The United States has already labeled China's treatment of the Uyghur minority as a genocide, and the Dutch and U.K. parliaments have followed suit, arguing that the Chinese government is engaged in activities including forced sterilization and destruction of cultural heritage like mosques. "We do everything we can to promote democracy and human rights in China," Wang said at a webinar organized by Munich Security Conference, where he criticized the European Union for imposing sanctions and questioned their legality given that they were not rolled out through the United Nations.
"They were based on so-called evidence. EU never communicated with China whether or not those evidence were true," he said, according to the official translation, stressing that Uyghur Muslims in China were not subject to persecution, concentration camps or genocide. Much of the western attention has focused on forced labor and "re-education" camps in the western region of Xinjiang, but China says such measures are an attempt to control Islamist extremism. Also on Tuesday, a Xinjiang government spokesman said the facilities helped radicalized Muslims "change back from ghosts to human beings."
