China’s foreign minister on Wednesday fired back at outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after he labeled the country’s treatment of Uighur Muslims a “genocide.”
The Associated Press reported that a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry mocked Pompeo for supposedly turning himself into a “joke” and a “doomsday clown,” while calling his allegations the result of “outright sensational pseudo-propositions and a malicious farce concocted by individual anti-China and anti-Communist forces.”
“In our view, Pompeo’s so-called designation is a piece of wastepaper. This American politician, who is notorious for lying and deceiving, is turning himself into a doomsday clown and joke of the century with his last madness and lies of the century,” said Hua Chunying, according to the AP.
Pompeo’s statement Tuesday describing China’s treatment of its Uighur minority as a “genocide” marked the first time a senior U.S. official has described the situation in the Xinjiang province with such severe language. The designation of genocide came on Pompeo’s last full day in office, leaving the fallout for his successor to manage.
“While the CCP has always exhibited a profound hostility to all people of faith, we have watched with growing alarm the Party’s increasingly repressive treatment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups,” Pompeo said Tuesday, referring to China’s ruling Communist Party.
“If the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against its own people, imagine what it will be emboldened to do to the free world, in the not-so-distant future,” he added.
President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign also used the term “genocide” to describe China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims last August.
“The unspeakable oppression that Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have suffered at the hands of China’s authoritarian government is genocide and Joe Biden stands against it in the strongest terms,” said a Biden campaign spokesman at the time. “If the Trump administration does indeed choose to call this out for what it is, as Joe Biden already did, the pressing question is what will Donald Trump do to take action. He must also apologize for condoning this horrifying treatment of Uighurs.”
Biden also vowed as recently as last year to recognize the killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as a genocide, a campaign promise his former boss, President Obama, also pledged to do but never followed through on during his eight years in office.