Context: In a coordinated move, the European Union, the US, Britain, and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials and entities for human rights abuses against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province.
About the sanctions on China

• It includes travel bans and freezing of assets.
• US blocked and reported to Office of Foreign Assets Control of all the property and interests in property of the listed Chinese officials that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons.
• This is the first time the EU has imposed sanctions on China since an arms embargo after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

About Uighur issue/Xinjiang conflict

• Xinjiang, China’s western border province comprising 18 percent of the country’s entire land area.
• It is a region beset by change, and increasingly, confrontation between two very distinct peoples – the more recently arrived Han Chinese and the indigenous Uyghur Turkish Muslims.
• The region has had intermittent autonomy and occasional independence, but what is now known as Xinjiang came under Chinese rule in the 18th Century.
• An East Turkestan state was briefly declared in 1949, but independence was short-lived - later that year Xinjiang officially became part of Communist China.

Xinjiang has a large number of Uighurs, who are Muslims of Turkic descent.

• There are about 12 million Uighurs, living in north-western China in the region of Xinjiang, officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
• The Uighurs speaks their own language and sees themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations.