Republicans and Democrats Demand that China stop abusing the Muslim minority.
Democrats and Republicans are stepping up pressure on the Biden administration to strengthen its stand on China’s oppression of its Uyghur minority but are using different tactics.
This week, Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, sent a sharply worded letter to Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, chastising the administration for failing to deliver a report on China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.
On Wednesday, the House passed a Republican-led measure that attempts to force the Biden administration to prohibit contacts with Chinese officials involved in the oppression of the minority group.
The U.S. government declared China’s actions against the Uyghurs to be a genocide in 2021 and passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which imposed sanctions on China related to human rights violations.
“But since those official actions, there has been radio silence from the intelligence community about the present state of the C.C.P.’s campaign of repression, genocidal campaign against Uyghur Muslims,” Mr. Torres said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “So I’m deeply troubled by the deafening silence from the federal government in general and the intelligence community in particular.”
Last year Congress approved a measure requiring the director of national intelligence to produce a public report on China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghurs, which was due in June. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Torres, a member of the House’s China committee, said he had crafted the legislation to highlight what he called the Chinese government’s genocidal campaign against the Muslim minority.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Haines acknowledged receiving Mr. Torres’s letter but declined to comment on it.
Congress requires many classified and unclassified reports from the intelligence agencies, which often struggle to deliver them on time.
Biden administration officials say they take the Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs seriously and are not shying away from criticizing Beijing. But Mr. Torres said that he suspected the report had been delayed because of geopolitical complications.
“We cannot simply sweep it under the rug because it’s geopolitically expedient to do so or because it might discomfort or offend the hypersensitivities of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
Protecting Uyghurs is a cause that enjoys rare support from both parties on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan majorities in the House have passed several measures aiming to advance human rights for the group and divest from companies that exploit Uyghur labor.
But with the U.S. election looming, the Uyghurs’ plight has been pulled into partisan politics, as lawmakers argued over a Republican effort in the House to impose sanctions on the Chinese government over human rights abuses.
Though the congressional concern for the fate of Uyghurs has been bipartisan, Republicans and Democrats have long bickered over how best to get tough on China. G.O.P. leaders have accused the Biden administration of pursuing a feckless approach to Beijing, while Democrats have accused Republicans of trying to undermine diplomacy with a scorched-earth approach.
As the campaign season has picked up, the political standoff has escalated. This month, House Republicans voted on an array of China bills they knew Democrats would oppose, as a way to demonstrate strength on national security issues before elections in which control of the House is up for grabs.
The bill approved on Wednesday, the Stop C.C.P. Act, would place sanctions on any member of the Chinese Communist Party who played a significant role in developing policies that limit Hong Kong’s autonomy, threaten Taiwan or violate the rights of ethnic groups in China, including the Uyghurs. The sanctions would freeze the assets of the Chinese officials and prohibit them from traveling to the United States, with exceptions to attend meetings at the United Nations and participate in intelligence-gathering activities or if the official had received a limited presidential waiver.
The House passed the bill Wednesday on a vote of 243 to 174, with 33 Democrats joining and all but two Republicans supporting the measure.
Although the bill drew significant Democratic support, the party’s leaders in the House argued that the punitive measures in it were too broad and encompassed almost all of China’s leadership.
“This bill would sabotage high-level diplomacy with Beijing,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Wednesday. He said the legislation would “do nothing to help the Uyghurs, the Hong Kongers, the people of Taiwan, while making it incredibly difficult to engage China to advance any U.S. interests.”
Mr. Torres said he too was voting against the Republican action because it would cut off diplomacy with China, which he called counterproductive.
“One of the most dangerous facts in the world is the lack of communication between the United States and China,” he said. “And when there’s a lack of communication, it means that you’re one accident or one miscalculation away from a catastrophic outbreak of war.”
The White House issued a similar rebuke earlier this week, noting in a statement that the legislation “would likely cut off any channels of communication between our two governments.”
Republicans took umbrage at the characterization, arguing that the bill did not specifically outlaw diplomatic engagement with China’s leaders.
“There’s nothing in the bill that says we can’t talk to them,” Representative Lisa McClain, Republican of Michigan and the author of the bill, said on the floor. “There’s nothing in the bill that says we can’t have this diplomacy.”
Ms. McClain also expressed disdain for the Biden administration’s diplomatic efforts to engage China. “I wish words would work, but they don’t, they haven’t,” she said.
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