Washington's Xinjiang troublemaking shameful: China Daily editorial

Two US diplomats reportedly acknowledged that Washington has hyped up issues related to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in an attempt to contain China.

According to a social media post by Global Times that cited an anonymous source, Sheila Carey and Andrew Chira, officials at the Economic and Political Department of the US Consulate General in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, told guests at a reception in 2021 that hyping up forced labor, genocide and criticizing China's human rights records in Xinjiang were viewed as an effective means to sink the Chinese government into the quagmire of negative publicity and ethnic tensions.

This prompted Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hua Chunying to call for an official explanation from the US about the remarks, calling them "a rare truth from US officials who've been lying through their teeth" in a social media post on Sunday.

The US, as expected, has rejected the claims, with a spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing calling them false statements that could make the US officials "targets for harassment".

But it is no secret that using Xinjiang-related issues to undermine China's interests has always been part of US diplomacy and national strategy. And it is not the first time "they have spoken their minds", as Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former US secretary of state Colin Powell, said in a speech at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 that if the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to destabilize China, the best way to do so, would be "to foment unrest" among the 20 million Uygurs in Xinjiang. He also said that one of the strategic objectives of the US sending troops to Afghanistan was to destabilize China.

Such destabilization activities are run-of-the-mill actions for the CIA, which has a long record of covert operations aimed at provoking unrest in countries which are not in favor with the US.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was even more direct when he talked about the tradition of the agency he headed from 2017 to 2018. "We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses," he boasted to an audience in April 2019.

The claim there is genocide in Xinjiang has proved to be "the biggest lie of the century" as the Chinese delegation said at the end of the China-US high-level strategic dialogue in Anchorage, Alaska, in March last year. Yet based on that lie, US President Joe Biden signed into force the "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act" in December, which becomes effective on June 21. This will prohibit US importers from importing products from Xinjiang. The move will greatly affect the global supply chains. Washington's false allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang reflect how unscrupulous, devious and desperate it is to make trouble for Beijing. It also makes clear that its claim that it wants the two countries to "coexist and cooperate" is a sham.