Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a virtual meeting with senior United Nations officials in a collegial display orchestrated as Chinese officials reject the significance of American statements about human rights.
“Reengaging with the Human Rights Council will amplify the crucial voice of the United States on the most urgent human rights issues,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Blinken at the outset of their encounter.
Guterres appeared enthused about Blinken’s decision to return to the U.N. human rights body, a reversal of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2018 announcement that the U.S. would exit the panel. His compliment had a broader resonance, though, as bipartisan American condemnation of China’s Uyghur Muslim repression hardens into a fault line of international diplomacy.
“People everywhere are demanding an end to systemic racism, discrimination and persecution, and protection for the rights of women, the marginalized, and minorities of all kinds,” Guterres said. “The United Nations is, I believe, the place to tackle our joint challenges and reaffirm our common values.”
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The definition of those values, and whether they are held in common, is a subject of intensifying dispute between Washington and Beijing. Chinese officials have dug in for an extended fight over the ethical obligations imposed by human rights, to deflect transatlantic condemnation of the regime’s repression of Uyghur Muslims.
“The human rights views of some Western countries do not represent international human rights views,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Monday while traveling in the United Arab Emirates.
A lower-ranking official in Xinjiang, the traditional home of the Uyghur Muslims whom Chinese Communist authorities have detained in mass reeducation camps, put the point even more emphatically while touting a boycott of Western companies that refuse to use Xinjiang cotton that is believed to be sourced from Uyghur slave labor.
“We hope that businesses like H&M will be more clear-eyed and distinguish right from wrong,” Xinjiang government spokesman Xu Guixiang said, per the South China Morning Post.
Chinese Communist officials are trying to advance an affirmative defense of their human rights policies in the face of intensifying Western rebukes. Pompeo’s team accused Beijing of waging a “war on faith” in 2019, before he termed the repression a genocide in the final hours of Donald Trump’s presidency. Survivor accounts of the sexual violence inflicted on Uyghur women and the abuse directed at devout Muslim families spurred the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union to sanction some of the Chinese officials overseeing the repression.
China retaliated by sanctioning U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Chairwoman Gayle Manchin and commission Vice Chairman Tony Perkins — a move likely to stoke bipartisan animosity in the United States. Manchin is married to Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, while Perkins, the Family Research Council President, is a social conservative who maintained close ties with Pompeo throughout his tenure as secretary of state.
“Beijing’s attempts to intimidate and silence those speaking out for human rights and fundamental freedoms only contribute to the growing international scrutiny of the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang,” Blinken replied Saturday evening.
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Blinken’s Chinese counterpart insisted that the true outrage lies in the prospect of Western nations or corporations refusing to invest in the industries implicated in the Uyghur Muslim repression at the expense of Chinese economic growth.
“If certain Western countries insist on using human rights as a pretext to contain and suppress developing countries and attempt to deprive nonWestern countries of their right to development, this will be the greatest injustice in the history of humanity,” the foreign minister said.
