More than a dozen properties owned by the Xinjiang military corporation have been sanctioned by the US over its involvement in mass human rights abuses against Uyghurs by the Chinese government.
The American media outlet Axios reported on Wednesday that the short-term rental company was at risk of US regulations preventing business dealings with sanctioned entities. Airbnb, which is a major sponsor of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, said it was not required to vet the underlying landowner of properties it lists.
There are hundreds of listings for accommodation in Xinjiang, including some close to sites that have mass detention facilities. Axios identified 14 properties owned by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps XPCC, one of several companies sanctioned by the US government in 2020 for its alleged involvement in serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities.
For several years, Chinese authorities have run a crackdown on minority populations in Xinjiang province, using strategies and policies found by multiple governments, human rights and legal groups to be crimes against humanity, and by some governments, including the US, to be genocide.
The US regulators rely on businesses to self-report concerns, and Airbnb has done so before in regards to users in Cuba and Crimea. An Airbnb spokeswoman, Christopher Nulty, told Axios the company took its US Treasury obligations seriously, ofac Office of Foreign Assets Control rules require Airbnb to screen the parties it is transacting with, not the underlying landowners. All hosts and guests are screened against global government watchlists, including Ofac's specially designated nationals and blocked persons list, including the hosts associated with listings raised by Axios. The Guardian contacted Airbnb in the US, Australia and New Zealand for a response.
The Trump administration imposed sanctions against the XPCC in July 2020, which prohibits all transactions by Americans or people in the US that involve the property or interests of the sanctioned parties.
The Treasury department said that the prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person, or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods or services from any such person.
The XPCC, a state-owned military and economic corporation, administers control over large parts of Xinjiang and is responsible for its economic development. It is well known to operate some of the detention camps where as many as a million Uyghurs have been interned, and is heavily involved in the cotton trade, which the US and human rights groups say is linked to forced labour.
The documents that were released this week showed links between the crackdown and policy goals set out by senior Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Xi Jinping, in speeches from 2014.
Beijing has denied the accusations of human rights abuses, saying that the detention camps and labour programmes are vocational training programmes tied to its anti-terrorism and poverty alleviation efforts.
The province has a lot of domestic Chinese visitors, and the government hopes to double annual visitor numbers by 2025 to 400 million by the year 2025, despite blanket government denials of abuse in Xinjiang.