China Blasts U.S. Human Rights Record

With a U.N. panel about to vote on a resolution condemning Chinese human rights abuses, China this week accelerated a sweeping media counterattack against the United States, focusing on the videotaped beating of Mexican illegal immigrants by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies.

Repeatedly on television news programs and in leading Communist Party newspapers, Chinese commentators have cited the Riverside beatings as an example of U.S. “hypocrisy” in attacking China’s human rights practices while American law enforcement agents are engaged in documented violence against unarmed civilians.

“The United States labels itself as ‘an exemplar of human rights’ and has censured some developing countries for their human rights conditions,” an editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper said. “But this time they outdid themselves. American police beat innocent people in front of a camera’s lens and gave a thorough demonstration of their talents.”

Interviewed by the official Ministry of Justice newspaper, Legal Daily, law professor Liu Wenzong joined in the chorus of official indignation over the April 1 beating incident.

“This was a case of barbaric racial violence and a serious infringement of Mexican citizens’ rights,” Liu said. “I think people still remember the incident five years ago in which four white policemen brutally beat Rodney King. . . . These two incidents, as well as widespread instances of white police brutality toward black, Hispanic, Asian Americans and American Indians, prove that the U.S. is a nation where racism thrives.”

The Riverside incident has been featured in the editorial cartoons of several newspapers.

In the People’s Daily, China’s leading Communist Party newspaper, helmeted police in military uniforms were depicted clubbing a sombrero-clad Mexican and a black man.

In the English-language China Daily, aimed mainly at a foreign readership, a fat police officer was shown holding a bloody nightstick and shouting through a rolled paper bullhorn labeled “Human Rights Report.”

The media campaign was launched as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is considering a U.S.-backed resolution condemning Chinese human rights practices.

The resolution, which is supported by the European Union and other Western states, is scheduled for a vote before the 53-member U.N. human rights forum in Geneva on Tuesday. A similar resolution offered last year was narrowly defeated after a major diplomatic effort by the Chinese government.

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According to a Western diplomat in Beijing, China is in a better position to block a formal vote on the resolution this year. Some Western countries, including France, opposed the reintroduction of the resolution, which this year contains language criticizing China’s treatment of orphans.

Defeat of what is now an annual vote on the human rights resolution has become a major diplomatic objective of the Chinese government.

When the U.S. State Department criticized China’s human rights practices in a report last year, China countered with a report of its own that cited crime, drug abuse, homelessness and the AIDS epidemic as examples of shortcomings in American human rights conditions.