Shanghai Daily

Smearing won’t twist China’s human rights record

- Zhang Xin

AT the 44th session of UN Human Rights Council, the United States and some other Western countries once again attacked China over what they claim human rights abuses, which have been categorica­lly rejected by dozens of other nations.

Those Western countries’ human rights platitude this time is as groundless as those they made before, if not more, and further unveils their deep-rooted egotism and prejudice toward China.

In fact, China’s human rights progress in recent decades is too substantiv­e to be denied or distorted.

Those with clear eyes will not miss China’s all-out poverty reduction efforts, which decreased impoverish­ed population from 98.99 million to 5.51 million between 2012 and 2019.

“The world already recognizes, or should recognize, what tremendous progress China has made with poverty down by more than two-thirds in the last five years,” David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, said on the sidelines of the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos.

Those with unbiased minds will not mistake China’s counterter­rorism efforts in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region for human rights abuses. That is because they know a safe, stable and prosperous Xinjiang is fundamenta­l to the protection of human rights.

According to statistics, from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist and extremist forces launched thousands of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, killing a large number of innocent civilians and hundreds of police officers, and causing considerab­le damage to property.

With decisive law-based anti-terror and deradicali­zation measures, Xinjiang has not seen violent terrorist incidents for three years in a row, and the rights to life and happiness of all ethnic groups there have now been well safeguarde­d.

And those with caring hearts will not ignore China’s human rights achievemen­ts in the fight against COVID-19.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Chinese government has upheld the spirit of putting human lives first, taken rigorous measures to contain the disease, and done what it can to help those who are struggling to weather the pandemic.

Successful pandemic fight

The journal Science reported in April that the measures imposed by China during the outbreak’s first 50 days may have prevented more than 700,000 infections across the country.

Yet the irony is that when those China hawks in Washington once again pointed their accusing fingers at Beijing, the skyrocketi­ng pandemic infections and deaths, as well as the burning protests over racial discrimina­tion in the United States, have exposed the true and deteriorat­ing human rights situation back in their own yards.

It is now crystal clear that those antiChina Western political opportunis­ts should do some immediate soul-searching on human rights protection, the very topic on which they are so used to lecturing others.

They should wake up to the fact that throwing mud at China will not only never help improve the human rights situation in their own countries, but also further lay bare their political incompeten­ce to solve basic social problems.

Of course, just as you cannot wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep, it is almost impossible to expect those die-hard Western China-detractors to stop poking their noses into China’s internal affairs on the pretext of human rights any time soon or ever.

However, if those Western interventi­onists still believe they can twist China’s human rights record or bully Beijing over this matter, they are simply barking up the wrong tree.

The author is a Xinhua writer.

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