State Department Blasts China for Genocide on Eve of Antony Blinken's Visit

The 2023 edition of the State Department’s annual human rights report was very tough on China, blasting the authoritarian regime for perpetrating “genocide against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs” and other groups, torturing prisoners, making dissidents disappear, censoring the Internet, persecuting journalists, and snuffing out freedom in Hong Kong.

The State Department’s broad indictment of China’s human rights abuses arrived just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was preparing to depart for Beijing. Blinken arrived in Shanghai on Wednesday for meetings with business leaders before heading on to Beijing, where he will meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and possibly China’s dictator Xi Jinping.

Blinken said his focus in these meetings would be on curbing the flow of fentanyl, resolving trade issues, and dissuading China from supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine. It remains to be seen if human rights will be a major topic, especially since the Chinese leadership has signaled that broaching it would hinder the Biden administration’s plans to improve bilateral relations.

The State Department human rights report for China focused heavily on the Uyghur genocide, which the State Department said was ongoing in 2023 despite China’s claims that millions of “students” had “graduated” from its razor-wire-enclosed “vocational schools,” and the camp system was winding down.

The State Department rattled off an astonishingly long list of violations China has perpetrated against “Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps,” from “pervasive and intrusive” surveillance to physical and psychological torture.

WATCH — Chinese Concentration Camp Survivor: I Saw People Tortured for Denying Xi Jinping Is God

The report noted that China conducts increasingly brazen “transnational repression against individuals in other countries.” Examples include allegations of Chinese agents beating protesters in San Francisco during Xi’s visit in November, Chinese hackers targeting dissidents on American soil, Chinese police terrorizing the families of students abroad to keep them in line, and the infamous secret “police stations” China established in the U.S., Canada, and Europe to maintain surveillance and repression of Chinese nationals living in other countries.

The State Department noted that China’s government has not taken “credible steps” to punish officials accused of human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and others.

The report found China is still oppressing Tibet, persecuting pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, and continuing to harass and terrorize the families of victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

China’s prisoners are often “beaten, raped, subjected to electric shock, forced to sit on stools for hours on end, hung by the wrists, deprived of sleep, force-fed, forced to take medication against their will, and otherwise subjected to physical and psychological abuse.”

These abuses were especially commonplace against “political and religious dissidents,” although ordinary prisoners have also been subjected to harsh treatment. Among the abused prisoners named in the report was Zhang Zhan, whose health has steadily deteriorated since she was jailed in 2020; she now weighs less than 90 pounds. Her “crime” was reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan as a citizen journalist.

The State Department observed that China has a special extrajudicial detention system that the Chinese Communist Party uses to jail anyone it accuses of “corruption.” These jails feature “extended solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, beatings, and forced standing or sitting in uncomfortable positions for hours and sometimes days.” The Communist Party is also known to get rid of dissidents and religious leaders as well as purge politicians by having them involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions.

A seldom-reported detail highlighted in the State Department report was that when China puts someone under “house arrest,” it is nothing like house arrest in Western countries. Detainees are often held incommunicado in their homes, prevented from having visitors, and barred from leaving the premises for any reason whatsoever.

Under the Chinese court system, trials are held in secret, prosecutors win almost every case, lawyers are punished if they attempt to defend certain clients, judgments are hardly ever reversed on appeal, and human rights activists are persecuted if they complain about any of the above.

Freedom of expression continued to wither in China in 2023, as the government “routinely took harsh action” against those who criticized the Chinese Communist Party or Xi Jinping. Chinese subjects are monitored through millions of cameras when they walk the streets and by millions of censors when they use their computers. As more of the public’s routine business has been moved online, the repressive government monitors “an increasing percentage of daily life.”

Merely telling a joke seen as insulting to the Chinese military can bring heavy fines and other punitive measures, as can posting anything the regime decides is “fake news” or “rumors.” In places like the Uyghurs’ home of occupied East Turkistan, the police physically accost people on the street and demand to see their cell phones. Authors and journalists are kept under heavy surveillance, even when they work overseas.

The Chinese government banned reporters from covering sensitive topics, such as the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, and, in 2022, they banned coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the Chinese Communist Party refuses to condemn. Journalists face serious penalties for violating censorship standards that are “often vague, subject to change at the discretion of propaganda officials, and enforced retroactively.”

Other forbidden topics include same-sex relations, domestic violence, Taiwan, the coronavirus aftermath, and, increasingly, the Chinese economy, the true condition of which the Communist Party does not want to admit. The regime also does not wish to discuss its human rights record and cracks down hard on any Chinese subjects who dare to support international criticism.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry angrily dismissed the State Department report as a collection of “political lies and ideological biases” on Tuesday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin fumed:

The Chinese people have the best say on the human rights situation in China. China made history by eliminating absolute poverty. We practice whole-process people’s democracy and provide the world’s largest education system, social security system and medical care system in China.

Wang accused the U.S. of hypocrisy for not reporting on its own “human rights violations,” while carefully avoiding mention of any of the documented abuses in the State Department report.

“The hegemonic, domineering and bullying nature of the US and its selfishness and hypocrisy are on clear display,” he sputtered. “If the U.S. truly cares about human rights, it should take seriously and properly address domestic gun violence, drug abuse, racial discrimination and other violations of human rights and dignity.”

“The U.S., turning a blind eye to over 110,000 civilian casualties in Gaza, vetoed the UN Security Council’s efforts for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza four times in a roll,” he added. “That alone says enough about how little human rights actually mean to the US and how it tramples on them,” Wang concluded, regurgitating Hamas propaganda. 

China has never denounced the savage rape and murder spree that Hamas perpetrated against Israeli civilians on October 7, a deafening silence that has put considerable strain on relations between China and Israel.