Parliament says China is committing a genocide. Why were officials planning to meet one of the perpetrators?

Labour peer Helena Kennedy and Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, co-chairs of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, protest at the Foreign Office in London on 13 February against the planned visit of Erkin Tuniyaz. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The oppression of the Uyghurs and other Turkic and Islamic minority people in China’s Xinjiang region has come into stark focus over the past five years.

First, minorities were interned in “re-education facilities” for indeterminate periods. Then came evidence of Chinese “minders” being sent to live with Uyghur families and report on their behaviour, of checkpoints on pedestrian streets, face-scanning cameras, the enforced installation of state spyware on personal phones, forced controls on fertility and the closing or demolition of mosques and other religious sites. Throughout all this, a man named Erkin Tuniyaz has been a leading official in Xinjiang’s regional government, and an enthusiastic defender of this “Sinicisation” of Islam. Since 2021, he has been the formal leader of the entire region.