U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Feb. 18 that protecting human rights in China is a bipartisan issue. She said she was “proud” that the U.S. government had found the Chinese Communist Party guilty of genocide.
In an interview with the English-language Epoch Times on February 18, Pelosi said, “I’ve been working on human rights in China for more than 30 years, since Tiananmen Square (June 4). It is very important for the world to understand that human rights are part of our value system.”
Better protection of human rights around the world is also about U.S. national security, she said, about the U.S. military and U.S. power, and about the U.S. economy.
Asked what policies the new administration should adopt to change Beijing‘s human rights practices, Pelosi said, “How we go about doing that is just weighing in.”
She added, “Whatever form it takes, I hope it [the approach] will change some of China’s [the Chinese Communist Party’s] behavior toward Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uighurs.”
Beijing’s crackdown on Uyghurs through tight surveillance and forced detentions has drawn international condemnation. The Trump (Trump) administration has imposed sanctions on entities and individuals who have committed atrocities in Xinjiang. At the same Time, the Trump Administration also banned all imports of cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang because of forced labor imposed by the Communist Party.
Pelosi said she was “proud” that the U.S. government found the Chinese Communist Party guilty of genocide against the Uighurs because it sent a strong message to the Chinese Communist Party. It is a “powerful statement” to those who have been detained and persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party without any charges.
She said it is important for us to speak up so that those people know they are not forgotten.
Pelosi also mentioned that human rights protections in China are a bipartisan issue; many Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.Y.) and retired Rep. Frank Wolf (D-N.Y.), have done excellent work on human rights around the world.
“They took risks, they went to prison labor camps to collect evidence so we could do our thing here.” Pelosi said.
On the 18th, a bipartisan bill was reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would ban imports of goods from China’s Xinjiang region unless it can be proven that they were not produced using forced labor and allow further sanctions against Communist Party officials who have committed violence against Muslims in Xinjiang.
In addition, Biden addressed human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party at a CNN-sponsored town hall meeting on June 16. He said the United States will reaffirm its role in upholding human rights at the United Nations and other institutions.
He said he and Xi mentioned China’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, as well as the Taiwan issue. But Biden followed up by saying, “Culturally, every country has different norms that they expect their leaders to abide by.”
Biden’s comments were immediately and widely criticized by conservatives and human rights activists as spreading Chinese Communist propaganda to justify human rights abuses and genocide by the Chinese Communist Party.
In a Feb. 17 interview with Fox News, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to Biden’s remarks by saying that the Perception that it is just a “different set of norms” is the CCP’s propaganda line, “It wants you to think that it’s just a quiet country, that the system may be a little bit different,” but the truth is that it is. “But the truth of the matter is that they are trying to destroy an entire nation.
Biden then went on to highlight the China+ human rights issue in a televised interview, saying that China (the CCP) is trying very hard to be a world leader and that to get that title, it has to gain the trust of other countries, but it’s hard to do that as long as they are engaged in activities that violate basic human rights.
Pompeo urged Biden not to be all talk and no action. He believes that what Xi may have gained through his call with Biden is the fact that this current U.S. administration is only talking about human rights issues and raising them, not acting on them.
Lee You-tan, a professor at the Institute of National Development at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said, “What we are most worried about is that the Biden Administration, when it takes office, is all talk and no real action, which is what we are most worried about. Not only the U.S. Republican Party and bipartisan politics should be strongly monitored, but people in liberal democracies around the world, too, should urgently keep an eye on what the Biden administration is doing.”
Twenty-four non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sent a letter to President Joe Biden on February 17 asking the U.S. government to make human rights a priority in its policy toward China.
The open letter from the NGOs, which focus on human and civil rights in China, said the international community needs to fundamentally stop the Chinese government’s human rights abuses both inside and outside of China because many of the previous tools are no longer relevant or powerful enough.
The organizations also made seven recommendations to the Biden administration, including making human rights a priority in U.S. policy toward China, the need for the administration to be careful in its terminology to distinguish between China and the CCP, and to refrain from using the CCP’s false propaganda language and avoiding excuses for the CCP’s gross human rights violations.
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