Mick Hartley

The People's Republic of China "liberated" Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan  - that huge area to China's northwest – in 1949. Since then it's been fighting to crush any independence movement within the largely Muslim Uighur population, both by repression and by encouraging Han Chinese immigration. While the repression is constant, the details change. Prior to 2001, rebels were generally branded as CIA stooges. Since 9/11, those rebels have conveniently become al-Qaeda-like fundamentalists, and the crack-down slots neatly into the world-wide war on terror. 

Accusations of genocide against the Uighurs have been made before. Now in this article in the Weekly Standard, Ethan Guttman ups the stakes. He finds evidence that the Chinese are organ-harvesting on a massive scale from Uighur political prisoners – who may not always be dead at the time:

In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group. 

If the title of Guttman's article – The Xinjiang Procedure – brings to mind the thrillers of Robert Ludlum, it's not entirely inappropriate. The whole piece is a little breathless. Still, there are some chilling details:

If a Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned, Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (described as an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instance of the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infant would turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation to Uighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle the drug.