According to activists and human rights experts, more than 1 million people — mostly Uyghurs, and other ethnic people — have been held in Chinese internment camps in the Xinjiang region of China since 2017. Such facilities are part of a government campaign to forcibly assimilate ethnic minorities, sometimes using torture and forced labor. The Chinese government has also targeted local officials and intellectuals.There have been mass rapes and the forced sterilization of women in and out of the camps .There has also been the separation of children from their families and attempts to break the cultural traditions of the Uyghur people.

People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture.

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, claiming its system of "re-education" camps are there to combat separatism and Islamist militancy in the region. Extremism charges are being issued on a "flimsy legal basis" in Xinjiang for "offences" that shouldn't even qualify as offences such as simply being an Imam in a mosque doing normal duties such as wedding ceremonies and leading prayers.

Several countries, including the US, Canada and the Netherlands, have accused China of committing genocide - defined by international convention as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

In 2021 New Zealand's parliament unanimously voted to name China's treatment of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province as 'severe human rights abuses' thereby seriously watering down the proposal to use the term 'genocide'.

New Zealand has taken this weak stance where we need to strongly and confidently condemn the atrocities committed against the Uyghur people by the Chinese Communist Party and put pressure on China to stop these crimes against humanity. The New Zealand government need to start by joining other countries in declaring the treatment of the Uyghur people in China as genocide.
.
The fact is, no matter how much trade we do with China, unless curbed, China will continue to export its model of autocratic government and this will have an impact on the future of the International order and the state of humanity.