Departing U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was damned Wednesday as a “doomsday clown” by a Chinese Communist Party official who said his accusations against China of genocide and crimes against humanity amounted to “a piece of wastepaper.”
The allegations of abuses against Muslim minority groups in China’s Xinjiang region are “outright sensational pseudo-propositions and a malicious farce concocted by individual anti-China and anti-Communist forces represented by Pompeo,” spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters at a daily briefing.
“In our view, Pompeo’s so-called designation is a piece of wastepaper. This American politician, who is notorious for lying and deceiving, is turning himself into a doomsday clown and joke of the century with his last madness and lies of the century,” Hau said, latter adding a string of accusations on social media.
#Pompeo's so-called determination is NULL & VOID. Not worth the paper it's written on. Because he is so NOTORIOUS for LYING & CHEATING. Btw, he is INDEED successful in making himself "the Clown of the Century"!
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) January 20, 2021
China has imprisoned more than one million people, including Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups, in a vast network of prison-like political concentration camps, according to U.S. officials and human rights groups.
Pompeo said on Tuesday that China’s sweeping incarceration without trial of those minorities amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, as Breitbart News reported.
Many of the Chinese officials accused of having taken part in the religious repression are already under U.S. sanctions. The “genocide” designation means new measures will be easier to impose and continues long-held public advocacy by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law on Wednesday, requiring sanctions on Chinese officials. https://t.co/961aNKbokh
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 19, 2020
Prisoners have been subjected to torture, sterilization and political indoctrination in addition to forced labor as part of an assimilation campaign in a region whose inhabitants are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese majority, something Pompeo attested to in his statement.
“We are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,” Pompeo said, in final broadsides at Beijing after a combative tenure on the world stage.
Hua on Wednesday said genocide had “never happened in the past, is not happening now and will never happen in China,” adding the Chinese Communist Party was committed to the freedom of all peoples under its purview.
AP contributed to this report
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