China yesterday hit back at comments by British Secretary of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab that accused Beijing of “gross” human rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang.
Raab told the BBC on Sunday that it was “clear that there are gross, egregious human rights abuses going on ... it is deeply, deeply troubling.”
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) yesterday called the comments “nothing but rumors and slander.”
Photo: Reuters
“The Xinjiang issue is not about human rights, religions or ethnic groups at all, but about combating violence, terrorism and separatism,” he said at a regular press briefing.
Raab said reports of forced sterilizations and mass detentions in Xinjiang required international attention, and that Britain “cannot see behavior like that and not call it out.”
Wang said the forced sterilization reports were “complete nonsense,” and that the Uighur population had more than doubled in the past four decades.
His comments echoed those of Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming (劉曉明), who on Sunday gave a brazen defense of China’s human rights record to the BBC, insisting the Uighurs live in “peaceful and harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups,” as he was confronted with footage of shackled prisoners being herded onto trains in Xinjiang.
Shown the pictures during a combative interview by the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Liu said: “I do not know where you get this videotape,” adding, “sometimes you have a transfer of prisoners, in any country.”
The drone footage, which was posted anonymously online last year and has recently gone viral online, shows hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men, who appeared to be Uighur and other minority ethnic groups, being led from a train in what was believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang in August last year.
“We treat every ethnic group as equal,” Liu said.
Liu was also played an interview with a woman who said she had been subjected to forced sterilization.
He responded by blaming such reports on “some small group of anti-China elements,” adding: “There’s no, so-called, pervasive, massive, forced sterilization among Uighur women in China.”
However, he conceded: “I cannot rule out single cases. For any country, there’s single cases.”
Liu also defended the new security law for Hong Kong.
He said ensuring national security is the responsibility of every government, and Beijing had been forced to act because Hong Kong law had “failed to curtail, to contain this violence, looting, smashing.”
The UK shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, interviewed by the BBC after Liu, said it appeared China was engaged in genocide.
“It certainly looks that way,” she said, describing China’s actions as “the deliberate persecution and killing of a large group of people on the basis of their ethnicity of nationhood.”
She urged the UK government to echo the US’ approach, and impose unilateral sanctions.
Liu expressed anger at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to exclude Huawei Technologies Co from the UK’s 5G network by the end of 2027, suggesting it showed London was “dancing to the tune” of Washington.
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