A change in the tone, specificity and scope of China’s diplomacy

Having read the Chinese Foreign Ministry reports and announcements as a matter of course across years, a change is noticeable.  At this level, the one of diplomacy, China has taken aim at the main pillars of US propaganda.  China is now not only making defensive statements to US threats and belligerence, but it is also starting a clear and offensive program of calling out the US for its excesses.  Usually, China makes mild statements, for example:  China has made clear its severe concern and firm opposition.  As a counter to the current Summit on Democracy and the recent US Human Rights report, issued in March, the Chinese diplomats have gone to work with a clear program that is very much beyond ‘severe concern and firm opposition’

The major Chinese media are writing extensively on the Summit on Democracy and have done so for a week.  These are strongly worded.

In addition, they rolled out from their foreign ministry what is clearly a coordinated program and are attacking the US on its own human rights.  It is noticeable how the defensive posture has changed.

First, Xinhuanet called attention to a report that they had developed, titled “The United States’ Arbitrary Detention at Home and Abroad: Truth and Facts” in the foreign ministry briefing this morning.   Mao Ning stated that the Xinhua report is worth reading. “With powerful facts and figures, it ripped apart the US’s disguise and revealed the truth that the US wantonly abuses arbitrary detention at home and abroad. ”

I quote a few sections:

The introduction states:

Freedom from arbitrary detention is a fundamental individual right stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of the United Nations, and an important provision in international human rights treaties. Though an important contributor in the drafting of the UDHR and one of the first countries to ratify international human rights treaties, the United States has carried out arbitrary detention in total disregard of its domestic legal provisions and international treaty obligations, causing serious physical and mental harm to people involved. This report is based on facts, and aims to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the United States on arbitrary detention, and form an understanding that no country is now trampling on human rights more seriously than the United States.

On prison boats:

According to BBC reports, as early as in June 2005, the United Nations had been informed that the US had secretly detained terrorist suspects on its warships. In 2008, the human rights group Reprieve disclosed that the US had been using “prison boats” to hold terrorist suspects since the Clinton administration. As many as 17 warships may have been used as “floating prisons” by the US from 2001 to 2008.

On Guantanamo Bay:

In 2001, the US decided to set up a prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to hold suspects captured by the US military in its global anti-terrorism operations after the 9/11 attacks. The US chose this location because with the sovereignty of the Guantanamo Bay belonging to Cuba, this place is legally not US territory; therefore the US could deny human rights to the detainees there and evade charges of human rights abuses from the international community.

In January 2002, the first 20 detainees were held outdoors in wire mesh cages immediately upon arrival at Guantanamo Bay. In the 20 years afterward, roughly 780 people have been held at Guantanamo. Scandals of arbitrary detention and torture there continued to come to light. Moazzam Begg, a British Pakistani held there for two years, told the media about the painful experience of torture – hogtying, punching, kicking, and waterboarding – that himself and other detainees had gone through. He said that the most vicious torture in the world is to be detained without knowing what crime has been committed. Without any charge or trial, one’s personal freedom is gravely compromised.

The report goes on to state:  “The United States has a long history of arbitrary detention and disregard of human rights both at home and abroad, reflecting a deep-seated political culture of racism and violence” and concludes with:

The fact that the United States has carried out arbitrary detention at home and abroad has laid bare its hypocrisy and double standards with regard to human rights. The US groundlessly accuses others of arbitrary detention, while at the same time, however, does not mention a word about the torture and maltreatment common at its own prisons. Arbitrarily throwing people into its “black sites” around the world without trial has become a hallmark of the US trampling on the rule of law and infringing on human rights. The US should face up to and reflect upon its own serious human rights violations, stop politicizing human rights issues, and stop undermining the human rights of people of other countries.

In addition, a range of commentary was posted and I list the titles:

And that was Xinhuanet.  Not even four hours after the discussion at the Chinese Briefing, another report was publicized by the Chinese State Council of Information condemning the US.  This one is titled:  The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022. 

It is in direct opposition to the first report mentioned, the US human rights report and contains:

I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System

II. Hollowed-out American-style Electoral Democracy

III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality

IV. Worsening Subsistence Crisis among U.S. Underclass

V. Historic Retrogression in Women’s and Children’s Rights

VI. Wanton Violation of Other Countries’ Human Rights and Trampling on Justice

It is extensive, and I quote the foreword:

The year 2022 witnessed a landmark setback for U.S. human rights. In the United States, a country labeling itself a “human rights defender,” “chronic diseases” such as money politics, racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarization are rampant. Human rights legislation and justice have seen an extreme retrogression, further undermining the basic rights and freedoms of the American people.

The U.S. government has greatly relaxed gun control, resulting in high death toll from gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruen case in 2022 became a landmark regression in the field of gun control in the United States. Nearly half of U.S. states have relaxed gun restrictions. The United States leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide and mass shootings, with more than 80,000 people killed or injured by gun violence in 2022, the third consecutive year on record that the United States experiences more than 600 mass shootings. Gun violence has become an “American disease.”

Midterm elections have become the most expensive ones in the United States, and American-style democracy has lost its popular support. The cost of elections in the United States has soared again, with cumulative spending of the 2022 midterm elections exceeding more than 16.7 billion U.S. dollars. Political donations from billionaires accounted for 15 percent of the federal total, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle. “Dark money” donations manipulate U.S. elections furtively, and political polarization and social fragmentation make it difficult for the country to reach a democratic consensus. With 69 percent of Americans believing their democracy is at “risk of collapse” and 86 percent of American voters saying it faces “very serious threats,” there is a general public disillusionment of American-style democracy.

Racism is on the rise and ethnic minorities suffer widespread discrimination. Hate crimes based on racial bias in the United States increased dramatically between 2020 and 2022. The racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, with 10 African-Americans killed, has shocked the world. A total of 81 percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging. African Americans are 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The sufferings caused by genocide and cultural assimilation taken by the U.S. government against Indians and other aborigines in history still persist today.

Life expectancy has plummeted, and deaths from drug abuse continue to climb. According to a report released in August 2022 by the National Center for Health Statistics under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 2.7 years to 76.1 years from 2019 to 2021, the lowest since 1996. Interest groups and politicians trade power for money, allowing drug and substance abuse to flourish. The number of Americans dying from drug and substance abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, to more than 100,000 per year. Substance abuse has become one of America’s most devastating public health crises.

Women have lost constitutional protections for abortion, and children’s living environment is worrying. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has ended women’s right to abortion protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 50 years, which lands a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality. In 2022, more than 5,800 children under the age of 18 got injured or killed by shooting in the United States, and the number of school shootings amounted to 302, the highest since 1970. The child poverty rate in the United States increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 16.6 percent in May 2022, with 3.3 million more children living in poverty. The United States had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations since 2018, and registered a 26 percent increase in minors employed in hazardous occupations in fiscal year 2022.

U.S. abuse of force and unilateral sanctions has created humanitarian disasters. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has carried out military operations in 85 countries in the name of “anti-terrorism,” which directly claimed at least 929,000 civilian lives and displaced 38 million people. The United States has imposed more unilateral sanctions than any other country in the world, and it still has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, resulting in the inability of those targeted to provide basic food and medicine for their people. Immigration issue has become a tool of partisan fight, and immigration farces have been staged on a large scale, making immigrants face extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. There were a record high of nearly 2.4 million migrant arrests at the nation’s border in 2022, and the death toll of immigrants at its southern border reached 856, the deadliest in a single year.

The United States, founded on colonialism, racist slavery and inequality in labor, possession and distribution, has further fallen into a quagmire of system failure, governance deficits, racial divide and social unrest in recent years under the interaction of its polarized economic distribution pattern, racial conflict dominated social pattern and capital interest groups controlled political pattern.

American politicians, serving the interests of oligarchs, have gradually lost their subjective will and objective ability to respond to the basic demands of ordinary people and defend the basic rights of ordinary citizens, and failed to solve their own structural problems of human rights. Instead, they wantonly use human rights as a weapon to attack other countries, creating confrontation, division and chaos in the international community, and have thus become a spoiler and obstructor of global human rights development.

In addition, the Chinese foreign ministry ran a series of social media comments supporting the major points of the reports, like this example:

The world needs to know the truth and facts about US arbitrary detention. pic.twitter.com/Ls7DE1Q70s

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) March 29, 2023

We have to then ask the question, why?  What is the objective?  Is it only to resist the Summit on Democracy and the allegations against China in the Human Rights Report?  It may be so, but I think it is bigger.  China has had quite a few diplomatic triumphs.  I propose that the media has become big enough, with an influence big enough, that they are taking aim at the western domination of the media landscape.  We may see this process continue into a Chinese pursuit of a New World Media Order.