The 2019 Country
Reports on Human
Rights Practices,
issued by the US Department of State on Wednesday, is like a veil that conceals the US’ own human rights wrongdoings. The report listed some so-called human rights violations and lambasted the Xinjiang policy of the Chinese government.
At the press conference on the report, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singled out China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba as among the worst violators. By using clichés, this senior US official behaved like a political scoundrel and smeared China by calling China’s treatment of Muslims “stain of the century.”
Like previous reports, this one ignores China’s progress in its human rights and the improvement of the level of human rights among all ethnicities in Xinjiang. Based on a fixated anti-China mentality, US politicians cared nothing about China’s human rights and were ignorant of China’s development. Anyway, they don’t have to know what is taking place in China. They have viewed China as a strategic competitor and an ideological rival. What they need is an all-around containment of China.
The novel coronavirus outbreak has spread worldwide and has been declared by the WHO as a pandemic. The outbreak concerns life and survival. The most urgent task right now is how to enhance the ability to fight the pandemic through multilateral cooperation, but the US State Department spares no time criticizing other countries’ human rights. This explains why the US government has been widely criticized for its slow response to the outbreak.
Today’s US politics is trapped in the fierce political battle between the Republican and Democratic parties, and is kidnapped by far-right ideology, conservatism and nationalism. The US’ China policy is being exploited by some ideological extremists, becoming the victim of the ongoing fights in its political arena. After the outbreak of the current epidemic, China had once again been turned into a scapegoat of US domestic problems. Against this backdrop, the human rights report has lost its significance over human rights issue, but has become a bullet toward the US’ strategic competitor.
There is no universal path of human rights development, not to mention the so-called perfect human rights. Every country has the right to find its own way of improving its human rights. The development of human rights worldwide should not be dominated by the US.
The US is in no position to judge other countries’ human rights, and only ordinary people in each country have a say. The most important part about human rights is whether people are living in a peaceful, stable society and whether they are entitled to the basic rights of pursuing a happy life. Yet, such human rights can hardly be found in a country where people resort to guns for protecting themselves, where people have to check their own bank account to see if they can afford the treatment if being infected by the novel coronavirus. One can never wake up a person pretending to be asleep.
The newly issued report is filled with diplomatic and political antagonism. It violates the concept of human rights advocated by the UN Human Rights Council. Its only value is to remind people that it is time to pay some attention to the human rights situation in the US.—GT.
