China strikes back at U.S., pointing out American human-rights abuses
The country that tortures political prisoners, censors speech, holds secret trials and forces Muslims to violate Ramadan rules is once again criticizing the human-rights record of its rival, the United States.
China on Friday accused the U.S. of discriminating against minorities and said its 5.7-per-cent January unemployment rate poses a “threat to people’s basic right of survival.”
The Chinese report was published a day after the U.S. State Department released its annual report on human-rights conditions in the world. It included criticism of China, saying “repression and coercion were routine” and accused criminals “face executions without due process.”
The tit-for-tat battle of reports is not new. This is the 16th time China has responded, and it did so in a strident tone: “The U.S., a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems,” the report said, according to the Xinhua news agency.
The Chinese report documents “a lot of issues, some of which we are ourselves critical of in our work in the U.S.,” Maya Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said. “The problem here is that the Chinese government seems to be using a report on U.S. human rights to dodge questions about its own appalling human-rights record,” she added. And “the human-rights situation in China in the last two years is basically in one of the worst periods in the post-1989 period.”
China has pushed hard to paper over that record, releasing a report on its own conduct earlier this month that stretches the definition of human rights beyond its normal boundaries. China’s human-rights performance, that report said, was improved by its emphasis on “core socialist values” – and the country succeeded because it built “civilized cities, towns, villages and units, and exhorted Chinese tourists to behave themselves.”
The early June report cited the publication of “6.12 copies of books per person” as evidence that Chinese freedom of speech is growing – although the publishing industry is heavily censored, and some of those books were authored by President Xi Jinping himself.
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