China, US clash over ’22 Games boycott calls
BEIJING: China on Wednesday said US House speaker Nancy Pelosi was “full of lies” after she called for a “diplomatic boycott” of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (February 4-20) over human rights abuses.
US lawmakers are getting increasingly vocal about an Olympic boycott and have lashed out at American firms, arguing their silence about what the state department has termed “a genocide of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in China was abetting the Chinese government”.
“What I propose - and join those who are proposing - is a diplomatic boycott,” Pelosi said, in which “lead countries of the world withhold their attendance at the Olympics”.
Pelosi’s sharp comments drew a strong response from China, which denies ill-treating Muslim minorities and has claimed that camps in Xinjiang, where an unknown number have been held, are vocational training centres, meant to deradicalise and train them for employment.
“Some US individuals’ remarks are full of lies and disinformation,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday.
“US politicians should stop using the Olympic movement to play despicable political games,” Zhao said.
“Some people in the US hype themselves up as moral authority. I don’t know where they get the nerve to say so.”
China targets US over Taiwan Strait passage
Besides strongly criticising Pelosi’s statement, Beijing also accused Washington of threatening the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait after a US warship sailed through the sensitive waterway that separates Taiwan from China.
The US navy’s seventh fleet said the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur conducted a “routine Taiwan Strait transit” on Tuesday following international law. “The ship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-pacific. The United States military will continue to fly, sail, and operate anywhere international law allows,” the US navy said.
A spokesperson for China’s eastern theatre command expressed strong opposition and condemned the move.
The spokesperson Zhang Chunhui said that by sending the guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur through the Taiwan Strait and hyping the event publicly, the US sent the wrong signals to “Taiwan independence” forces. Beijing claims the self-ruled Taiwanese democracy as a breakaway region.
Chunhui said the passage of the US warship deliberately disturbed and damaged the regional situation and harmed peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.