When Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a press conference last week to announce that the State Department was releasing its 2023 country reports on human rights practices, he said the People's Republic of China was engaging in genocide in Xinjiang Province.
"The report documents atrocities reminiscent of humanity's darkest moments," Blinken said. "In Sudan, both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have committed war crimes. Rohingya in Burma, Uyghurs in Xinjiang -- each victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
"The United States will continue to raise our deep concerns directly with the governments responsible," said Blinken.
Since 2020, every annual State Department report on human rights in China has unambiguously stated that the regime running this country was committing genocide.
"The People's Republic of China is an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party is the paramount authority," said the 2020 report.
"Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang," it said.
The first sentence of the 2023 report the State Department released last week declared: "Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang."
The second sentence cited many other human rights abuses this communist regime had perpetrated. These included "arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; enforced disappearances by the government; torture by the government" and "involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices."
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The State Department report also said the government of the People's Republic of China was guilty of "arbitrary interference with privacy including pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring" and "serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others."
The report also said this communist regime continued to carry out a coercive population-control policy.
"Enforcement of the decades-old population-control policy, which originally limited parents to one child, relied on social pressure, education, propaganda, and economic penalties, as well as on measures such as mandatory pregnancy examinations, forced contraception, forced sterilizations, and coerced abortions," said this new report.
The day after Blinken held his press conference releasing the human rights reports -- and personally described China's Uyghur population as "victims of genocide and crimes against humanity" -- he flew to Shanghai.
Over the course of three days, he met with multiple leaders of China's communist regime. In the public statements he made in China on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, he never specifically cited the genocide he had cited Monday in Washington.
On Wednesday night, after he arrived in Shanghai, he attended the "Shanghai Sharks-Zhejiang Golden Bulls Chinese Basketball Association playoff game," according to the State Department.
The next morning, he met with Shanghai Chinese Communist Party Secretary Chen Jining in Shanghai. Before going into this meeting, he and Chen made public statements. The Communist Party secretary took note of what Blinken had done the previous night.
"Last night I watched the news, and I saw that you went to our Yu Garden to enjoy our local delicacy, and you also watched our basketball match," he told Blinken, according to a transcript published by the State Department.
In his own remarks, Blinken talked about building "cooperation" with this communist government.
"I think the direction from President Biden and President Xi was to continue to build those lines of communication, to sustain, and again, to deal directly with our differences as we also seek to build cooperation," he said.
Blinken then met with business leaders in Shanghai, where he talked about President Joe Biden's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California last November -- and about America's purchasing of Chinese imports.
"And one of the things that President Biden and President Xi agreed when they met in San Francisco was that we have to -- we need to find ways to put as much stability as possible into the relationships to make sure that we're managing the relationship responsibly, which we're committed to doing," said Blinken. "And a big part of that is making sure that the economic relationship is working in ways that it should work to mutual benefit."
"We have, as you know, a relationship that has us as the largest market for products that are made in China. That remains the case," said Blinken.
In 2023, according to the Census Bureau, the United States purchased $427.22 billion in imports from China while China only purchased $147.80 billion from the United States -- resulting in a trade deficit of $279.42 billion.
On Friday, Blinken met with Chinese Foreign Minster Wang Yi. "Overall, the China-U.S. relationship is beginning to stabilize," Wang said before they went into their meeting. "Across the areas our two sides have increased dialogue, cooperation, and the positive side of the relationship."
Blinken then said Biden had asked him on this trip to Beijing "to work on moving forward on the agreements that our two presidents reached in San Francisco at the end of last year: resuming cooperation on counternarcotics; restarting our military-to-military conversations; looking together at the future of artificial intelligence -- its risks and safety issues; and trying to strengthen our people-to-people connections; but also, critically, managing responsibly our differences."
After meeting with Wang Yi, Blinken met with Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong. Then he met with Xi Jinping.
"Now, even as we seek to deepen cooperation where our interests align, the United States is very clear-eyed about the challenges posed by the PRC and about our competing visions for the future," Blinken said in a press conference after the meeting. "America will always defend our core interests and values."
He then did mention Xinjiang -- citing what he called "human rights abuses" there, not genocide.
"I also raised concerns about the erosion of Hong Kong's autonomy and democratic institutions as well as transnational repression, ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and a number of individual human rights cases," Blinken said.
Blinken should have unambiguously condemned Xi for the genocide his regime has perpetrated.
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