China does not need US lectures on human rights

Published:July14,2022

By Staff writer

Early this year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticised China on alleged human rights abuses when he unveiled the State Department’s annual report on human rights around the world. The report which carried more than  50,000 words to its assessment of China’s human rights record, including blistering critiques of Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang and Tibet; its increased censorship amid the coronavirus pandemic; and its efforts to increase control over Hong Kong. The U.S. alleges the Chinese Communist Party is inflicting “torture, physical and sexual abuse, mass surveillance, family separation, and repression of cultural and religious expression.”

The world knows that the US preaches water and drinks wine. As all countries around the world have their own domestic challenges and know how to deal with them in their own context without lectures from foreign countries. Police brutality in the US against blacks and people of colour is well documented but US authorities make themselves the judges of other countries and prefer to sweep their own rot of human rights abuse under the carpet. The US lectures to other countries o democracy, human rights and the rule of law is simply a deception of what they believe in and do.

In a story published by Reuters on July 12, the author Kanishka Singh narrates how a former White House national security adviser John Bolton admitted that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries. It is said that Bolton made the remarks on CNN after the days’s congressional hearing into the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Such revelation shows how regime change in foreign countries is part of US foreign policy that the US administration will always want to hide, yet it is a global public secret. 

In 2021, there were 1,055 fatal police shootings in US and in 2021, while in 2020 there were 1,020 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was reported to be much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 40 fatal shootings per million of the population as of June 2022, statista.com.

The evidence of US human rights abuse is documented spanning a long period of time. In 1920s, many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime. In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos).

Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement. And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.

Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is anti-black racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.

The attack on China’s human rights record is therefore, seen as politically motivated agenda with a wide foreign policy scheme aimed at alienating and causing conflict between the Chinese leaders and their citizens, with an ultimate goal of containing the rise of China. US administration anti-China schemes which claim human rights abuses have not worked for years. China’s choice of people centred governance puts the governing Communist Party of China close to the people by caring and solving people basic human rights needs.  Attempts by US to provoke proxy wars through Hong Kong and Taiwan will also not succeed as both Taiwan and Hong Kong abide by the one country- two systems principle.