Long term, I believe we can get our balls out of their death grip, and then sanction them properly.

I doubt it. The situation is not just a death grip… China is the second largest economy in the world. In order to effectively sanction another nation you have to be in a position of economic superiority, such that you can affect the trading decisions of other nations. Even if western nations could extricate their manufacturing needs from China, they would still be dependent on raw materials trade. There just isn’t a way to cut trading ties with China, short of a broad collapse of international trade… and then, well, a lot of people die.

If there are still any Uyghurs left by then…

This is the part that feels so wrong. Choosing to not do anything about this terrible thing that we know is happening seems self-interested. I feel that at some point in the future the descendants of the Uyghurs will look at the world and ask, “Why didn’t you do anything to help us?”, and what could be our answer then?

But… doing something in practice would mean so many deaths, and so much suffering before the conflict was resolved, and more suffering after while trying to pick up the pieces.

Uyghurs in China are being rounded up and forced into labor camps

I think this set of photos of one of the camps in Xinjiang is particularly illustrative:

This isn’t some short-term persecution for the sake of political influence, it’s not the whim of a few local officials, and it’s not just basic racism. This is a systemic problem, not just with the government but with Chinese culture broadly. Uyghurs are seen as inferior, and therefore it is acceptable to use them as labor or worse. What’s being done to these people is akin to the African slave trade of the 1800s, it’s just being done mostly within China’s borders. It is exploitation at an industrial scale plotted by the highest levels of political power and executed ruthlessly.

To change this would require forcing large portions of the Chinese population to see the Uyghurs as equals, as fellow humans with a right to self-determination, and then act on that conviction to change the government.

A failed US covert operation is why this narrative was cooked up in the first place, to make lemonade out of its lemon[1][2].

With China being a nuclear country, military intervention is out of the question.

Yeah, pretty much. Even a non-nuclear conflict at any level that would affect regime change would be devastating.

So the only option left is political

Even if the entirety of the UN got together and unanimously condemned the PRC for the treatment of Uyghurs, I doubt they would care. China is about as likely to change domestic policy based on external political pressure as they are to collectively tap-dance to the moon.

and economical pressure and sanctions.

Effective economic pressure requires a position of economic superiority. China is the second largest economy in the world, which means they are inextricably intertwined with the largest economy (the US) and so nobody has that position.

You are sick in the head if you think you need moral grounds to protest ethnic cleansing.

I really see a beautiful protest with “yeah, we can and we are doing it, but you bad”. China will merely say what about you? And then?

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Bullshit. You can go to Xinjiang and see for yourself, as millions do each year.

“What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy”. From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds:

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.