China accused the US yesterday of pushing for Internet freedom around the world as a way to undermine other nations, while noting that Washington’s campaign against secret-spilling Web site WikiLeaks showed its own sensitivity to the free flow of information.
The charges appeared in China’s annual report on Washington’s human rights record, which lambasted the US over issues ranging from homelessness and violent crime to the influence of money on politics and the negative effects of its foreign policy on civilians.
The lengthy document published in official newspapers is a rebuttal to the US Department of State’s annual assessment of human rights around the world, which said that China stepped up restrictions on critics and tightened control of civil society last year by limiting freedom of speech and Internet access.
Photo: EPA
The US has also protested the detention of government critics, including artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) as part of a recent Chinese crackdown on dissent.
“We hereby advise the US government to take concrete actions to improve its human rights conditions, check and rectify its acts in the human rights field, and stop the hegemonistic deeds of using human rights issues to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” the report said.
Curiously, it also took the US to task for some of the same accusations China faces — and routinely rejects — alleging rampant miscarriages of justice by US courts and excessive US “restrictions” on the Internet.
WikiLeaks deeply angered US officials by publishing tens of thousands of secret US military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and secret US diplomatic cables from around the world.
The US Army private suspected of supplying thousands of sensitive files to WikiLeaks, 23-year-old Bradley Manning, is being held in military detention in solitary confinement for all but an hour every day. He was charged with mishandling and leaking classified data and early last month the Army filed 22 new charges against him, including aiding the enemy.
The Chinese report said that action by US government comes while it also calls for the free flow of electronic information elsewhere.
It said Washington “wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks.”
The Chinese report cited figures showing high crime, child poverty and racial discrimination in the US, and accused Washington of causing “huge civilian casualties” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report pointed to the huge amount of money poured into last year’s mid-term congressional elections as a perversion of democracy, blasted Arizona’s legislation on illegal immigration and pointed to a women’s bias lawsuit against Wal-Mart as evidence of continuing gender discrimination.
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