(TibetanReview.net, Dec13’22) – China demanded Dec 12 that the US withdraw its sanctions on two of its senior officials for grave human rights abuses in occupied Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). It also reacted angrily to US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns’s statement on Dec 10, the international Human Rights Day, criticizing the situation in China and in particular expressing concerns over the conditions in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.
The two senior officials were among 40 people and entities from 9 countries sanctioned by the US on Dec 9 for human rights abuses and corruption, coinciding with the commemorations of International Anti-Corruption Day and Human Rights Day, respectively, on Dec 9 and 10.
China urges the United States to withdraw its so-called sanctions on Chinese officials immediately, and stop interfering in Tibet affairs, China’s official Xinhua news agency Dec 12 cited foreign spokesperson Wang Wenbin as saying.
He has said China will take effective and resolute measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests, stopping short of mentioning reciprocal sanctions.
The report cited Wang as accusing the US of imposing illegal sanctions on Chinese officials under domestic law and what he has called the pretext of so-called human rights issues in Tibet, which in his view “grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs, blatantly violates basic norms in international relations and gravely undermines China-U.S. relations.”
“China firmly opposes it and strongly condemns it,” Wang has said.
The US Treasury Department on Dec 9 included Wu Yingjie, who was China’s party chief in TAR from 2016 to 2021, and Zhang Hongbo, China’s police chief in the Himalayan region since 2018 among those it sanctioned under its Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
The sanctions mean that United States has blocked any US assets and criminalized transactions with these two Chinese officials.
In the same press briefing, Wang has accused US Ambassador Burns of making “unwarranted accusations against China’s human rights conditions.” He has claimed that Burns’s Dec 10 statement “fully reveals the hegemonic, high-handed and bullying nature of the US and its political agenda of using human rights issues as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs and undermine China’s stability, development and ethnic solidarity. China is gravely concerned and strongly opposes this.”
He has further maintained: “The so-called ‘genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang’ is a sheer lie of the century. The so-called ‘repressive policies in Tibet’ is a distortion of facts. The so-called ‘dismantling of the autonomy’ in Hong Kong confuses right and wrong.”