China Blasts US for ‘Brazen’ Human Rights Abuses at Home and Abroad

According to the Guardian:

The China section of the annual US State Department report on human rights conditions globally, released on Thursday, said that “repression and coercion were routine” against activists, ethnic minorities and law firms that took on sensitive cases.

Human rights have long been a source of tension between the world’s two largest economies, especially since 1989, when the US imposed sanctions on China after a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

While senior leaders periodically promise China’s citizens democracy and human rights, the last two years under President Xi Jinping’s administration have been marked by a sweeping crackdown on dissidents and activists.

China has long rejected criticism of its rights’ record, saying providing food, clothing, housing and economic growth are far more relevant for developing countries, pointing to its success at lifting millions out of poverty.

China’s report, titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2014,” cites news articles, many of them from U.S. media sources, to support its claims.

But its criticisms are not limited to domestic human rights violations. “While its own human rights situation was increasingly grave, the U.S. violated human rights in other countries in a more brazen manner,” the report reads.

“In the field of international human rights, the U.S. has long refused to approve some core human rights conventions of the United Nations and voted against some important UN human rights resolutions,” it declares. “More than that, the U.S. continued to go even further to violate human rights in other countries, including infringing on the privacy of citizens of other countries with the overseas monitoring project, killing large number of innocent civilians of other countries in drone strikes, and raping and killing locals by U.S. soldiers garrisoned overseas.”

The State Department and Chinese reports come in the same week that the U.S. and China held three days of high-level talks in Washington, D.C. Tensions between the two countries have recently been rising.