China and Russia join forces to combat the West’s “coercive diplomacy”
In the week since the much-postponed release of a United Nations report on China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China has reserved its most aggressive rhetoric for the United States rather than UN or its outgoing High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.
As the China Media Project pointed out, there has been little domestic coverage or even condemnation of the report in China. The domestic press has chosen the path of blissful ignorance. Instead, China’s responses have been outward facing, its calculated “fury” intended to send a message to the world.
Aynne Kokas, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me that the “The Chinese government either ignores or denies reports on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In this case, likely due to the extremely high profile nature of the report and well-respected international source, the strategy appears to not give the report additional oxygen.”
But if silence was the policy within China, the Chinese response to the report in English-language media was swift and voluble. In a press conference the day after the report was released, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the UN Human Rights Office “has been reduced to an enforcer and accomplice of the U.S. and some Western forces to force developing countries to fall in line with them.”