Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin: Lies and rumors will eventually shatter into pieces in front of facts and truth
2022-03-03 00:32

China Daily: On March 1, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in his video address at the 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council that the Chinese government continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang against Muslim Uyghurs and other minority groups. Do you have any response?

Wang Wenbin: We condemn the US moves to smear and attack China by spreading lies. 

The word “genocide” has rigorous definition. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 defined the crime of genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Since its founding, the US has slaughtered the Native Americans, whose population nosedived from five million in 1492 to 250,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. This is nothing short of genocide. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an American historian dedicated to the study of indigenous peoples, concluded that all five acts of genocide listed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide can be found in the crimes the US committed against American Indians. Today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released on its website a report titled “The American Genocide of the Indians—Historical Facts and Real Evidence”. It details crimes of genocide committed by the US. You may refer to that. 

Over the past 60-plus years, the population in China’s Xinjiang region increased fourfold and the Uyghur population grew from 2.2 million to about 12 million. The accusation of “genocide” in Xinjiang is a flat-out lie of the century. Those who make this accusation are totally unethical. 

People behind this lie of the century are mainly anti-China forces in the US. Toward the end of the last administration’s term in office, Mike Pompeo fabricated the lie of “genocide” in Xinjiang. Even though lawyers of the US State Department called this argument untenable, Pompeo insisted on using it as a main tool to smear and attack China to serve his anti-China political goals. After the new US administration came in office, instead of rooting out the former administration’s poisonous legacy of concocting lies to smear China, it inherited the approach of manipulating lies to denigrate China, in an attempt to undermine China’s ethnic unity and hobble China’s development.

I also noted media reports that revealed the US’ specific measures to formulate Xinjiang-related propaganda strategies and spread negative information about Xinjiang in an organized manner. They include encouraging US academic institutions, think tanks and non-governmental organizations to constantly fabricate so-called research reports about Xinjiang and publish related books. News agencies overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) are instructed to produce fake news reports and “propaganda materials” about “genocide” and “forced labor” in Xinjiang in dozens of languages and hype up religious and sensitive topics. In the meanwhile, the USAGM coordinates with media networks in US ally countries to reprint and push such “products”. The US online media also chip in technologically through weakening and blocking true information about Xinjiang released by the Chinese side while providing technical assistance for anti-China forces to spread false information related to the region. Such efforts are also financially supported by the US government.

As people can tell, in this production line of Xinjiang-related lies, the US government directly dominates the fabrication and dissemination by staging the show and marketing what it produces. This latest revelation echoes with the personal statement by former US senior official Lawrence Wilkerson, who admitted that the US tries to incite Uyghurs and destabilize China from within. It fully reveals the US real intention to undermine China’s stability and development by exploiting Xinjiang-related issues. 

Lies and rumors will eventually shatter into pieces in front of facts and truth. In recent years, more than 2,000 experts, scholars, journalists, diplomats and religious personnel from over 100 countries have visited Xinjiang. They have seen first-hand the facts about social stability, economic development and people’s happy life in Xinjiang. At the UN Human Rights Council, almost 100 countries unanimously expressed support for the Chinese government’s policy in Xinjiang and opposition to interference in China’s internal affairs in the name of human rights. None of the handful of countries that echoed with the US’ position is a Muslim country. More and more visionary people are making rational and objective voices on Xinjiang-related issues. 

I want to stress that the door to Xinjiang is wide open. We welcome all unbiased people from all countries to visit Xinjiang. The US politicians’ move to discredit China by spreading lies will only damage their reputation and expose their sinister intention to the world.