Trump’s opponents of China are also pro-Uyghur.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of two outspoken critics of China’s crackdown on Uyghurs to serve in top foreign-policy roles in the next administration has been welcomed by Uyghur advocates. But it could also serve as a future flash point with the president-elect.

Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of state, and Rep. Mike Waltz, his national security advisor, have both sought to use their clout as lawmakers to condemn China’s persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in its northwestern Xinjiang region.

“Having engaged with both offices, I’m hopeful for the future,” said Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer as well as a senior legal and policy advisor with the Strategic Litigiation Project at the Atlantic Council. Asat is of Uyghur heritage, and her brother, Ekpar Asat, is imprisoned in China. “Their strong records in leading and sponsoring legislation on Uyghur rights speak for themselves.”

In 2021, Waltz called for the United States to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics the following year over China’s human rights record, likening the event to the infamous 1936 Summer Games that were held in Nazi Germany.

Rubio has long been a champion of human rights in China. He co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021, which assumes that all goods from Xinjiang are produced using forced labor, unless proven otherwise, and bars them from being imported to the United States. It is widely regarded as the U.S. government’s most assertive action to date to address the repression in Xinjiang, which has seen more than a million people detained since 2017. The Chinese government stopped publishing data on the number of prosecutions in Xinjiang in 2021.

“He is a sturdy, sober member of Congress who has worked for a long time on China and human rights issues,” said Sophie Richardson, who served as the China director at Human Rights Watch from 2006 to 2023.

Beijing sanctioned Rubio in 2020 alongside Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and others in response to the United States sanctioning Chinese officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Although the first Trump administration took a number of important steps to respond to China’s crackdown in Xinjiang, including issuing sanctions and designating it as a genocide, such actions seem to have been driven by administration officials as opposed to the president himself. Rubio’s and Waltz’s strong convictions on human rights in China could thus prove to be a point of tension in a second Trump administration.

John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisors, said in his book The Room Where It Happened that during a 2019 meeting between Trump and Xi, at which only the two leaders and their interpreters were present, the U.S. president told his Chinese counterpart that his efforts to incarcerate the Uyghurs was “exactly the right thing to do,” according to the U.S. interpreter. Trump has denied the allegation.

In 2020, Trump told Axios that he had held off imposing U.S. Treasury sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the crackdown out of concern that doing so could disrupt ongoing trade talks. At the time, the Trump administration had put export restrictions on Chinese government entities and Chinese companies deemed complicit in the abuses in Xinjiang as well as visa restrictions on Chinese Communist Party officials deemed responsible, but it had not yet taken the step of applying harsher Treasury Department sanctions.

Trump had also that week signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which requires the president to file a report to Congress identifying all individuals responsible for the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, in order to determine future sanctions. 

“There were certainly people in the administration who I think cared about these issues deeply,” said Richardson, who is now a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, “but I think the president’s posture certainly undercut the credibility that the administration could expect on human rights.”

Another wrinkle for Rubio and Waltz is close Trump ally Elon Musk, whose electric vehicle company Tesla has a “gigafactory” in Shanghai and opened a showroom in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in 2022. Rubio condemned the latter at the time, writing on X, “Nationless corporations are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide and slave labor in the region.”