The release of a report on the myriad human rights violations in China has triggered an equally detailed rebuttal from the communist regime, which on Friday accused the United States of “widespread human rights abuses,” including the government shutdown, “private gun ownership,” and allowing Jimmy Kimmel to be on television.
Reuters reports the Chinese issued a counter human rights report on the United States after a survey of human rights around the world found China lacking in their freedom of expression and media and urged greater respect by the government for their people. The counter-report, “without a hint of irony,” claimed the United States’ National Security Agency program Prism, revealed by former government contractor Edward Snowden, was “a blatant violation of international law” worth condemning.
The report, titled “Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013,” was published in full on state media and quickly descends into absurdity. The list of “human rights abuses” occurring in the United States for which the government is responsible, according to China, includes the Boston Marathon bombings, the government shutdown, and Jimmy Kimmel.
On the last two, China asserts that “the checks-and-balances system has become an impediment to actions,” arguing that a three-branch government essentially deprives citizens of human rights (as opposed to a communist oligarchy, one assumes). It alleges that “the situation of ethnic minorities’ human rights is grim,” citing Jimmy Kimmel: “Some mainstream media, social organizations and politicians publicize racist comments… American Broadcasting Company’s Jimmy Kimmel Show aired a segment saying ‘kill everyone in China’ and ‘promoted racial hatred.'”
The report also cites the Trayvon Martin case, without mentioning George Zimmerman’s Peruvian heritage. It also dares to allege that the United States treats prison inmates “inhumanely” and claim that “about 70 percent of the population, who are on the lower wealth and income scale, have virtually no influence on policy whatsoever.”
The seven page report touches on all sorts of other issues as large as the drone strike program and as minute as the United States not ratifying the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a sham document that demands all nations “take steps” toward providing every citizen with a job and health care. China routinely violates the covenant, which demands “protection of the family” (forced abortions) and the “freedom to unionize” (limited in China). Yet the report did not have the harshest words for the United States.
Those came from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang in the government newspaper Xinhua, in which the spokesman did little to hide the “I know you are but what am I?” nature of this new human rights report. “The United States always wants to gossip and remark about other countries’ situations, but ignores its own issues,” Gang told the press. He alleged the United States wants to “be the grand master of human rights” but, “The Chinese people are in the best position to judge the human rights situation facing the Chinese people.”
Earlier this week, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke urged China to respect basic human rights like freedom of assembly and expression.
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