Washington should do soul-searching on human rights

Editor's note: The US Department of State issued the 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices on Monday. In his remarks on the reports, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken once again criticized China's human rights conditions. The following are excerpts of the response given by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin in a regular news conference on Tuesday:

The China-related content of the 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices is fraught with political lies and ideological prejudice. Those platitudes have no merits at all. People can easily tell that these so-called country reports released throughout the years have never been about human rights issues, but about the US' hegemonism and bullying practice as well as its hypocritical double standards.

As a Chinese saying goes, it's inappropriate not to reciprocate. Since the United States enjoys finding fault with other countries so much, we thought it might be helpful to remove the facade of US democracy for the rest of the world.

On Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a report titled "The State of Democracy in the United States: 2022" on its website. This report contains a multitude of facts, media comments and expert opinions to present a complete and real picture of US democracy over the year. What they reveal is US democracy is in chaos at home and a trail of havoc and disasters has been left behind as the US peddled and imposed its democracy around the globe.

It reveals the US' hypocritical practices including framing a narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism" and splitting the world into two camps of what it defined as "democracies and non-democracies" to serve the interests of none other than itself.

In a couple of days, the US will organize the so-called second Summit for Democracy to check how various countries have performed in meeting the US standards for democracy and to issue new orders. Be it high-sounding rhetoric or maneuvers driven by a hidden agenda, none can hide the real designs of the US — to maintain its hegemony by playing bloc politics and using democracy as a tool for political ends.

What the world needs today is not the stoking of divisions in the name of democracy and the pursuit of de facto supremacy-oriented unilateralism, but the strengthening of solidarity and cooperation and the upholding of true multilateralism on the basis of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

What the world needs today is not the interference in other countries' internal affairs under the guise of democracy, but the advocating of genuine democracy, the rejecting of pseudo-democracy and the joint promotion of greater democracy in international relations.

What the world needs today is not a so-called democracy summit that hypes up confrontation and contributes nothing to the collective response to global challenges, but a conference of solidarity that focuses on taking real actions to solve prominent global challenges.

We urge the US to immediately stop pointing fingers at other countries and earnestly reflect on its own actions, and change its moves of violating human rights in other countries and undermining democracy in the world under the pretext of human rights and democracy.