China’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday criticized a joint US-New Zealand statement in which the countries expressed “serious concerns” about human rights violations in the Xinjiang region and the erosion of freedoms in China. Hong Kong territory.
The statements, said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, seriously interfered with Beijing’s internal affairs. In the statement, US leaders Joe Biden and New Zealand leaders Jacinda Ardern also said they encouraged a peaceful resolution to the Taiwan Strait issues.
Even as China reacted specifically to American and New Zealand mentions of these issues, Biden and Jacinda’s meeting on Tuesday at the White House focused on fears generated by China’s moves to increase its influence in the Pacific – a US official said that the president and prime minister discussed the need for face-to-face meetings with leaders in the region.
The meeting in Washington drew attention because it comes shortly after Beijing struck a security deal with the Solomon Islands and failed to forge a collective pact with other Pacific countries. Jacinda told reporters that both the United States and New Zealand are aligned “in the focus that Pacific Island leaders have determined for themselves.”
Although it was part of an economic bloc proposed by Biden for the Indo-Pacific region during the US president’s trip to Asia last week, designed to counter China, New Zealand, along with several other countries in the region, say believe that the initiative will not go very far.
Jacinda has already said she would like to see the U.S. return to a regional business deal that the Democrat’s predecessor, Donald Trump, left in 2017. Biden, however, has been reluctant to go down that path due to domestic fears that dealings with the U.S. kind can cost Americans jobs.
The citations to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the communiqué are lumped together in just one paragraph, but they are central points of Beijing’s policy and the target of repeated criticism from Western powers.
Xinjiang, in the west of the country, has become the scene of accusations of repression, led by the Chinese regime, against the ethnic Uighur. Recently, the leak of documents dubbed the Xinjiang Police Archives revealed more than 2,800 photos of detained Muslim minority members and 23,000 files of people arrested and placed in re-education camps. Among the reasons for the arrests is involvement in what are described as terrorist attacks committed in the past, dating back to the 1980s.
There have indeed been isolated attacks, especially in the last 20 years. The regime went on to accuse Uighurs of promoting terrorism and having links with international fundamentalist groups. The situation escalated in 2017, when Beijing began an incarceration plan in the region with the justification of fighting separatism and terrorism, which would have spilled over into unjustified detentions.
Memetimin Memet, 35, for example, received a ten-year prison sentence. But in his file, revealed in the Xinjiang Police Archives, the accusation had nothing to do with such acts. “The suspect learned the practice of worship and scriptures [islâmicas] for about a month in 1994; let his beard grow for about three months, from May to August 2006”.
Hong Kong, a former British colony returned to China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” arrangement, deals with the growing suppression of freedoms that would have been guaranteed in the agreement with the United Kingdom: an island of unregulated capitalism, a free judiciary and press. . After the wave of pro-democracy demonstrations that occupied the streets of the territory in 2019, however, the Chinese communist regime instituted the National Security Law, effectively ending the established regime of autonomy.
Finally, Taiwan, the island to which those defeated by the Communist Revolution of 1949 fled, is seen as a rebel province by Beijing, and the total reunification of the country’s territory has become an objective of the communist regime, a mission intensified by the leadership of Xi Jinping.
On the 23rd, when Biden was on a tour of Asia, the president said that the US would use force to defend Taiwan if the island were invaded by China. For the American, Beijing “flirts with danger” by flying over the territory during military exercises. The comment, although not unprecedented, calls into question the “strategic ambiguity” that traditionally governs relations between Washington and Taipei.
Through this approach, the US has an agreement to supply arms and other assistance and is committed to ensuring the island can defend itself, but does not formally challenge Beijing’s alleged sovereignty over Taiwan. As with the other times when criticisms of these points have been made, the Chinese always claim that Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan are strictly domestic matters and have classified the comments as external interference.
