The three-day visit, which started on Tuesday, comes days after the EU agreed to overhaul its customs system, targeting largely Chinese e-commerce platforms with stricter safety checks and potential fines for selling illegal or non-compliant goods.

A nine-member delegation led by Anna Cavazzini, chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee, met officials from China’s market regulator and members of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, according to statements from the parliamentary body.

During discussions with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, EU lawmakers highlighted concerns over what they described as a high influx of dangerous and non-compliant products entering the European market from China.

The talks also covered the liability of online marketplaces and the need to ensure fair competition.The delegation raised broader issues including forced labour, protection of minors online and longstanding concerns about access for European companies to the Chinese market, the parliamentary committee said.

Beijing welcomed the visit as an opportunity to stabilise relations following its decision last year to lift sanctions on several EU lawmakers, a move seen as an attempt to ease trade tensions at a time of growing friction with the United States.

China had imposed sanctions in 2021 on 10 EU individuals and four entities in response to European measures targeting Chinese officials over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

The EU is grappling with a surge in low-value e-commerce imports, with 5.8 billion parcels entering the bloc in 2025, more than 90% of which are estimated to originate from China.

Under current rules, parcels valued below 150 euros are exempt from customs duties, a threshold that has supported the rapid expansion of platforms such as Shein, Temu and AliExpress.

EU lawmakers are expected to meet representatives from major Chinese e-commerce firms during the visit, including Shein, Alibaba and Temu.

The meeting with Shein follows a February investigation into the sale of child-like sex dolls on its platform, adding to regulatory scrutiny of online marketplaces operating across borders.

Apparently, celebrating the persecution of Xinjiang’s Muslims did not break Twitter rules.

This week, Donald Trump was blocked indefinitely from Facebook. He was also handed a 12-hour Twitter suspension and three of his tweets were deleted.

These moves came after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, with the president’s critics accusing him of inciting and then failing to condemn the violence in which five people died.

Some have pointed to these firms’ inconsistency. Twitter, for example, while censoring Trump, has taken no action against a tweet from the Chinese embassy in the US, which has framed the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs as a form of re-educative liberation.

“Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uyghur women in Xinjiang were emancipated, and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines”, a tweet by the embassy proudly announced.

Apparently, celebrating the persecution of Xinjiang’s Muslims did not break Twitter rules.

The tweet revealed the sinister character of the Chinese government’s propaganda. It also seems as if Twitter felt the outgoing president to be more worthy of online punishment than an authoritarian state persecuting a whole race of people.

Could there be a more telling example of Silicon Valley’s misplaced priorities? The Bad Orange Man, for all his failings, does not come close to the level of evil being perpetrated in Xinjiang.

But in Big Tech execs’ minds, the imagined threat of a Trumpian coup appears to be more concerning than the actual reality of authoritarian China.

But calls to censor Chinese propaganda also miss the point, of course. If anyone thinks blocking a tweet from an arm of the Chinese state will have any positive impact whatsoever on Chinese policy, they are deluded.

And the notion that removing those we do not like from the public space is a good way to challenge or even better understand their ideas is deeply misguided.

The problem with Big Tech censorship is not its inconsistency, although that itself is certainly a concern. It is the censorship itself. The simple fact that social-media firms have the power and inclination to silence people at will – including people as powerful as the US president – is a dangerous threat to free expression. And the idea that this is the most effective response to authoritarianism is absurd.

China’s tweet served to remind us of the truth-twisting, inhuman nature of its propaganda. It is surely better to let people share the embassy’s foul tweet – letting the world know of China’s foul deeds – than to expunge it from our collective online consciousness. Censorship merely puts the issue out of sight and out of mind.

You can’t fight authoritarianism with censorship.

Article first published on Spiked.

Paddy Hannam is editorial assistant at Spiked. He tweets under @paddyhannam.

“If not a genocide, something close to it going on in Xinjiang,” Robert O’Brien told an online event hosted by the Aspen Institute, while highlighting other Chinese crackdowns including one on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

The United States has denounced China’s treatment of Uighur and other minority Muslims in Xinjiang and imposed sanctions on officials it blames for abuses. It has not, though, so far termed Beijing’s actions genocide, a designation that would have significant legal implications and require stronger action against China.

The United Nations estimates that more than a million Muslims have been detained in Xinjiang and activists say crimes against humanity and genocide are taking place there. China has denied any abuses and says its camps in the region provide vocational training and help fight extremism.

O’Brien referred to seizures by US customs of “massive numbers” of hair products made with human hair from Xinjiang.

“The Chinese are literally shaving the heads of Uighur women and making hair products and sending them to the United States,” he said.

US Customs and Border Protection said in June it had detained a shipment originating in Xinjiang of hair products and accessories suspected of being forced-labor products made with human hair.

In June, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled as “shocking” and “disturbing” reports that China was using forced sterilization, forced abortion and coercive family planning against Muslims in Xinjiang.

He said last month Washington was considering the language it would use to describe what is happening in the region but added: “When the United States speaks about crimes against humanity or genocide … we’ve got to be very careful and very precise because it carries an enormous weight.”

With a changed economic scenario, Uighurs find that Turkey is no longer a welcome country.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign to project himself as a leader of the Muslim world has hit a major roadblock. Under Erdogan, Turkey is arresting Uighurs and keeping them in detention centres to ostensibly deport them to China—a country where they face internment camps and ethnic cleansing.

Till a couple of years back, Turkey was one of the few vocal supporters of the Uighur movement and a welcoming country for Uighur Muslims who managed to escape China’s prisons and persecution. Because of ethnic affinity, Uighurs used to call Turkey their second home and have been settling there for decades. This changed once the Turkish Lira hit record lows, external debt ballooned and the economy nosedived in 2018.

The crisis pushed Turkey into the welcoming arms of China, which was too happy to help. Turkey received a $3.6-billion loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and was grateful. Since then the two have not looked back. A keen supporter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Turkey now has Chinese investments in energy, infrastructure, tourism, transport and e-commerce. The Asian giant has been repeatedly pumping in money to keep the Turkish economy afloat—weighed down under $440 billion external debt.

With the money flowing in, Turkey has given a burial to Uighur rights, detentions and re-education in special camps run by the Chinese Communist Party. There was a time in 2009 when strongman Erdogan had said that Beijing is committing “a kind of genocide” against the Uighurs. Now that China has rounded up over a million Uighurs, and reportedly making Uighur women sleep with Han Chinese officials, Erdogan is keeping quiet.

Uighurs are a Muslim community in Xinjiang, one of China’s largest provinces. They speak a Turkic language and have long considered Turkey a natural ally with nearly 35,000 Uighurs escaping China for Turkey. However, this is an exchange between persecution and jail to living in poverty and uncertainty as Turkey has been arbitrarily rounding them up, not giving work permits and allowing Chinese policy to dictate Turkey its treatment of the Uighurs.

China has been flooding the region not just with troops but also with Han Chinese after the 2009 riots left more than 140 people dead. The riots, that lasted days, allegedly started by Uighurs over discrimination in jobs, religious persecution, cultural incompatibilities and economic deprivation were one in a series of violent unrest against the Chinese state. Determined not to allow unrest again, the Chinese government resorted to ethnic cleansing. Initiated by the Communist Party, the nearly one-million Uighur men in re-education camps in China work as forced labor where they create products for international brands.

With a changed economic scenario, Uighurs find that Turkey is no longer a welcome country. The Erdogan government is arresting them from restaurants, mid-night raids at homes, streets and anywhere they can be found. Hundreds have been arrested without charges and kept in deportation centres for months.

Many fear that they are being followed and kept under watch by Turkish officials. With Beijing asking for extradition of the Uighurs, a handful have already been deported. Things have taken a turn for the worse after Erdogan’s visit to China in 2019, after which he said that the people in Xinjiang “live happily” and supported the re-education camps as de-radicalization camps. Erdogan, reportedly also said that he will not allow, “any forces to carry out anti-China activities in Turkey.”

With Turkey banging the doors on the embattled Uighurs, the community has found public support from the US, which blacklisted dozens of companies and institutions complicity in China’s human rights violations, high-technology surveillance of Uighurs, forced labor and arbitrary detentions.

Not just this, Jim Risch, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, recently tweeted his criticism of Turkey. He said: “It’s shameful that Turkey assists China in violating Uyghur human rights.” His tweet found support in Edward Markey, Democratic Senator, who criticized Erdogan by saying: “As Beijing pushes its own extradition and intimidation campaign against minorities, Turkey should rededicate itself to the protection of persecuted Uyghurs.”

The tweets did not go down well with Turkey. Serdar Kilic, Turkish ambassador to the US, mounted a strong defence of his country’s policy towards the Uighurs by referred to the tweets as unsubstantiated and biased.

Even as Erdogan looks forward to his resurrection as a caliph, a tottering economy and withdrawal of support for the Uighur Muslims might undo his dreams. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Uighurs in Turkey keep looking over their shoulders and live with nightmares as the Communist party chases them through Turkish streets with Erdogan’s help.

Article first appeared on India Narrative.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that, “Today, I am announcing visa restrictions on Chinese government and Communist Party officials believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, the detention or abuse of Uighurs, Kazakhs, or other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.”

Today, I am announcing visa restrictions on Chinese government and Communist Party officials believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, the detention or abuse of Uighurs, Kazakhs, or other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) October 8, 2019

However, Chinese government has denied all charges of mistreatment of Uighur Muslims, and the Chinese Embassy in Washington has not commented yet on the decision.

Meanwhile, US Senator from Republican Party Tom Cotton praised the Government’s decision and said, “officials who place Uighurs and other minority groups in concentration camps shouldn’t be allowed to visit the United States and enjoy our freedoms.”

CCP officials who place Uighurs and other minority groups in concentration camps shouldn't be allowed to visit the United States and enjoy our freedoms. This is an excellent decision and I urge our allies around the world to impose similar restrictions. https://t.co/0D4QP7LdbF

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) October 8, 2019

Chinese Government has been accused of targeting and cracking down heavily on Uighur Muslim minority, which has incurred condemnation world-wide.