The Trump administration is considering labeling China’s oppression of Uighur Muslims in the western Xinjiang province “genocide,” Politico reports.
Tensions between the United States and China have increased in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, disagreements about trade and Hong Kong’s autonomy. An accusation of genocide would inflame those tensions further.
The White House National Security Council condemned China’s actions in the Xinjiang province on Tuesday.
“Beijing’s atrocities against the Uighurs include horrific acts against women including forced abortion, forced sterilization and other coercive birth control methods, state-sponsored forced labor, sexual violence including through rape in detention, compulsory home-stays by Han officials, and forced marriages,” John Ullyot, a National Security Council spokesperson, told Fox News in a statement. “The Chinese Communist Party’s atrocities also include the largest incarceration of an ethnic minority since World War II.”
A June report by Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation argued that Beijing started a campaign of mass sterilizations and forced family separations among Uighurs in 2017 to decrease their natural population growth.
“These findings raise serious concerns as to whether Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang represent, in fundamental respects, what might be characterized as a demographic campaign of genocide per the text of Section D, Article II of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” Zenz wrote.
Last month, the Trump administration imposed sanctions and visa restrictions on multiple Chinese Communist Party officials believed to be responsible for human rights abuses in the Xinjiang province. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said those abuses “include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, and attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith.”https://www.foxnews.com/us/trump-administration-chinas--uighur-muslims-genocide-report
into the failure of NIH grantees to disclose financial ties to
foreign governments. For 93% of the 189 scientists whom
NIH has investigated to date, China was the source of their
undisclosed support.
The new numbers come from Michael Lauer, NIH’s head of extramural research. Lauer had previously provided some information on the scope of NIH’s investigation, which had targeted 189 scientists at 87 institutions. But his presentation today to a senior advisory panel offered by far the most detailed breakout of an effort NIH launched in August 2018 that has roiled the U.S. biomedical community, and resulted in criminal charges against some prominent researchers, including Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University’s department of chemistry and chemical biology.
“It’s not what we had hoped, and it’s not a fun task,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in characterizing the ongoing investigation. He called the data “sobering.”
In the vast majority of cases, Lauer reported, the person being investigated has been an Asian man in his 50s. Some three-quarters of those under investigation had active NIH grants, and nearly half had at least two grants. The 285 active grants totaled $164 million.
Lauer also presented data on the nature of the violations that NIH has uncovered. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of NIH’s peer-review system.
Lauer said the fact that 82% of those being investigated are Asian “is not surprising” because “that’s who the Chinese target” in their foreign talent recruitment programs. Some 82% are men, and their median age is 56, with the youngest being 48 and the oldest 59. Slightly more than one-half had been an NIH peer reviewer in the past 2 years, and 41% of those under investigation (77 scientists) have been barred by their institutions from submitting a grant proposal to NIH or serving as a principal investigator on an NIH award.
NIH has been in the forefront of federal efforts to identify and block behavior that many U.S. government officials say poses a significant threat to the country’s economic well-being and to national security. Several bills pending in Congress seek to limit that threat in various ways, including by limiting the flow of scientific talent from China to the United States, and by restricting access to federally funded research that provides a foundation for cutting-edge technologies and new industries.
Lauer’s presentation also provided a glimpse into the scope of that broader investigation. There are 399 scientists “of possible concern” to NIH, he told the advisory council, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has fingered 30% (121) of them. An additional 44 have been flagged by their own institutions. Of that pool, Lauer said, investigations into 63%, or 256 scientists, came out “positive.” Investigations into some 19% came up “negative,” he noted, whereas the status of the remaining 18% is “pending.”
*Correction, 19 June, 1:15 p.m.: This story has been revised to clarify the pool of scientists who have failed to disclose financial support from foreign sources and the actions that their institutions have taken.
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
The National Institutes of Health is requiring a small nonprofit research organization to take unusual—and perhaps impossible—steps to end a controversial suspension of an NIH grant related to bat coronavirus research in China. NIH’s conditions for reinstating the funding to the EcoHealth Alliance are “outrageous,” former NIH Director Harold Varmus told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an article published today that first reported the agency’s demands.
The controversy began in April, after President Donald Trump complained about NIH’s grant to the EcoHealth Alliance because it involved researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Conservative commentators, Trump, and Trump administration officials have asserted, without evidence, that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 escaped from WIV. Shortly after Trump’s complaint, NIH abruptly canceled the grant, stating that its goal of studying bat coronavirus spillovers into humans did not “align with … agency priorities.” NIH’s move drew extensive criticism from the scientific community.
NIH拒絕了外界對勞爾和現任院長弗朗西斯·柯林斯（Francis Collins）的採訪請求，並在一份聲明中表示，NIH不與外界討論有關特定撥款的內部審議問題。生態健康聯盟則在一份聲明中指責NIH對撥款的再次擱置是嚴重阻礙了科學研究。5月份，77個諾貝爾獎獲得者聯名給NIH現任院長柯林斯寫信，要求重新審核取消撥款的理由，其中的一位科學家對《華爾街日報》說，“這些條件令人難以接受，該撥款已經被同行仔細評估並通過，這項研究將解決目前世界所面對的最嚴重的問題之一，即病毒如何由動物傳染給人類。” 生態健康聯盟主席彼得·達薩克（Peter Daszak）則利用《科學內幕》採訪的機會向柯林斯叫板，他指責稱，“生物科學不應被政治所左右。我認為這是個錯誤。柯林斯先生一遇到阻力就屈服了，白宮一施壓他就讓步了。” 曾經於2003年至2011年在NIH分支機構美國國家綜合醫學研究所（National Institute of General Medical Sciences）任所長的傑里米·伯格（Jeremy Berg）則指責柯林斯是一個唯川普總統馬首是瞻的政客。
