Examining the Efficacy of Economic Sanctions in Pressuring China on Xinjiang Human Rights Violations

Abstract

This paper assesses the effectiveness of employing economic sanctions to address human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang region against the Uyghur population. By drawing from historical cases in Iraq and South Africa where economic sanctions were previously enforced to combat human rights violations, this paper will identify specific factors that contribute to the success and failure of sanctions and their implications for the Xinjiang case. For this purpose, an extensive literature review of past research and studies relating to these cases and economic sanctions as a whole was conducted to analyze the impact of various complexing factors. The findings of this paper underscore the multitude of factors that influence each case, including aspects such as the reasonability of a sanction’s goal and the level of economic interdependence between sanctioning countries. Ultimately, this paper argues that in China’s case, economic sanctions would likely do more harm than good due to a lack of transparency surrounding the status of human rights in the Xinjiang region and the country’s formidable economic influence.