Xinjiang’s Communist Party secretary Chen Quanguo for the first time on April 2 openly responded to the campaign to boycott Xinjiang cotton, which had been gaining traction among big corporations. Last year, the United States imposed sanctions on four Chinese officials over serious human rights abuses in Xinjiang—a remote region in northwest China. As the top government official in the area, Chen was named at the top of the sanctions list. “Some forces concocted and propagated a large number of lies and false information about Xinjiang to smear Xinjiang’s image,” Chen said, touting “Xinjiang’s story” as one of the most successful human rights stories in history. He made the comments during a ceremony to receive a foreign delegation of diplomats from over 20 countries led by Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Vladimir Norov, the former foreign affairs minister for Uzbekistan. The group were in Xinjiang from March 30 to April …