Xinjiang welcomes US officials
Continuing to hype topic may further damage ties: experts
Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region welcomes people from all around the world, including officials from the new US administration, to visit but it opposes any presumption of guilt, senior officials from the region told a press conference in Beijing on Monday.
Analysts said that China’s attitude toward foreigners’ visits to Xinjiang is always open and consistent despite some of them trying to verify presumptions. Welcoming US officials to visit Xinjiang showed that China hopes the Biden administration would not repeat the mistakes of the Trump administration in using Xinjiang topics to further damage bilateral ties.
“We welcome people from all fields around the world, including officials from the new US administration, to visit Xinjiang to learn what is really happening there and avoid being fooled by Pompeo’s lies,” Xu Guixiang, a deputy directorgeneral of the publicity department of the Xinjiang Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China ( CPC), said on Monday.
We also have a bottom line and firmly oppose any so- called investigation with a presumption of guilt, said Xu.
Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo on January 19 -his last day in the job -- tweeted that he had “determined” that China is “committing genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang against Uygurs and other ethnic groups, and he wrote that China and the CPC “must be held to account.”
China’s attitude to welcome foreigners to visit its Xinjiang is consistent and open, although some foreigners never abandoned their bias and tried hard to verify their presumptions of guilt during or before visits to the region, Jia Chunyang, an expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times on Monday.
Xinjiang’s senior officials’ remarks and invitations to US officials from the new administration also showed that they hope US President Joe Biden and his team would not follow the wrong path of the Trump administration in hyping Xinjiang topics to further damage bilateral ties, Jia said.
Although bearing hopes of the Biden administration being more rational and normal, Chinese experts also warned that the US would not give up using the topics of human rights and religious freedom to contain China, but currently Biden is fully engaged in dealing with the domestic epidemic.
Analysts also noted that if Biden decides to impose more sanctions on China by hyping Xinjiang topics or colluding with US allies in containing China under the excuse of policies in Xinjiang, it would not be a good way to improve ties with China, nor would it help the US win back the moral high ground it lost a long time ago.
The Monday’s press conference was the third of its kind on Xinjiang- related issues held by the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, with the attendance of a dozen representatives from domestic and foreign media from the UK, the US, Indonesia and Japan.