China UK Photo:VCG

Some British politicians, busy with pointing fingers at China's Xinjiang with smears and lies, but ignoring and even whitewashing the racial problems in their own country, have clearly shown the world their double face and hypocrisy, said Chinese officials and experts on UK studies on Thursday after a recent report commissioned by the British government on the UK's racial situation received wide criticism.

The spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the UK said on Friday that the unwarranted accusation by a handful of British MPs that there is a "genocide" in Xinjiang is the most preposterous lie of the century. It's an outrageous insult and affront to the Chinese people, and a gross breach of international law and the basic norms governing international relations.

Whitewashing domestic human rights issues while at the same time staging human rights farces concerning other countries smack of sheer hypocrisy and double standards, the embassy spokesperson said.

The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, issued on March 31, rejected claims the UK is institutionally racist, and said it should be regarded as a "model for other white-majority countries," drawing a backlash with critics describing it as "utter whitewash."   

Echoing the criticism, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday at a regular press conference that the report avoids the important and dwells on the trivial, deliberately glosses over racial inequality in the UK, and evades the historical and institutional factors in the racial issues.

It even tries to whitewash the UK's colonial history, thus widely criticized by people from different sectors, Wang said. 

In the UK, people of African descent keep suffering from inequities in health, education, employment, housing, law enforcement, and criminal justice, Wang said, noting that black children there are far less likely to attend school than white children, and black people are four times more likely to be arrested than white people.

Figures show that there were at least 136,000 people living in modern slavery in the UK in 2019, the vast majority of whom were victims of illegal human smuggling and trafficking, Wang said. In 2018, British police identified 7,000 as modern slave labors, up by one third from 2017, he added.

Ironically, while turning a blind eye to the racial problems in their own country, some British politicians are busy with babbling on China's Xinjiang region with groundless accusations, observers said.  

The UK House of Commons voted on Thursday to "declare that genocide is under way in Xinjiang." 

The vote is non-binding, but could "have a large diplomatic and moral impact" if "a large number of British MPs denounce China for genocide," reported The Guardian on April 14.

The vote is no surprise. It's no more than another trick of the British parliament to manipulate public opinion and defame China regardless of facts, Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies told the Global Times. 

"There are some conservatives and anti-China forces in parliament who have been constantly attacking China in the form of reports, bills or votes in the past few years," Cui said. 

Analysts said these politicians blindly follow the anti-China forces led by the US to defame China to gain political capital, pushing China-UK relations to a low. 

Wang criticized their behavior as a double standard at Thursday's press conference. "While some people in the UK have the audacity to spread lies and false information in smearing and attacking the human rights of other countries, they have no courage to face up to and solve their own human rights problems," he said.