The Chinese Foreign Ministry and Chinese state propaganda outlets used the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, this week to blame American “values” and “freedom” for the massacre and tie it to the unrelated death of Minnesota man George Floyd in 2020.
Police identified 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who reports now indicate had a long history of bizarre, violent behavior that relatives did not address, as the gunman responsible for killing 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday. A Border Patrol agent exterminated Ramos after local police allegedly did little to stop the rampage. Many of the children who survived were reportedly saved by parents rushing into the attack.
The Chinese government, currently engaging in a genocide against multiple ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan, described the shooting as evidence of the American government’s “human rights” abuses against its own people. Chinese propaganda outlets also bizarrely blamed “racism” for the shooting, despite Ramos and most of his victims all being Hispanic.
“The right to life is the biggest human right and racial discrimination is the biggest injustice. The US is beset by the most serious gun violence and social discrimination, and also a country with the biggest deficit in human rights,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin declared on Wednesday. “It is unacceptable that no substantive measures have been taken by the US government to tackle these problems over the past decades. Over the past 25 years, the US federal government has failed to promulgate a single gun control act.”
“Nearly 60 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and today, we still have to face a brutal reality where people like George Floyd can’t even breathe,” Wang concluded.
George Floyd was a Minnesota man who died in police custody in an unrelated incident in 2020.
The Global Times, an English-language Chinese government propaganda outlet, explicitly blamed the Uvalde shooting on America’s respect for individual freedom. Citing a member of its rotating panel of Communist Party-approved experts, the Times declared on Wednesday that the entire American political system “is definitely flawed and problematic … such design is closely connected to US values and concept of freedom as well as all aspects of history.”
“Some observers believe that loopholes in the top-down system, the interests-driven partisan mechanism, powerful lobby groups and deepening divisions and racism in American society amid the pandemic will lead gun control into a dead end,” the article concluded, without explaining the relationship between the Uvalde shooting and “racism” or the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which was caused by Chinese government failing to properly implement travel restrictions or alert the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to a respiratory disease outbreak within its borders in 2019.
“The mass shooting in the majority Latino school occurred one day before the second anniversary of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, which exposed entrenched racism in the US,” the Global Times asserted, echoing the Foreign Ministry and former American President Barack Obama.
The Global Times also noted in its article that the Uvalde shooting “came just 10 days after the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that claimed 10 lives,” but omitted that, the day after the Buffalo shooting, a Chinese nationalist with ties to a Chinese government “foreign mission” opened fire on a group of elderly Taiwanese people in Laguna Woods, California. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has repeatedly used violent rhetoric, including threatening America with “shotguns” if it maintains friendly relations with Taiwan, in the aftermath of that shooting.
In a separate article on Wednesday, the Global Times posited that the solution to mass shootings in America is to abolish the U.S. Constitution and end “social pluralism,” meaning the government allowing differing political views to exist. In China, the Communist Party is the overwhelmingly dominant political party and only tiny, decorative Marxist parties are allowed to exist. Political dissidents face regular arrests for crimes such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” have no political right to express themselves or run for office, and often face extreme state violence and disappearance.
“From a moral perspective, guns are supposed to be controlled, as endowing ordinary Americans to bear arms has triggered so many tragedies. But unfortunately, gun violence will not go away as long as the US retains its current political system,” the Global Times argued on Wednesday. “The separation of powers and social pluralism in US society, which the country considers to be the pros and vitality of its system, precisely mirrors its fatal flaw when it comes to gun control.”
Stripping Americans of the right to bear arms is currently impossible through legislation, the Chinese propaganda outlet observed, because “‘The right of the [American] people to keep and bear arms’ is endowed by the US Constitution. And the US’ gun lobby is capable of persuading politicians.”
The outlet went on to call President Joe Biden and national Democrats “hypocritical” for calling for gun control measures while supporting the existence of the American Constitution. In the same article, the Global Times also radically pivoted away from discussing gun violence in America to condemn German researcher Adrian Zenz, who published a massive volume of allegedly hacked photos, speech transcripts, police training manuals, and other key materials belonging to Chinese officials in East Turkistan. The records, branded the “Xinjiang Police Files,” compile thousands of photos of concentration camp victims, including children, and documents directly implicating dictator Xi Jinping in the genocide of the Uyghur people and other ethnic groups in the region.
“More ironically, the US is good at spreading lies from the mouths of some scholars. One of the representatives is the so-called German scholar Adrian Zenz, who has fabricated many fallacies about human rights-related issues on China,” the Global Times ranted in an article about the Uvalde shooting. “But have any of them voiced their concern over the US’ gun shooting? The human rights situation in the US has been poor and deteriorating, and it is not qualified to point an accusing finger at other countries, such as China.”
The Global Times did not clarify the relationship it claims to perceive between a German scholar specializing in researching Chinese human rights abuses and a mass shooting in Texas.
United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, currently in China to allegedly investigate the Uyghur genocide, applauded Xi for “protecting human rights” on Wednesday.