US President Donald Trump told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he approved of China's treatment of Uighur people, an explosive new book by former national security advisor John Bolton claims.
In excerpts of the book published by The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Mr Bolton claims Mr Trump repeatedly showed a readiness to overlook Chinese human rights abuses - most strikingly telling Mr Xi the mass internment of Uighur Muslims was "exactly the right thing to do."
In his book, The Room Where It Happened, Mr Bolton writes the remarks were made during a private meeting during the 2019 G20 meeting in Japan after Mr Xi explained, through an interpreter, the reasons for using "concentration camps" to house Uighur people.
"Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do," Mr Bolton writes.
Activists say China has rounded up at least one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims and is trying to forcibly assimilate them by wiping out their culture and punishing basic Islamic practices.
Beijing counters that it is running vocational educational centres that offer an alternative to Islamic extremism.
The book also claims that Mr Trump asked President Xi for assistance in his re-election.
"I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations," Mr Bolton writes of the real estate magnate turned president, who was impeached in December for seeking dirt from Ukraine on his 2020 Democratic election rival Joe Biden.
In a key meeting with Mr Xi last June, Mr Trump "stunningly turned the conversation to the US presidential election, alluding to China's economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win," Mr Bolton claims in his upcoming tell-all.
Sanctions on Chinese officials
The explosive excerpts were published on the same day as the US president signed into law an act that authorises santions against Chinese officials over the mass incarceration of Uighur Muslims.
Beijing has slammed the new US law, saying it "maliciously attacks" China's policy in the Xinjiang region.
China will "resolutely hit back and the US will bear the burden of all subsequent consequences", the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement after US President Donald Trump signed the Uighur Human Rights Act into law Wednesday.
The legislation, which passed Congress almost unanimously, requires the US administration to determine which Chinese officials are responsible for the "arbitrary detention, torture and harassment" of Uighurs and other minorities.
US President Donald Trump reportedly asked China's President Xi Jinping for help with his re-election. Source: Getty
The United States would then freeze any assets the officials hold in the world's largest economy and ban their entry into the country.
China's foreign ministry said in a statement that the act "rudely interferes in China's internal affairs", and urged the US to "immediately correct its mistakes".
"This so-called act deliberately slanders the human rights situation in Xinjiang and maliciously attacks China's policy in governing Xinjiang," the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for over nearly nine hours at a Honolulu military base with senior Chinese official Yang Jiechi, in the two countries' highest-level meeting since the coronavirus pandemic sent tensions skyrocketing, a State Department official said.
