China has strongly rejected US criticism of its human rights record, accusing American politicians of corruption and hypocrisy.
China's State Council Information Office, in a report entitled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2016” and released on Thursday, scoffed at Washington’s repeated pose as “the judge of human rights.”
The report stated that the United States continues to wield “the baton of human rights” and criticize many countries for the human rights situation while it takes no heed of its own "terrible human rights problems."
It added that "the self-proclaimed human rights advocate has exposed its human rights myth" with "the gunshots lingering in people's ears behind the Statue of Liberty, worsening racial discrimination and the election farce dominated by money politics and power-for-money deals."
“Waves of boycotts and protests fully exposed the hypocritical nature of US democracy,” the report pointed out.
The United States had the second highest prisoner rate last year, with 693 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population. Gun-related crimes also reached a high level, according to the report.
There were a total of 58,125 gun violence incidents, including 385 mass shootings, in the United States in 2016, leaving 15,039 killed and 30,589 injured, the report cited figures from a report by the Gun Violence Archive.
Moreover, US social polarization worsened in 2016 and the proportion of adults who had full-time jobs hit a new low since 1983, income gaps continued to grow, the size of middle class began to shrink, and living conditions of the lower class deteriorated, the report added.
The percentage of Americans who said they were in the middle or upper-middle class dropped by 10 percentage points, from an average of 61 percent between 2000 and 2008 to 51 percent in 2016. That descent meant 25 million people in the United States fared much worse in economic terms, the report highlighted.
It added that race relations continued to deteriorate in the US last year, and the wage gap between blacks and whites was the worst in nearly four decades.
The report came in response to "The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2016" issued by the US State Department on March 3.
Washington’s report accused China of "repression and coercion" of civil society groups, and claimed that Beijing is impinging on people’s liberties in Hong Kong and Macau.
