Xinjiang Party Head Considered Responsible for Forced Labour of Uyghurs Replaced

He was sanctioned last year by the United States for alleged human rights atrocities against the Uyghur community.

The Id Kah is the main Mosque in Kashgar, Xinjiang, and the largest in China.

Image used for representational purposes only. 

(Photo: iStock)

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has dismissed Chen Quanguo as the Party Committee Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Reuters reported.

He will be replaced by Ma Xingrui, who has previously served as the governor of the Guangdong province.

Chen is regarded to be the party official responsible for the brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, targeting ethnic Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims in the province.

A member of the CPC Politburo, 66-year-old Chen was sanctioned last year by the United States for alleged human rights atrocities against the Uyghur community.

Reports complied by the United Nations and human rights activists have accounted an estimated one million Muslims who are being kept in detention camps in the Western Chinese region.

China has continuously rejected these accusations, and has characterised the camps as vocational centres in order to tackle Islamic extremism.

US President Joe Biden last week signed into law a legislation that prohibited the import of goods coming in from the Xinjiang region over concerns regarding forced labor.

"The United States will continue to use every tool at our disposal to ensure supply chains are free from the use of forced labor including from Xinjiang and other parts of China," the president had tweeted.

(With inputs from Reuters.)