China’s state-run Global Times on Saturday exploited the second anniversary of George Floyd’s death to push the Communist Party narrative that America does not have the moral standing to criticize China’s horrendous human rights abuses.
There was little new in the latest Global Times screed — and there was not much new in the first one two years ago as Chinese propagandists mostly copy-and-paste what they read in American media — but it featured an especially crude attempt to use U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet as an instrument of the Communist narrative:
Racism is a deep-rooted tumor of the American society. It is continuing to cause human rights tragedies for the racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.
According to USA Today, hundreds of people from ethnic minority groups were killed by U.S. law enforcement officers just within a year after the death of George Floyd. Statistics released by American social groups indicated that 266 African Americans were killed by police officers last year, and they were almost three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police.
At the 49th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council held in March this year, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet noted that given the large number of deaths of African Americans caused by police brutality in the U.S., relevant departments should take practical actions to investigate into such cases and bring relevant lawbreakers to justice.
May 24, 2022, a small group of Uyghurs staged a protest in Ankara on Tuesday, denouncing U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s visit to China and demanding that the Turkish government take a stronger stance against human rights abuses in China’s far-western Xinjiang region. (Burhan Ozbilici/AP)
“Racism is an institutional and systemic defect of the U.S. It is embodied in every aspect of the American society,” the propaganda outlet concluded.
The Global Times worked Bachelet in because she is currently suffering heavy criticism from human rights activists around the world for letting China stage-manage her visit to Xinjiang province and whitewash the Uyghur genocide. The Global Times suggested Bachelet thinks investigating American police departments is more important than investigating the concentration camps of Xinjiang.
After grabbing every factoid about racial tensions in America it could find with a quick Google search, and tossing in a quote from President Joe Biden about “white supremacy” as a “poison running through our body politic,” the Global Times claimed chaotic American democracy can never deliver justice.
“Given the polarization of American politics, the U.S. government can barely roll out any practical measure to narrow the racial gap. Some American politicians even publicly resorted to right-wing extremism to fuel the white supremacy,” the editorial claimed.
Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet and Chinese President XI Jinping pose for a photo prior to the dinner during the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, China, May 14, 2017. (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
“Without racial justice, the U.S. cannot be a truly free and democratic country. Two years after George Floyd was killed, the systemic racism of the U.S. society is still there and making ethnic minority groups unable to breathe. This is how human rights are ‘protected’ in the country,” the Global Times sneered.
On Monday, after scoring its propaganda coup with Bachelet’s toothless post-Xinjiang press conference, the Chinese Communist Party doubled down by asking the U.N. Human Rights Commission to investigate mass shootings in the United States.