cidal because of its abuses of the Uyghur
minority in the northwest province of Xin-
jiang. But human-rights advocates are
watching to see if the administration will
stick by the accusation and follow it up
with severe penalties—or, by failing to do
so, diminish the power of an accusation of
genocide to shock the world’s conscience.
The Biden administration is consider-
ing what penalties, including sanctions on
individual officials, it might add to mea-
sures put in place by the Trump adminis-
tration. Biden officials also expect the
genocide designation to bring new pres-
sure to bear on multinational firms operat-
ing in China. One lawyer with experience
combating crimes against humanity de-
scribed fielding calls from companies with
business in China asking what the designa-
tion might mean for them. “You put China
together with the term ‘genocide’ and
you’re in new territory,” this lawyer said.
Whether seen against the history of
American indulgence of Chinese human-
rights abuses, or the history of American
reluctance to level accusations of genocide
against even weak, murderous states, the
administration’s move is extraordinary. So
far no allies have shown much interest in
lining up behind America. Joe Biden avoid-
ed the word on a call with Xi Jinping on Feb-
ruary 10th. China has rejected the charge of
genocide and warned against trying to in-
terfere in matters like its approach to Xin-
jiang or Hong Kong. “They constitute a red
line which must not be crossed,” according
to China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi.
The American approach to naming and
punishing genocide has been a tug-of-war
between morality and expediency almost
from the start. Like the word “genocide” it-
self, the un convention describing the
crime was created in the wake of the Holo-caust. Under President Harry Truman,
America signed the treaty in 1948, after it
was unanimously approved by the General
Assembly. (China has also signed the
treaty.) But the Senate resisted ratifying it,
out of fear it might infringe on American
sovereignty, or that African-Americans or
Native Americans might invoke its provi-
sions against their own government.
Almost twenty years on, in 1967, Senator
William Proxmire of Wisconsin vowed to
argue for the genocide convention on the
floor of the Senate each day it was in ses-
sion until ratification. It took him more
than 3,000 speeches across 19 years to win
the argument. Two years later, in 1988, Con-
gress complied with a stipulation of the
treaty by passing its own anti-genocide
law, which replicates the un’s definition of
the crime. The American law empowers the
justice department to arrest and prosecute
foreign officials it can connect to a cam-
paign of genocide, but the law creates no
obligation to do anything. Past administra-
tions have nevertheless been reluctant to
invoke the term, fearing that they would be
conjuring intense pressure to act.
The Clinton administration took to re-
ferring carefully to “acts of genocide” dur-
ing the Bosnian war and the slaughter in
Rwanda, prompting one exasperated re-
porter to ask at a State Department briefing,
“How many acts of genocide does it take to
make genocide?” Eventually, the Clinton
State Department did apply the word“genocide” to both those cases. That ad-
ministration would go on to describe the
mass killing of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 as geno-
cide. Subsequent administrations applied
the term to slaughter in Darfur, in 2004,
and in areas under the control of isisin
2016 and 2017. The American government
has never spelled out a process for arriving
at a determination of genocide.
America has yet to stamp Myanmar’s
persecution of its Rohingya minority as
genocide. But in light of the deployment of
the term to describe the treatment of the
Uyghurs, the Biden administration is com-
ing under intensified pressure from mem-
bers of Congress and human-rights groups
to invoke the word against Myanmar too.
Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has
said he will review whether the treatment
of the Rohingya amounts to genocide.
Many human-rights advocates argue
that the case for genocide is more stark
against Myanmar than against China. The
unconvention says that genocide refers to
acts “committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group”. These advocates worry
that it is harder to establish intent without
evidence of mass slaughter, which has not
been documented in Xinjiang, and that as a
result the Biden administration may, in ef-
fect, define genocide downward. But oth-
ers note that the unconvention, like the
American law based on it, calls out “mea-
sures intended to prevent births within the
group” as well as forced transfers of “chil-
dren of the group to another group.” Jour-
nalists and ngos have found extensive evi-
dence of both practices in Xinjiang.
Rather than diluting the genocide con-
vention, its application to Xinjiang could
fulfil a deeper reading of the treaty. Raphael
Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who invented
the word “genocide”, had studied the devel-
opments that led to the Nazis’ campaign of
extermination. The convention, which he
helped draft, aimed not just to punish
genocide but to prevent it in the first place.
As a result, some human-rights advo-
cates regard calling out the treatment of the
Uyghurs as a potentially important step
forward in applying the treaty’s principles.
According to this view, China’s govern-
ment may be playing a long game in Xin-
jiang, committing genocide not by killing
off the Uyghurs but by working across time
to erase their identity as a people. “They
have patience,” says Beth Van Schaack, a
professor of human rights at Stanford Law
School and a former deputy to the state de-
partment’s ambassador-at-large for war-
crimes issues. “You can imagine them do-
ing it in a much more methodical, slow
way, even if it takes three generations.” The
task the Biden administration has now set
itself is to find a way to honour Mr Lemkin’s
vision without blowing up the world’s
most important bilateral relationship. 7NEW YORK
Can America’s government deal with China’s after accusing it of genocide?America and ChinaGenocide aside
They make such nice phones, though