Before leaving office, Mike Pompeo accused China of genocide

IN ONE OF his last acts as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo declared that China’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang was an act of “genocide”. Antony Blinken, President Joe’s Biden nominee to succeed Mr Pompeo, said he agreed. In the fog of a presidential transition, America thereby adopted the harshest language of any country in its description of the atrocities in China’s far west. This will raise tensions and complicate relations between China and the new administration.

Mr Pompeo’s use of the term “genocide” was not a formal legal judgment. It does not oblige Mr Biden to take any further action to punish China for its repression of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic group. The Trump administration had already imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions on numerous Chinese government entities, companies and officials—including Chen Quanguo, who is the Communist Party boss of Xinjiang and a member of China’s Politburo. This month it declared a ban on imports of goods made with cotton or tomatoes from Xinjiang, a big producer of both, because of the alleged use of Uyghur forced labour to produce them.