China announced retaliatory sanctions on nine British citizens and four entities for “maliciously spreading lies and disinformation” about its Xinjiang region.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement yesterday that it is applying sanctions on the China Research Group, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, the Uyghur Tribunal and Essex Court Chambers.
The nine include British lawmakers Nusrat Ghani, Tom Tugendhat, Neil O’Brien, Tim Loughton, Geoffrey Nice and Iain Duncan Smith, who served as Conservative Party leader from 2001 to 2003 and British secretary of state for work and pensions from 2010 to 2016.
The individuals and their relatives are banned from entering China or trading with Chinese citizens and institutions, and any assets they have in China would be frozen, the statement said.
Sanctions London had levied on China over allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang were “based on nothing but lies and disinformation,” and “grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs,” the ministry said.
The message being sent to the UK and Europe is that by “siding with the US, they will not do themselves any good,” said Renmin University Institute of International Affairs director Wang Yiwei (王義桅), a former Chinese diplomat.
China’s aim is to eliminate the influence of these individuals, which removes them as stumbling blocks to future cooperation, he said.
Earlier this week, the UK joined the US, Canada and the EU in imposing sanctions against China over alleged human rights abuses of the Uighurs minority in Xinjiang.
Western governments accuse China of interning up to 1 million Muslim Uighurs in camps and compelling them to work, while also forcing children across the region into boarding schools.
The US and lawmakers in Canada and the Netherlands have labeled Beijing’s actions in the region as genocide.
China dismisses the allegations, saying that it is building infrastructure to boost the region’s economy, providing jobs and educating Uighur children.
The US and its allies should face up to their own human rights failures, ministry spokesman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) told a regular press briefing on Thursday.
Multinational companies are becoming ensnared in the controversy, with Chinese social media users calling for boycotts of Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) and Nike for not using cotton grown in Xinjiang.
Chinese firms and investors are now rallying around Xinjiang, which produces more than 80 percent of the country’s cotton.
Anta Sports Products, the Chinese sneaker company that owns the Fila brand, was among the firms that have issued statements saying that they will continue to source the material from the region.
Shares of Anta rose 4.9 percent on Friday in Hong Kong trading.
Apple has cut ties with Chinese component supplier Ofilm Group Co over allegations that it is involved in a Chinese government program that transfers minorities from Xinjiang to other parts of the country for work, a person familiar with the matter said last week.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency