Politicizing tragedies has consequences at home. It also has consequences abroad, where our enemies watch for opportunities to highlight U.S. failures and hide their own.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, called on the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights this week to conduct investigations into and submit reports on the United States’s “human rights problems” following the Uvalde shooting.
“The right to life of ordinary people, including children and teenagers, cannot be guaranteed,” he said.
Zhao’s statements were made in response to a question about U.S. concern over China’s continuing human rights abuses and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s recent visit, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken said was restricted and manipulated by China.
There is, of course, no equivalence between a disturbed individual unleashing horrifying violence in a country with laws against violence and the state-sponsored torture, abuse, and cruelty that China subjects its own Uyghur Muslim population to daily. But what makes China’s political jabs troubling is the fact that it is borrowing them directly from U.S. leaders and legacy media outlets.
Take, for example, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Global Times, published just days after Zhao’s comments, that called on the U.S. to “take concrete actions to solve its own severe human rights problems.” It references the New York Times opinion piece “Don’t Talk to Me About ‘Civility.’ On Tuesday Morning Those Children Were Alive.”
The rambling New York Times opinion condemns everything from overturning Roe v. Wade to supposed systemic racism and the Constitution itself, arguing that the U.S. was tainted from its inception and founded “on stolen land, built with the labor of stolen lives.”
“The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens — its women, its racial minorities and especially its children,” the op-ed states.
The Global Times similarly criticized the entire U.S. system.
“In addition to the weak gun control, the shootings also reflect the intensification of various social contradictions in the U.S., such as the wealth gap, racial discrimination, drug abuse, and public security,” it says. “The U.S. system is equally incapable, or lacks interest, motivation, and courage, to address these problems thoroughly.”
The editorial goes on to quote President Joe Biden, who recently said, “These kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” It also quotes Vice President Kamala Harris, who stated after the Buffalo, New York, shooting last month that the U.S. is “experiencing an epidemic of hate.”
A separate piece published in the CCP-owned People’s Daily Online argues that “racism is an institutional and systemic defect” of the U.S., agreeing with Biden that “white supremacy is a poison running through our body politic.”
“Just as The Washington Post put it, people of all races took to the streets to demand accountability, justice and reform, and Black people should not continue to be targeted for harm based on the color of their skin,” the piece says. “However, it’s been two years and Black people still can’t breathe.”
Pointing out America’s systemic racism is a favorite tactic of China. In 2020, they proclaimed support for Black Lives Matter and condemned racial discrimination. Last year, they issued a report on the U.S. human rights record. And shockingly, all of this anti-American propaganda came straight from the mouths of America’s leaders.
Our leaders should debate policies and cultural solutions that could reduce tragedies. But all too often, they approach the conversation with ulterior motives, oversimplifying complex issues into narratives about race and gun control to score political points. Those narratives happen to be extremely useful for China.
For China, repudiating the U.S. is a convenient way to divert international attention from the leaked “Xinjiang Police Files,” which exposed in detail the depth of human rights violations in China’s so-called vocational education and training centers, more accurately internment camps. Our leaders need to stop undermining U.S. interests by giving China easy tools for creating propaganda.
