The U.S. State Department published its annual global human rights reports on Tuesday, featuring a profile on the Chinese Communist Party that accused that government of a host of atrocities including genocide, slavery, worker abuse, forced abortions, and various forms of torture against dissidents.
The State Department human rights reports are published annually and broken down by country. The 2025 report published this week covers the year 2024. The profile on China focused significantly on updates regarding the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. While widespread evidence indicates that the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to violently subjugate the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan for decades, human rights experts largely agree that dictator Xi Jinping dramatically expanded this effort in 2017, turning the region into a high-tech surveillance state and imprisoning as many as 3 million people in concentration camps.
Following a wave of negative publicity and action by human rights groups to raise awareness of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Chinese government began to describe the concentration camps as “vocational education” centers and claim that most of its victims had “graduated” from the prisons. Survivors of the abuse nonetheless persisted in reported experiences of beatings, psychological abuse, rape, and slavery at the hands of regime thugs at the camps.
Outside of the camps, evidence indicated that the Chinese government was engaging in the mass sterilization of Uyghur women and forcing children into boarding schools where they were isolated from their families and culture, both acts internationally recognized as constituting genocide.
The State Department report affirmed that these actions continued in 2024, as well as a litany of human rights abuses outside of East Turkistan including the persecution of journalists, human rights lawyers, activists, labor organizers, and others deemed a threat to the Communist Party. The complete list of human rights abuses detailed in the report included:
arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps, prisons, and an additional unknown number subjected to daytime-only “re-education” training; acts of transnational repression against individuals in other countries; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others, and restrictions on internet freedom; restrictions of religious freedom; instances of coerced abortions and forced sterilization; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; prohibiting independent trade unions and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association; and significant presence of some of the worst forms of child labor.
The State Department explicitly stated that “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year” against the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan, which China calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR).
Years after China claimed it had closed down the concentration camps, the State Department noted that reports of “custodial deaths related to detentions in the internment camps” continued. While many were reportedly removed from the original concentration camps, the report stated that Beijing did not free many of those no longer in the camps, but rather had them “transferred to the formal prison system” by charging them with dubious crimes.
Outside the camps, the report continued, the Chinese Communist Party “monitored a significant portion of daily life” for both Uyghurs and Han Chinese elsewhere in the country, though non-Han populations in colonized regions endured more surveillance. The report documented ongoing censorship of anti-communist speech, social media posts that in any way deviated from official state media accounts of any topic, and “censors continued to block images of Winnie the Pooh,” who dissidents use to mock Xi Jinping’s portly physique.
The State Department also documented rampant evidence of slavery and labor abuse and a near-complete absence of labor rights in practice, despite the Marxist basis for the Communist Party constitution. In East Turkistan, China created a “labor transfer” program that continued into 2024, shipping Uyghur slaves around the country as part of a “cross-provincial labor transfer” regime. Workers were forced into six-day work weeks despite official regulations on limits to work hours and “overtime,” and only one legal union controlled by the state is allowed to exist.
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“There was no legal obligation for employers to negotiate or to bargain in good faith, and some employers refused to do so,” the report noted. “Most collective contracts simply restated wage and hour terms already established by law.”
Police, it continued, abused workers who attempted to strike or protest employer abuse at factories. Some protesters were arrested on “vague criminal offenses, such as ‘inciting subversion of state power’ [or] ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble.’”
Once imprisoned, individuals the state considered a liability often simply disappeared, the State Department detailed.
“Enforced disappearances through multiple means continued at a nationwide, systemic scale,” it noted. “Numerous reports suggested individuals forcibly disappeared … were subject to various abuses, including but not limited to physical and psychological abuse, humiliation, rape, torture, starvation, isolation, and forced confessions.”
Evidence for officials torturing dissidents wasprevalent in 2024 as well. The list of torture mechanisms included survivors detailing being:
beaten, raped, subjected to electric shock, forced to sit on stools for hours on end, hung by the wrists, deprived of sleep, force-fed, forced to take medication against their will, and otherwise subjected to physical and psychological abuse.
The Chinese government expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with the results of the State Department human rights assessment on Wednesday claiming that the accusations against China were “smears” not based on reality. Chinese state media also disparaged the United States as not “exactly a model” on human rights, comparing genocidal Beijing to the United States favorably.
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