Many claims of genocide do not present a prima facie case of the intent to destroy a group, let alone show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They are a stratagem to enhance the claimant’s position in an inter-state or intra-state conflict. Claims about China’s Xinjiang are not based on the mass killings associated with genocide, but on birth limits for minorities in 2017-2021 that included practices previously applied to China’s Han majority for decades, plus brief family separations of a few minority children. These assertions impel Western sanctions and incite anti-Chinese sentiment but are empirically unsupported and degrade the concept of genocide.