Genocide Designations Aren’t Enough to Stop Mass Atrocities

While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic and widespread violence in Xinjiang, states, multilateral organizations, corporations and many civil society groups have only recently begun considering their response to these grave violations. For more than a year, much of the public debate on China’s treatment of Uyghurs has focused not on what can be done in the face of such brutality, but how that brutality should be described: Is this a genocide or not? Concrete efforts to end the violence—or even meaningful debates on what those efforts should look like—have been harder to spot.