An infuriated Global Times, the flagship English-language propaganda outlet of the government of China, claimed in a column Thursday that the House of Representatives voting to impeach President Donald Trump should cast doubt over all criticism of China’s human rights atrocities.
Ample evidence has surfaced in the past year that China has built over 1,000 concentration camps in western Xinjiang province housing millions of Muslims belonging to Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other ethnic minorities. Survivors say they are subject to rape, extreme torture, indoctrination, forced sterilization, and slavery.
American politicians in both major parties have loudly criticized China for these abuses. The House of Representatives recently passed the UIGHUR Act, which would sanction China for maintaining concentration camps, and the bill is likely to pass in the Senate and become law.
Congress also recently passed, and President Donald Trump signed, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which establishes legal safeguards for pro-democracy protesters in the city and creates a route to revoking Hong Kong’s special economic status if the State Department finds evidence of Chinese human rights abuses against locals.
Millions in Hong Kong have been protesting against the communist regime for months, met with routine brutal assaults at the hands of Hong Kong police and armed pro-China mobs. Protesters and journalists have published extensive video and photo evidence of the attacks.
The Global Times argued that reasonable people cannot take this evidence, or evidence regarding the Xinjiang camps, seriously because of House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump.
“With the involvement of personal grudges and partisan struggles, the impeachments have led to negative perceptions of Western-style democracy. This has seriously eroded some people’s belief that US-style impeachment is a ‘manifestation of democracy,'” the Times argued. “Comments on the impeachment made by prominent Democrats and Republicans were poles apart, but all sounded just and upright. However, what lies beneath are political calculations for their own party.”
“One could imagine how adept these American politicians will be when they apply such political skills in dealing with foreign relations. Many of them are good at packaging interests as delivering justice,” the newspaper continued, pivoting to the evidence of human rights abuses in China. “This has become a habit of them or considered a rule.”
“When the U.S. Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and Uyghur Human Rights Policy [UIGHUR] Act, when U.S. senior officials delivered a radical and extreme China policy speech, when they took action against China’s interests under high-sounding excuses,” the newspaper asked, “how can we count on them to proceed from international law and justice and have goodwill toward China-US relations as well as the Chinese people?”
Left-wing mainstream media bias against President Trump, the Global Times contended, also means that “We can hardly expect such U.S. media to report on China based on rationality and facts.”
“‘Snubbing facts and prioritizing stance’ is infiltrating U.S. politics and its inertia is enough to influence the attitude of American public opinion toward China,” the propaganda outlet declared.
The Times also continued its streak of using any disagreement in American politics to argue that the nation is mired in chaos and a China-style totalitarian regime is the only true path to “harmony.”
“The impeachment of Trump reflects the true face of American politics. Institutional flaws of Western-style democracy in recent years have increasingly been activated and expanded,” the Times claimed. “The U.S. is becoming growingly ‘extreme’ be it in domestic politics or on [sic] global stage. Other mainstream Western countries, to varying degrees, are ‘Americanized.'”
The article concluded a plea with the Chinese people to “have more patience” with the uncivilized Americans.
The Global Times also published what it claimed to be a roundup of Chinese citizen commentary on social media, which the government heavily regulates so that only comments favorable to the worldview of the Communist Party appear. Unnamed “users” were rooting for Trump, the article claimed, because Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had supported the Hong Kong protesters, even though Trump has also said he supports them.
“Populism was hurting not only the US but also other countries worldwide, and some were still suffering from unrest and violent conflicts, said Chinese experts,” that article concluded.
The Global Times‘ attempt to use the impeachment process to argue that American political norms were destructive follows years of reporting on nearly every domestic U.S. issue as evidence that China’s repressive communism is a better choice. In early December, the Times admired the fact that China never has elections for its “president,” since the Communist Party appoints all leaders. In contrast, it called the 2020 election race in the United States “pathetic” and lamented, “political chaos has become a new normal for the U.S.”
In October, the Times touted “the superiority of China’s development path” to America’s.
“China’s progress has not only contributed to political and economic changes across the world, but also provided an alternative to the Western development model,” the publication claimed. “It offers another option for countries which want to seek development while at the same time maintaining independence.”
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