Beijing slams upcoming US-led UN event on Xinjiang as 'insult, interference'

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has slammed as “an insult” US-led efforts to organize a virtual event this week to censure China’s alleged repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, saying the event’s sponsors aim to use human rights as a meddling tool.

Speaking during her daily press briefing on Monday, the ministry's spokeswoman Hua Chunying reiterated that organizers of the upcoming event, including the US, Germany, Britain, Canada, and Australia, intend to use “human rights issues as a political tool to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”

Earlier on Saturday, China’s United Nations mission in New York censured the event – due to take place on Wednesday – as “politically motivated” and called on missions of other UN member states not to participate in it.

"It is a politically-motivated event. We request your mission NOT to participate in this anti-China event," said a Thursday note reportedly sent by Beijing’s UN mission to other UN representative offices of member states.

Further emphasizing that sponsors of the event – which also included several other European governments – resorted to the rights issues “to create division and turbulence and disrupt China's development,” the note added, “They are obsessed with provoking confrontation with China… The provocative event can only lead to more confrontation.”

Permanent UN representatives of the US, Britain, and Germany are scheduled to address the virtual event on Wednesday, along with the executive director of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the secretary-general of the UK-based Amnesty International – widely suspected of being publicity instruments of their hosting governments to issue reports on human rights violations across the globe, particularly in countries not in tune with “Western values.”

The purpose of the event, as claimed in the invitation sent out by its sponsors, is to “discuss how the UN system, member states, and civil society can support and advocate for the human rights of members of ethnic Turkic communities in Xinjiang.”

The development comes as a senior White House official announced last month plans by US President Joe Biden to call on Washington’s Group of Seven (G7) allies to bring further pressure on China over the alleged use of forced labor in Xinjiang, as the new American president continues to follow the same anti-Beijing policies pursued by his Republican predecessor.

“These are like-minded allies, and we want to take tangible and concrete actions that show our willingness to coordinate on non-market economies, such as China,” Biden’s Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh claimed on April 24.

“The galvanizing challenge for the G7 is to show that open societies, democratic societies still have the best chance of solving the biggest problems in our world, and that top-down autocracies are not the best path,” added Singh, who also serves as deputy director of the National Economic Council and is helping to coordinate the next meeting of the G7 advanced economies, set to take place in Britain in June.

While Western governments and rights groups have accused authorities in Xinjiang of detaining and torturing Uyghur Muslims in camps, they have notoriously established themselves as being the top promoters of Islamophobia, racism and discrimination against non-White and non-Western migrant communities.

Their claim of advocating for Muslims in China also comes as US-led Western and NATO forces have engaged in two massive military occupations of Muslim nations of Iraq and Afghanistan and committed some of the most brutal massacres and torture of civilians and suspected enemy forces in the process. Western governments have also been strong backers of the near-daily atrocities of the Israeli regime carried out against mostly Muslim Palestinians since its illegitimate inception in 1948.

China rejects claims of mistreating the Uighurs, saying it has been taking anti-terrorism measures against separatists in the region who are seeking to join Takfiri outfits such as al-Qaeda.

Beijing describes the camps in Xinjiang as “vocational education and employment training centers,” which are part of its efforts to tackle underdevelopment and a lack of employment in the area.

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