Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China

Bill Totten's Weblog Reality Check (Part 6 of 21) Author Uncategorized 2022/07/02 11 Minutes Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China https://english.news.cn (June 19 2022) Part 5 is at https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2022/07/01/reality-check-part-5-of-21/ Falsehood 6 The United States raises human rights issues and calls for change – not to stand against China, but to stand up for peace, security, and human dignity. Reality Check The human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before, with a notable increase in their sense of fulfillment, happiness, and security. In contrast, the US has been engaged in grave human rights violations both at home and abroad, and its shocking track record makes it the biggest human rights abuser in the world. * China always puts people’s right to subsistence on top of its agenda, prioritizes the work to enhance their right to development, regards the protection of citizens’ lawful rights and interests as its basic task, has made the safeguarding of the rights of ethnic groups an important part of its work, and considers the protection of people’s safety its long-term goal. Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded, the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its mission. For the past 100 years, the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguards for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights. * China has created the miracle of eliminating absolute poverty. By the end of 2020, China has lifted all 98.99 million rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty. In 2021, China completed the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and historically resolved the problem of absolute poverty. Since the launch of reform and opening-up, 770 million impoverished rural residents have shaken off poverty as currently defined. Based on the international poverty line of the World Bank, China accounts for 70 percent of global poverty reduction over the same period. China met the poverty reduction goal of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ten years ahead of schedule, making major contributions to global poverty reduction and human rights progress. China has also put in place the world’s largest education system, the largest social security system, and the largest health care system. * Since COVID-19 started, China has been acting on the principle of putting the people and their lives first. Based on China’s national conditions, it has formulated and implemented dynamic zero-COVID guidelines and has been constantly fine-tuning its response measures in light of the evolving situation, to best protect people’s lives and health and at the same time, ensure sustained, sound, and steady socioeconomic development with the pandemic under effective control. Both the infection rate and mortality rate in China are the lowest in the world. * As an active participant in global human rights governance, China has made its contribution to and offered its initiatives on world human rights development. In recent years, the concept of “building a community of shared future” has been written into the resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council, and China-sponsored resolutions on “the contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights” and on “Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights” were adopted multiple times at the Human Rights Council. China also made joint statements on behalf of developing countries on the implementation of the right to development, the promotion of human rights by poverty alleviation, equitable distribution of vaccines, among other subjects, contributing its share to safeguarding the basic human rights of developing countries, which has won it wide recognition and support from the international community. * China has been an advocate and a doer in advancing the international human rights cause. A World Bank study estimates that, if implemented fully, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) could lift 32 million people out of moderate poverty those who live on less than $3.2 a day. It shows how participating in Belt and Road cooperation can advance human rights in more countries. In the face of the pandemic, China launched its largest global humanitarian operation since the founding of the People’s Republic and championed the building of a global community of health for all. To address the global development deficit, China proposed the Global Development Initiative (GDI) which sees improving people’s welfare and achieving well-rounded human development as the fundamental purpose and goal. The GDI has been echoed and supported by more than 100 countries and many international organizations including the UN. The Initiative galvanizes extensive international consensus for accelerated implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and builds up international synergy for coordinated development, thus providing a strong underpinning for the advancement of the international human rights cause. * The right to life is of utmost importance, as survival is the basis of all human rights. Endowed with the world’s most advanced medical equipment and technologies, the US has registered the world’s largest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths. Pandemic response has been extremely politicized, and become a tool and lever to attack, undercut and oppose each other between the Republicans and the Democrats. Politicians only focus on political gains, with no regard to the life and health of ordinary people. Its pandemic control, which has been unscientific, unequal, and irresponsible, has gravely undermined the American people’s right to life and health. So far, the COVID-19 death toll in the US has surpassed one million. The deaths are, according to The Atlantic magazine, “unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable”. Some politicians even suggested that old people may sacrifice themselves for the country and that saving the country’s economy is more important than old people’s lives. Data of the US Center for Disease Prevention and Control shows that most COVID victims are aged 65 years and above. USC and Princeton University researchers project that due to the pandemic deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years, the sharpest decline since World War Two. “For Blacks, the life expectancy would shorten by 2.10 years, and for Latinos, by 3.05 years. Whites are also impacted, but their projected decline is much smaller – 0.68 years.” The Washington Post points to a far greater number behind the one million death toll: That number is 9 million – the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings, and children to COVID. A study by Imperial College London estimates that more than 250,000 US children had lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 by 23 May 2020. Figures released by the US Government Accountability Office in March 2022 show that up to 23 million people in the US may have developed “long COVID”, and an estimated one million people suffering from the symptoms may be pushed out of work. The US is the country most rampant with gun violence. Its population, totaling 333 million or 4 percent of the world’s total, owns more than 400 million guns, or 46 percent of all the private guns in the world. It tops the world in terms of gun ownership and shooting incidents every now and then in the US take away more than 110 lives on a daily average. Many people say it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the US. Data from the US website Gun Violence Archive show about 45,000 Americans are killed in gun violence incidents in 2021. On 24 May 2022, the Robb elementary school shooting in Texas claimed 21 lives, including 19 children. By US media counts, it is the 39th campus shooting this year. According to The Washington Post, 202 mass shootings took place in the US in the first five and half months of this year. For decades, no substantive measures have been taken by the US government to address such problems. In the past 25 years, the US federal government has failed to introduce any gun control act. The New York Times observed, The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility, but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens – its women, its racial minorities and especially its children. Despite the claim by the US founding fathers that “All men are created equal”, slavery was preserved in its Constitution of 1789. Although the US has abolished segregation on the surface, white supremacy continues to wreak havoc, and systemic discrimination against racial minorities still exists even to this day. The entrenched racism, compounded by the coronavirus, has fueled a new spike of hate crimes against Asian-Americans. At the same time, racial persecution of the indigenous people persists, discrimination against the Muslim community worsens, the racial economic divide yawns, and racial inequality aggravates day by day. Nearly 60 years on since Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, people still see a brutal reality as reflected in George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” plea. * Through slaughter, expulsion, sterilization, and forced assimilation, the US committed genocide against Native Americans, resulting in a sharp drop in their population from five million in 1492 to 250,000 in the early 20th century. The Native American community has long been neglected and discriminated against. The indigenous culture was fundamentally crushed, and the intergenerational inheritance of indigenous lives and spirits was under severe threat. Many US government statistical programs either leave them out completely or simply classify them as “others”. Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, Chief Executive and Attorney of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said that Native Americans have diverse cultures and languages, but are often seen not as an ethnic group, but as a political stratum with limited autonomy based on treaties with the federal government. The Atlantic commented that from the expulsion, slaughter, and forced assimilation back in history to the current widespread poverty and neglect, the American Indians, once the owners of this continent, now have a very weak voice in American society. The US government enforced the system of boarding schools in Native American areas to impose English and Christian education on Native American children. It also enacted laws prohibiting Native Americans from performing religious rituals which have been passed down through generations. An article titled “The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides” carried by the Foreign Policy website on 11 October 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were more than 350 government-funded indigenous boarding schools across the US. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous children passed through or died in, these schools. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. The US was not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people. Native American writer Rebecca Nagle believes that information about Native Americans has been systematically removed from mainstream media and popular culture. According to a report by the National Indian Education Association, 87 percent of state-level US history textbooks do not mention the post-1900 history of indigenous people. According to the Smithsonian Institution, things taught about Native Americans in American schools are full of inaccurate information and fail to present the real picture of the sufferings of indigenous people. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, said publicly at the Young America’s Foundation that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here … but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture”. * Islamophobia and the discrimination against and suppression of Muslims and Islam in US mainstream society has become more pronounced. A Bloomberg report on 9 September 2021 observed that discrimination against Muslims in the US increased in the two decades after 9/11. On the same day, the Associated Press cited a survey that found that 53 percent of Americans have negative views toward Islam. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in its 2021 report that it receives an increasing number of complaints each year about bullying and hate speech against Muslims. According to the survey findings released by the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California at Berkeley on 29 October 2021, 67.5 percent of Muslim respondents said they had experienced Islamophobia, and an even larger percentage of those surveyed, 93.7 percent, said that anti-Muslim hatred had affected their mental or emotional well-being to some degree. * The US has serious problems of human trafficking and forced labor. It still has not ratified the Forced Labour Convention (1930), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Every year, nearly 100,000 people are smuggled into the US for forced labor. Today, there are at least half a million people enslaved in the US, roughly 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are victims of sexual slavery. * Immigrants and refugees have become a tool of partisan feuding and political rivalry in the US. The government changes its rules and regulations capriciously, enforces laws violently, and immigrants have been subjected to inhuman treatment such as prolonged detention, torture, and forced labor. Data released by US Border Patrol shows that in fiscal year 2021, as many as 557 migrants died on the southern border of the US, more than double the previous fiscal year, hitting the highest number since records began in 1998. That same year, the US detained more than 1.7 million immigrants at the southern border, including 45,000 children. In September 2021, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti crowded under a bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio, sleeping in squalid tents or dirt in the sweltering heat, and surrounded by trash under dire living conditions. US border patrol authorities brutalized the asylum seekers, with patrols on horseback, brandishing horsewhips and charging toward the crowds to expel them into the river. CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark era in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves. * Turning a blind eye to the systematic violation of the human rights of its own people, the US government has wilfully attacked other countries and interfered in their internal affairs in the name of human rights, challenging right with might, and trampling on justice out of selfish interest. Since 2001, the US has waged war or Since 2001, the US has waged war or conducted military operations in about 80 countries in the name of the “war on terror”, resulting in the deaths of more than 900,000 people, including 300,000 civilians. The 20-year-long war waged by the US has left Afghanistan devastated and impoverished. A total of 47,245 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to 9/11 have been killed and more than 10 million displaced as a result of US operations. The War in Afghanistan has destroyed the foundation of economic development and impoverished the Afghan people. When the US withdrew from Afghanistan, it immediately froze billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves at the Afghan central bank, pushing the Afghan economy to the brink of collapse and making things worse for the Afghan people. At the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, many countries denounced the US as “the biggest destroyer of human rights in the world” and urged it to address its own gross human rights problems. * The US has been an expert in arbitrary detention and torture. Under the pretext of “war on terror”, the CIA has set up black sites in at least 54 countries and regions over the years, where more than 100,000 people are detained. A group of independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said in a statement released on 10 January 2022 that the US has arbitrarily detained people without trial and subjected them to torture or ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay for 20 years in violation of international human rights law, calling this “a stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law”. The US should face up to and resolve its own systemic and chronic human rights problems, reflect on the humanitarian disasters and crimes it has caused around the world, and give a responsible account of itself to the international community. Source: fmprc.gov.cnEditor: huaxia2022-06-19 22:19:29 https://english.news.cn/20220619/edf2556087954b8d90440b077a3c3c21/c.html