Together with our friends at Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong (UK), we have written this motion for the Labour Party conference scheduled in September 2021.
To get it to conference, we need as many local Constituency Labour Parties to pass it as possible and to choose it as their submission to the conference (each CLP can submit one motion or one rule change). If you are a Labour member, please consider putting it to your local CLP! Get in touch if you are thinking of doing this – we can offer tips about how to get it through. Email info@uyghursolidarityuk.org. (Please note, motions can be up to 250 words plus title, so this is the maximum length – if it’s made any longer, the submission will be rejected.)
And if you’re part of a grouping within Labour, please help us win backing from your group to get the motion through! We would welcome support from all parts of Labour who can get behind our motion (we are already participating in Momentum’s policy primary).
Finally: we’re a cross-party left-wing campaign, so we’d also like to hear from supporters in other parties – could you get a similar motion through your party’s conference?
Proposed motion text
China, Hong Kong and the Uyghurs: solidarity, peace, democracy, liberation
Labour believes socialism means political and economic democracy. Despite pretences, China’s authoritarian state represents neither.
Uyghurs and other majority-Muslim peoples in Xinjiang/ East Turkestan suffer genocidal persecution including racist surveillance; political, cultural and religious repression; forced contraception and sterilisation; forced labour in global corporate supply chains; children removed from families; and concentration camps.
A violent, corporate-backed crackdown has attacked Hong Kong’s movement for democracy and civil liberties. Independent unions like the HKCTU are surging but under assault. British colonial-era anti-union and anti-democratic laws facilitate this.
Throughout China, worker exploitation is rampant. Wealth inequality approaches US levels. Independent unions and protests are suppressed while corporations and state bureaucrats profit. But workers, women, minorities and dissidents continue to resist.
In all levels of government and grassroots campaigning, Labour will:
- Build solidarity with independent labour, democratic and liberatory movements, protests and strikes in China;
- Resist hijacking of this cause by nationalists and hawks promoting anti-Chinese racism, superpower rivalry, trade wars and militarisation;
- Support freedom and human rights for the indigenous peoples of Xinjiang/ East Turkestan and Tibet, and their right to democratically determine their futures;
- Support universal suffrage for Hong Kong, release of political prisoners and repeal of the National Security Law;
- Propose Magnitsky sanctions against officials involved in these abuses;
- Support protests and worker action against businesses complicit in these abuses;
- Propose laws requiring big businesses to transparently audit supply chains to source worldwide, and cut ties to rights abuses;
- Welcome unconditionally all refugees who seek sanctuary here from tyranny and persecution.