Excerpts from China's report on the Human Rights Record of the US, published each year in response to our State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practises, which was particularly ironic this year in chastising other countries for human rights abuses like "sleep deprivation for detainees, confining prisoners in contorted positions, stripping and blindfolding them and threatening them with dogs."
China hits back:
American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person.
The United States has the biggest number of gun owners, and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day.
The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest.
According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to two million in 2000, a hike by six times. The number of convicted offenders may total more than six million if parolees and probationers are also counted.
And then this from the Political Rights and Freedom section...
Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies.
One could point out that China can put out a report like this easily since the statistics on all of this are a matter of public record around here, while their official policy is that nothing bad ever happened in China, but that wouldn't make many of their conclusions any less accurate.
Not to mention that we're accelerating towards a "nothing bad ever happened here" mentality pretty quickly ourselves.
Pogo? Sure, let's do Pogo again.
