China Calls U.S. a Hypocrite Over Human Rights

Reuters
March 12, 2010

BEIJING (Reuters) – China accused Washington of hypocrisy on Friday for its criticism of Beijing's restrictions on the Internet and dissent, blaming the United States for the financial crisis and saying its own rights record was terrible.

In its annual survey of human rights in 194 countries issued on Thursday, the U.S. State Department criticized China, along with Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea and Russia.

China's State Council Information Office, or cabinet spokesman's office, issued its own annual assessment of the United States' human rights record in response, and this year it dwelt on America's economic woes.

"The United States not only has a terrible domestic human rights record, it is also the main source of many human rights disasters worldwide," the Chinese report said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

"Especially a time when the world is suffering serious human rights disasters caused by the global financial crisis sparked by the U.S. sub-prime crisis, the U.S. government has ignored its own grave human rights problems and reveled in accusing other countries."

Washington has long criticized of China on human rights, and the subject has added to recent tensions with Beijing, which has also pushed back over arms sales to Taiwan and President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since their split in 1949 amid civil war, and reviles the Dalai Lama as a "separatist" for seeking self-rule for his Himalayan homeland.

PELOSI TIBET REMARKS CONDEMNED

China's Foreign Ministry, in a separate statement, also condemned U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi for comments earlier this week honoring "the many brave Tibetans who have sacrificed their lives fighting for freedom."

"We advise the relevant U.S. congresswoman to respect the facts, abandon her prejudices and stop using the Tibet issue to interfere in China's internal affairs," spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement on the ministry's website (http://www.fmprc.gov.cn).

China's Internet controls have also thrust Beijing into a dispute with search engine giant Google, which has said it may shut down its Chinese-language Google.cn portal and draw back from the Chinese market out of concerns over censorship and a hacking attack from within the country.

China has intensified restrictions on the Internet, imposed tight control over people seen as threats to Communist Party rule, and increased repression of Uighurs after ethnic violence and riots in Xinjiang, the country's restive far-western region, said the State Department report.

China's Communist Party authorities have shown little patience with Western criticisms of Beijing's punishment of political dissidents and protesters.

Late last year, U.S. officials decried the sentencing of prominent Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in jail on charges of "inciting subversion."

The latest Chinese counter-blast to U.S. criticisms said Washington should concentrate on "improving its own human rights."

(Reporting by Chris Buckley and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Alex Richardson)

               China Lashes Out at U.S.on Human Rights

By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
March 4, 2005

BEIJING - China issued a tit-for-tat report card Thursday on human rights in the United States that lambasted the Pentagon for "wanton slaughters" abroad, belittled American elections as awash in special-interest cash and accused U.S. courts of deep-seated racial bias.

The Chinese government report, which portrayed the United States as gun-crazed and unfair to minorities, came three days after the State Department released its annual report on human rights abuses in countries around the world, including China.

It marked the sixth straight year that China has countered the American report with one of its own, but this year's was particularly noteworthy because it condemned the United States for abuses by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"In 2004, the atrocity of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of the human rights performance of the United States," the report said.

Instead of censuring other nations, the report urged the United States to "reflect on its erroneous behavior" and deal with "tons of problems in its own human rights."

In a report issued Monday, the State Department cited "numerous and serious abuses" in China against petitioners, writers and critics of one-party rule. It said inmates often died in custody, and that more than 250,000 people languished in labor camps without trials. It cited "credible reports" of widespread incarceration of regime critics in high-security psychiatric hospitals.

"We have a strong relationship with China, and the mark of a good relationship is that you sometimes disagree," State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said. He declined to comment further on the Chinese report, but said the State Department stood by its own report.

"We think it's well-researched, well-documented and well-substantiated," he said.

China's report listed many of what it said were injustices in the United States for women, minorities, the poor and victims of violent crime. Many of the problems were cited from American newspaper reports. The sources of some of the statistics used in the report weren't given.

"The United States claims to be `a paragon of democracy,' but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common," the report said. "Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money." It described the 2004 presidential election as riddled with problems, ballot-counting errors and confusion.

"In Florida, the cases of black people being removed from voter registration list or their votes being denied were 10 times higher than people of other races," it said.

"Most prisons in the United States are overcrowded," even though construction of jails is a growth industry, the report added. "California has seen only one college but 21 new prisons built since 1984."

"Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world's richest country," and racial discrimination permeates society, especially in the court system, the report charged. Nearly 3 out of 10 African-Americans have been in prison at least once, it said.

"Blacks receive, on average, a longer felony sentence than whites. A black person's average jail sentence is six months longer than a white's for the same crime," it said.

Children aren't safe at U.S. schools, the report charged. It said 4.5 million students were molested each year at school.

The report was harshest on the conduct of American soldiers overseas and the way in which the Bush administration conducts its worldwide war on terrorism.

"To avoid international scrutiny, the United States keeps under wraps half of its 20-odd detention centers worldwide which are holding terrorist suspects," it said.

China cited a report that said the American-led invasion of Iraq might have led to 100,000 civilian deaths in the country, "with most victims being women and children."

Such a high death toll should come as little surprise, the Chinese report said.

"The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks."

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/11047248.htm?

To read the Full Text of the China Report click here.

China's Report Condemns Us
 for Infringing Foreigners' Rights, Citing Abuse in Iraq

The atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the infringement of human rights of foreign nationals by the United States, according to the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004.

The report, released by the Information Office of China's State Council on Thursday, said that according to US media like the Newsweek and the Washington Post, as early as several years ago, in US forces' prisons in Afghanistan, interrogators used various kinds of torture tools for acquiring confession, causing many deaths.

The International Committee of the Red Cross believed that abuse of detained Iraqis in the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison was not a single case and it was a systematic behavior, the report said.

According to the report, at least 107 children were imprisoned in seven prisons including the Abu Ghraib Prison run by the US forces. They were not allowed to get in contact with their families. Their term in prison was undetermined. It was not clear when they were going to be brought court hearing. Some of these children had been abused.

The report said, to avoid international scrutiny, the United States keeps under wraps half of its 20-odd detention centers worldwide which are holding terrorist suspects. And at least seven US-controlled clandestine prisons, one of which dubbed "inferno," in Afghanistan, have not been kept within the bounds of law.

In a report by the Human Rights First on 24 US secret interrogation centers, these secret facilities are believed to "make inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but virtually inevitable," the report quoted a British newspaper, the Times, as saying.

The US military spending has kept shooting up, with its fiscal 2005 defense budget hitting a historical high of 422 billion US dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over fiscal 2004, according to the report.

As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the United States has made a fortune out of war. Its transactions of conventional weapons exceeded 14.5 billion dollars in 2003, up 900 million dollars year-on-year and accounting for 56.7 percent of the total sales worldwide. The Iraq War has been "a helping straw" to the US economic development, the report said.

The report points out that the United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Statistics from the health department of the interim Iraqi government show 3,487 people, including 328 women and children, have been killed and another 13,720 injured in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces between April 15 and Sept. 19 in 2004.

A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the US-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children, the report said.

Jointly designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the survey also finds that the majority of the additional, unnatural deaths since the invasion were caused by violence, while air strikes from the coalition forces were the main factor to blame for the violence-caused deaths, according to the report.

In addition, the US troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-US militants since the invasion. The American forces have so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent, the report said.

The report said that the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably.

China's Report Criticizes US for its "Money Democracy"

English Eastday.com
March 4, 2004

Boasted as "a paragon of democracy, " the United States' democracy is actually manipulated by the rich and malpractice, said the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004 issued here Thursday.
Referring the elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money, the record said, the presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly US$4 billion, some US$1 billion or one third more than that spent in the 2000 elections.

According to the US official website www.opensecrets.org, the 2004 presidential election has been listed as the most expensive campaign in the country's history, with the cost jumping to US$1.7 billion from US$1 billion in 2000.

The record also quoted The Washington Post on Dec. 3, a report named Fundraising Records Broken by Both Major Political Parties, as saying that last year the Democratic Party collected US$389.8 million in electoral funds and the Republican Party raised US$385.3 million, both hitting a record high.
In the elections, the record said, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as US$130,000.

In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The Baltimore Sun called this "Buying Power". Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. Some interest groups also got themselves involved in the judge election campaign.
The US election system has quite a few flaws. The newly adopted Help America Vote Act of 2004 requires voters to offer a series of documents such as a stable residence or identification in registering, which in reality disenfranchises thousands of homeless people. The United States is the only country in the world that rules out ex-inmates' right to vote, which disenfranchises 5 million ex-inmates and 13 percent male black people, said the record.

In the meantime, fabrications of disputable pictures and statements were put in the agenda of political maneuvers, the record pointed out. According to statistics of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of University of Pennsylvania, campaign advertisement for the 2004 US presidential election had a large proportion of false information that was enough to mislead voters, far beyond 50 percent in 1996. In the Republican camp, at least 75 percent contained untrue information and personal attacks. The website of the center www.FactCheck.org listed at least 100 items of such information.

The New York Times published a commentary on March 30, 2004, saying that the US government's reliance on slandering had reached an unprecedented level in contemporary American political history, and the government prepared to abuse power at any moment to threat potential critics.

On July 16, 2004 the US State Department made a regulation, in violation of the norms of most other countries, that foreign reporters should leave the country while waiting for the valid period of their visas to be extended. The annual report of Native American Journalists Association criticized the US administration for the move, which severely infringes upon press freedom.

Someone with the American Society of Newspaper Editors said that the US administration's measures reflected its repulsion of foreign news media. In Iraq, the United States on the one hand alleged that it had brought democracy to the Iraqi people, on the other hand it suppressed public opinion. On March 28, 2004 US troops closed down a Shiite newspaper in Baghdad, which triggered a protest demonstration by thousands of Iraqi people.

On Sept. 27, the Association of American University Presses, Association of American Publishers and other organizations jointly lodged a complaint to the district court of Manhattan, New York, charging the Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Department of the Treasury with deliberately preventing literary works of Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese writers from entering the United States and turning the economic sanctions against the three countries into a "censorship system" to stop free dissemination of information and ideology.

In another case, eight reporters, including Jim Taricani of the TV station in Providence, Rhode Island with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Judith Miller of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, were declared guilty for they declined to disclose the confidential sources of news. The New York Times pointed out on Nov. 10, 2004 that through these cases, it was found out that press freedom suffered rampant infringement.
In addition, the record said, in recent years, over a dozen foreign journalists have been detained in airports in the United States, including the one in Los Angeles. In March 2003, a Danish press-photographer was expelled out of the country after a DNA test. A Swiss journalist was rejected from entry of an airport in Washington D.C. The airport staff by force took pictures and finger prints of the journalist. Meanwhile, he was not permitted to contact the Swiss embassy in the Unite States.

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