Trump says he opted against punishing China for its internment of 1 million Muslims to avoid jeopardizing a trade deal he long sought
- Trump said in an Axios interview he opted against enacting sanctions on China for its crackdown on Uighur Muslims to avoid jeopardizing progress on a trade deal.
- "Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal," Trump said. "And when you're in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we've done a lot."
- Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton writes in a new book that Trump had expressed approval to Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the country's campaign against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
- The human rights issue was kept out of high-level trade talks between Washington and Beijing.
President Donald Trump says he decided against slapping sanctions on China for its internment of one million Uighur Muslims to avoid jeopardizing a trade deal with Beijing he had long sought.
In an interview with Axios published Sunday, the president was pressed on why he had not moved forward with a plan from the Treasury Department in late 2018 to punish China with sanctions on officials involved with the country's drastic crackdown on Uighurs and other minorities.
"Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal," Trump said. "And when you're in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we've done a lot."
The president went on: "I put tariffs on China, which are far worse than any sanction you can think of."
The remarks supported the account of John Bolton, the former national security adviser who wrote in a new book that Trump asked him why the US government was weighing sanctions on Chinese officials with a hand in the crackdown.
Bolton wrote that Trump expressed approval to Chinese President Xi Jinping for the construction of internment camps in China.
"Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do," the former adviser wrote.
The issue never came up in high-level trade talks between Washington and Beijing.
China has locked up over one million Uighurs in concentration camps. The campaign triggered an avalanche of international criticism, with Human Rights Watch condemning "horrific" abuses in the camps, which include torture.
Bolton's book provided other explosive details. During a summit dinner with Xi last year, Trump asked the Chinese president to help him win re-election by ramping up purchases of soybeans and other products from farmers, Bolton wrote.
Trump back in January signed a "phase one" trade deal with China, which scaled back some of the tariffs on US products and eased a bruising economic conflict. The country pledged to ramp up agricultural purchases to $200 billion of goods from the US by the end of 2021. Around $50 billion was slated to be farm goods.
But tensions between Washington and Beijing have risen over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has railed against China in recent weeks, threatening in mid-May that the US "could cut off the whole relationship."