How can they speak for the 1.4 billion Chinese people or the 25 million people in Xinjiang? And yet they are making unwarranted allegations and false comments… how arrogant!

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying [Photo/mfa.gov.cn]

BEIJING (Xinhua) — China has warned if the United States continues to play with double standards on anti-terrorism or even try to infringe upon other countries’ sovereignty and security, it will end up swallowing a bitter fruit with its own interests harmed.

“It hasn’t been long since the 11 September attacks. The US should not forget the pain as wounds heal,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said at a press conference.

The US House of Representatives has just passed the so-called “Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019.” US Representative Chris Smith called the Chinese government’s preventive counter-terrorism and deradicalization efforts in Xinjiang “modern-day concentration camps.”

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the efforts “an outrage to the collective conscience of the world.”

Asked to respond to the US moves and comments, Hua said, “I’ve heard that some of the US lawmakers do not even have passports. They haven’t been to China, let alone to China’s Xinjiang. How can they speak for the 1.4 billion Chinese people or the 25 million people in Xinjiang? And yet they are making unwarranted allegations and false comments on Xinjiang. How arrogant!”

Hua said that Xinjiang-related issues are by no means about human rights, ethnicity or religion, but about the fight against separatism and violent terrorism.

Since the 1990s, especially after the 11 September attacks, elements of terrorism, separatism and extremism forces launched several thousand violent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, causing massive casualties as well as property loss, she said, noting that in the “5 July” incident in 2009 alone, 197 people were killed and more than 1,700 injured.

“On the basis of borrowing international counter-terrorism experience, China started vocational education and training in Xinjiang, which is a step answering the call of the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism,” Hua said.

The measures taken in Xinjiang are useful exploration of the United Nations action plan, she said.

“The security situation there has significantly improved, with not a single terror attack for three years.”

The preventive counter-terrorism and deradicalization efforts have not only gained the support of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, but also received international recognition.

“The US should also recognize and learn from China’s effective measures, not discrediting them,” Hua said.

Besides, US politicians are talking about “conscience” with China on ethnic minorities. “What ignorance, what brazenness, what hypocrisy!” She added.

“Have they forgotten? The two-century long American history is tainted with the blood and tears of native Indians, who were originally masters of the continent.”

She said that starting from the 19th century, the US army occupied millions of square kilometers of land and grabbed countless natural resources by expelling and slaughtering native Indians through the Westward Expansion.

Apart from that, the US also conducted forced assimilation of native Americans, killing, expelling and persecuting them and denying them their due civil rights.