China’s Criticism of U.S. on Human Rights Draws Support (and Mockery)

BEIJING â€" “Gun shootings in America are unceasing, how is it qualified to talk about human rights?”

So ran the title of a furious, unsigned commentary today in Shanghai’s Eastday.com news portal, which accused the United States, in its annual human rights report on other countries issued last Friday, of “pointing fingers, blaming and denouncing other countries while showing itself off.”

China, which was criticized in the State Department report, hit back hard with its own report on human rights in America, issued Sunday, just two days after the U.S. report. The Chinese report was titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012″.

For years, the United States and China have engaged in a tit-for-tat of this kind â€" America criticizes, China responds, in an angry ritual of reports.

This year, the Chinese government focused on gun crime, citing “astonishing casualties”; growing poverty in the United States and a wide wealth gap; and America’s overseas wars, which it said had killed tens of thousands since 2011. It also singled out what it said was low voter participation in U.S. elections (57.5 percent in the 2012 presidential election, it said). “The U.S. citizens have never really enjoyed common and equal suffrage,” the report said, and criticized the detention of terrorism suspects in Guantánamo.

But it’s the issue of gun crime that perhaps has been most seized upon here: Eastday.com’s commentary, echoing the report, listed three recent mass shootings in the United States, in Oakland, Colorado and Connecticut, tallying the dozens who died. The United States was not protecting its citizens’ physical safety, it said. “Alone from this series of bloody shootings one can see the reality of America’s human rights.” (In the report, the government noted that gun violence was a “serious threat to the lives and personal security of citizens in the U.S.”)

Online, where ordinary Chinese people speak their minds relatively freely (and get censored, though much does evade the censor’s delete button â€" senior leaders are known to follow microblogs closely to track public opinion), the comments were multiplying. Search for “America” and “human rights” on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblog site, and nearly 2.6 million entries pop up in total.

Yet many of those sampled were critical of China, not the United States, despite the fact that many of the criticisms in China’s report are gathered from reports that originated in the West â€" such as the tally of deaths overseas from America’s “war on terror” since 2001, gathered, the Chinese government said, from the Web site of the Stop the War Coalition.

Sarcasm was widespread, especially over the report’s criticism of low voter participation. (Chinese people cannot choose their government, though there are local elections where candidates are carefully vetted by the Communist Party.)

“I wonder what is the voter participation in this honorable country?” quipped Shui Shan X.

“Of these problems, except for the first,” the shootings, “which of them has not happened in China, and more seriously than in other places?” wrote Chenmo de mouzi.

In a post addressed to the State Council, which issued the report, Merlin_MaWT seemed to warn the government that Chinese people cannot be fooled any longer. “Do you think that we people today are really the people of 30 years ago? Do you really think that information today is the same as 30 years ago when there was only your media?” the person wrote.

And referring to the criticism of U.S. elections, Zhaini ruocao wrote, simply: “Chinese-style humor.”

Is America’s apparent inability to stem gun violence a human rights issue? Is the Chinese government right on this issue? What do you think?