CLAIM: American presidents, with the exception of Donald Trump, stood up to China’s abuses of human rights.
VERDICT: FALSE. The Trump administration was the most aggressive to date on China’s human rights abuses.
President Joe Biden faced a question during his first White House press conference on Thursday about whether he would restrict imports from China that relied on slave labor. Biden responded by claiming that he had been telling Chinese leaders for years that “no American — at least one did — but no American president ever backed down from speaking out from what’s happening to the Uighurs, what’s happening to Hong Kong, what’s happening in country. That’s who we are. The moment a president walks away from that, as the last one did, is the moment we begin to lose our legitimacy around the world.”
Biden’s claims are false. The Trump administration condemned China’s Uighur concentration camps in July 2018:
We are particularly troubled by reports of the Chinese government’s deepening crackdown on Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in China, including: undue restrictions on freedom of religion; destruction of mosques; unprecedented levels of surveillance; efforts to pressure other governments into forcibly returning Uighurs to China or to coerce family members of Uighurs still in Xinjiang to encourage Uighurs living abroad to return; and the detention of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in facilities ranging from makeshift holding centers to prisons, ostensibly for “political re-education,” in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. There are reports of deaths in these facilities. We call on the Chinese government to release immediately all those arbitrarily detained.
Trump also signed legislation imposing sanctions on China over Hong Kong, and an executive order removing the special status that had allowed China to benefit from unique economic provisions granted to Hong Kong. He said at the time:
“This law gives my administration powerful new tools to hold responsible the individuals and the entities involved in extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom,” Trump said. “Their freedom has been taken away. Their rights have been taken away, and with it goes Hong Kong in my opinion because it will no longer be able to compete with free markets. A lot of people will be leaving Hong Kong, I suspect.”
In contrast, Biden has a long history of overlooking China’s human rights abuses as he pushed for Chinese participation in the World Trade Organization and as he and his families sought personal business deals connected to the Chinese regime.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.