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China pans US anti-communism memorial

China criticized the US' "Cold War" thinking after US President George W. Bush attended the opening of a memorial for those killed in communist regimes.

Bush had said the Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated to tens of millions of people killed in communist regimes including China, the Soviet Union, North Korea and Vietnam, and that their deaths should remind Americans that "evil is real and must be confronted."

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded on Wednesday evening, saying Beijing had protested to the US after the inauguration of the bronze memorial in Washington and Bush's comments, made on Tuesday.

"There are political forces in the United States who still think in Cold War terms and seek to provoke conflicts between different ideologies and social systems," ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) said in a statement posted on the ministry's Web site.

"We resent and oppose the US acts and have lodged strong representations with the US side. The US should stop interfering in the internal affair of other countries," Qin said.

His statement did not mention Bush by name.

The memorial has been more than a decade in the making, and aims to honor memories and educate current and future generations about communism's crimes against humanity.

Bush spoke on the 20th anniversary of one of the late US president Ronald Reagan's most famous moments -- a speech at the Berlin Wall in which he challenged then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Despite tussles over trade issues, relations between the countries have generally been good recently, especially in cooperating on trying to shut down North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

However, Bejing also denounced Bush the week after he met with a prominent Muslim activist and outspoken critic of Beijing's rule in the far western Xinjiang region, calling the meeting a "blatant interference" in Chinese affairs.
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