China saddened by Texas school shooting, urges US to effectively protect human rights: FM spokesperson

BEIJING - China is saddened by the heavy casualties caused by repeated deadly shootings in the United States and has expressed condolences to the victims and sympathy to the injured and bereaved families in the Texas shooting incident, said a foreign ministry spokesperson on Wednesday, also urging the US side to effectively safeguard its own people's human rights.

Wang Wenbin made the remarks at a daily press briefing after an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school in southern America on Tuesday.

"The right to life is the biggest human right and racial discrimination is the worst injustice," Wang said, noting that the United States is the country with the worst gun violence and racial discrimination, and the worst human rights deficit, however, "the US government has not been seen to do anything substantive to address these problems in the past decades."

"In the past 25 years, the US federal government has failed to adopt a single gun control act and nearly 60 years have passed since Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream,' but the brutal reality of George Floyd's 'I can't breathe' is still visible," Wang said.

The spokesperson further pointed out that the US government is indifferent to the systematic violation of human rights of the American people, but is keen on wanton attacks and interference against other countries under the guise of human rights.

"This fully shows that the so-called US emphasis on human rights is completely hypocritical and empty," Wang said, adding that if the US government doesn't care about the human rights of its own people, how can it really care about the human rights of other countries?

"We urge the United States to take the human rights of the American people seriously and submit an American human rights report to the world as soon as possible," Wang said, also urging the US side to take effective measures to protect the lives of the American people and ensure that they enjoy the right and freedom from fear, gun violence and racial discrimination.