In a replay of Mike Pompeo’s ravings, the State Department’s annual human rights report for 2020 charges that in China, “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.” These crimes, it says, “were continuing and include: the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than 1 million civilians; forced sterilization, coerced abortions, and more restrictive application of China’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained; forced labor; and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.” https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/china/
China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded almost immediately to the State Department with a scathing denunciation of the genocide accusation, charging the U.S. with “riding roughshod over international law.” Genocide is a very precisely defined term, she said, described at the end of World War II by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as specific acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Any charge of genocide must “survive a strict scrutiny of the facts,” Hua emphasized, and declaring that no “state, organization or individual is qualified and entitled to arbitrarily determine that another state has committed ‘genocide.’ ”
