Beijing: China today said the rise in hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the US was heart wrenching and epitomized the “dark track record of US human rights conditions”.
Yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s republished data mentioned that hate crimes against people of Asian descent rose by 76% in the US in 2020.
China mentioned that the sufferings of hate crimes were not limited to Asian Americans, “people who cannot breathe go beyond people like George Floyd and systemic racism remains endemic in the US society”.
“People wonder: When will police brutality against racial minorities wane and end in the US? When will Islamophobia permeating the US society vanish?,” Zhao Lijian, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, told reporters here today.
According to the FBI report, in 2020, 279 hate crime incidents were reported against individuals of Asian descent as compared to 158 incidents reported in 2019. The FBI republished the data after it withdrew its previously issued hate crime data in August which had error in reporting Ohio’s statistics.
Lijian claimed that in fact, since the outbreak of COVID-19, bullying of and even attacks on people of Asian descent abound in the US. “According to a report that surveyed young Asian Americans published on the website of the National Broadcasting Corporation, over the past year, a quarter of young Asian Americans became targets of racial discrimination and bullying, nearly half of the respondents expressed pessimism about their situation, and a quarter of the respondents expressed fear about the situation of themselves and their families,” he said.
Beijing also raised doubts about the US motive of returning to the UN Human Rights Council in light of the latest number. “Is it rejoining with sincerity to improve its own human rights conditions and participate in promoting global human rights development, or to continue to use human rights as a political tool and stoke division and turbulence in places across the world in a way that serves its own geopolitical interests?” Lijian asked.
He advised Washington to squarely face and redress its own problems of human rights violations, stop the wrong moves of politicizing human rights problems or using them as tools, and earnestly take the responsibility of respecting and protecting human rights.
– global bihari bureau
