China issues report on US human rights

BEIJING - China published a report on the United States' human rights situation on Thursday.

The report, titled "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2016," was released by the Information Office of the State Council, China's cabinet, in response to "the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2016" issued by the US State Department on March 3 local time.

China's report says that the United States poses once again as "the judge of human rights".

"Wielding 'the baton of human rights,' it pointed fingers and cast blame on the human rights situation in many countries while paying no attention to its own terrible human rights problems," it says.

"With the gunshots lingering in people's ears behind the Statue of Liberty, worsening racial discrimination and the election farce dominated by money politics, the self-proclaimed human rights defender has exposed its human rights 'myth' with its own deeds," it added.

Concrete facts show that the United States saw continued deterioration in some key aspects of its existent human rights issues last year, according to the report.

The United States had the second highest prisoner rate, with 693 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population, the report says.

Roughly 2.2 million people were incarcerated in the United States in 2014. And there had been 70 million Americans incarcerated - that's almost one in three adults - with some form of criminal record, the report cites media reports as saying.

Occurrence of gun-related crimes also sustained a high level, according to the report.

There were a total of 58,125 gun violence incidents, including 385 mass shootings, in the United States in 2016, leaving 15,039 killed and 30,589 injured, says the report, citing figures from a toll report by the Gun Violence Archive.

In 2016, the US social polarization became more serious, with the proportion of adults who had full-time jobs hitting a new low since 1983, income gaps continuing to widen, the size of middle class reaching a turning point and beginning to shrink, and living conditions of the lower class deteriorating, the report says.

According to consulting firm Gallup, the percentage of Americans who said they were in the middle or upper-middle class had fallen by 10 percentage points, from an average of 61 percent between 2000 and 2008 to 51 percent in 2016.

"That drop meant 25 million people in the United States fared much worse in economic terms," it says.

Besides, one in seven Americans, or at least 45 million people, lived in poverty, the report quotes the Daily Mail as saying.

In 2016, racial relations in the United States continued to deteriorate, the report says.

A Washington Post website report on police shootings in 2015 found that black Americans were 2.5 times as likely to be shot and killed by police as white Americans. Unarmed black men were five times as likely to be shot and killed by police as unarmed white men.

Wage gap between blacks and whites was the worst in nearly four decades, according to the report.

It notes that racial discrimination is strongly condemned by the United Nations (UN).

In 2016, the UN's Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reported to the UN Human Rights Council that racial problems were severe in the United States, saying the colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remained a serious challenge.

"The situation of protection of rights of women, children and elders in the United States was worrisome in 2016," the report says.

Women were paid much less compared to their male colleagues who do the same work, and they frequently fell victims to sexual harassment and assault.

Poverty rate among children remained high and cases of elder abuse happened from time to time, according to the report.

It quotes a USA Today website report as saying that roughly one in four women say they have been harassed on the job.

An estimated 6.8 million people aged 10 to 17 in the United States are food insecure, according to the report.

In addition, "the United States repeatedly trampled on human rights in other countries and willfully slaughtered innocent victims," the report says.

From Aug 8, 2014 to Dec 19, 2016, the United States launched 7,258 air strikes in Iraq and 5,828 in Syria, causing 733 incidents with an estimated number of civilian deaths between 4,568 and 6,127.