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US President Donald Trump informed the Chinese President Xi Jinping that building concentration camps to re-educate Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang was the right thing to do. The statement came from the former national security adviser John Bolton’s book. The White House is now trying to block the release of the book, ‘The Room Where It Happened’. Bolton claimed Trump backed the controversial camps during a conversation with Xi at a G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. It also says the US president asked Chinese President to help him win the 2020 election by purchasing more agricultural products from the United States. Bolton also wrote about Trump’s July 2019 request to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to do us a favor by announcing investigations into Joe Biden.

It is noteworthy that Trump was impeached over the incident but was acquitted by his Republican allies in the US Senate. They had voted not to hear more evidence from Bolton who had made clear he had relevant information. Bolton wrote that Xi defended China’s construction of camps housing up to 1 million Uighur Muslims and Trump signaled his approval during the G20 meeting. He also wrote, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do”. Bolton said the conversation took place during an opening dinner and Xi explained why he was basically building concentration camps in the province where the Chinese Communist Party had been interning the ethnic minority.

It was part of what Bolton describes as Trump’s callous lack of concern about human rights, with securing a second term the one goal that loomed above all else. Bolton wrote, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations”. The claims came on the same day Trump signed into legislation the ability to sanction Chinese officials responsible for oppressing Uighur Muslims. On Wednesday, President Trump said in a statement that the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 holds accountable perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses. He said, “Such as the systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uighur and other minorities in China”.