China condemns US visa restrictions on officials, warns of retaliation

The US should revoke its visa restrictions on Chinese officials immediately, or China will react with reciprocal countermeasures, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

Wang made the remark at a daily news conference after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Monday that the US is imposing visa restrictions on Chinese officials who it believes to be involved in “repressing” religious people and ethnic group members.

Voicing China’s absolute objection, Wang said the statement violates international law and basic rules for international relations, and is brutal interference in China’s domestic affairs.

The US slandered China, and suppressed Chinese officials groundlessly with the statement “filled with ideological bias and political lies”, Wang said, adding that the US is unqualified to point fingers at China’s human rights situation.

“China’s human rights situation is at its best in history, which is for all of the international community to see,” the spokesman said.

The Chinese government has adhered to the people-centered idea of human rights and implemented conscientiously the principle of respecting and protecting human rights as stipulated in the Constitution, Wang said.

The government deems the rights to survival and development as the primary basic human rights, he also said.

The US, on the other hand, is “the largest human rights violator in the world”, Wang said, adding that its “all-around and systemic violation of Native American people’s human rights has constituted de facto genocide”.

“In more than 100 years since the founding of the US, the country had been purging systemically the Native American people, a population that plunged to 250,000 in the early 20th century from 5 million in the late 15th century,” Wang said, adding that the US government’s assimilation policies led to the extinction of Native American culture.

Wang went on to cite the US failure to tackle COVID-19, which claimed more than 970,000 US people’s lives, the “long-term and systemic racial discrimination” in the country and its invasions of other countries.

“Even so the US is clamoring all day and threatening sanctions on other countries under the pretext of protecting human rights,” Wang said. “Such a trick is doomed to fail.”