China to issue report on human rights violations in U.S.

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02:04

China's State Council Information Office will in the near future issue a report on the human rights violations in the United States in 2020, an official statement said Monday.

Titled "The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2020," the 15,000-Chinese-character document details facts regarding Washington's incompetent pandemic containment leading to tragic outcomes, American democracy disorder triggering political chaos, ethnic minorities suffering racial discrimination, continuous social unrest threatening public security, growing polarization between the rich and the poor aggravating social inequality, and U.S. trampling on international rules resulting in humanitarian disasters.

Graphics: What does America's human rights situation look like in 2018?

Mishandled COVID-19

The United States reached the grim milestone of half a million coronavirus deaths in February. The report attributed the great loss of the Americans to its government's mishandling of the COVID-19.

Latest data from Johns Hopkins University showed that the country accounts for a quarter of all global cases and 20 percent of total global deaths.

"That's more lives lost to this virus than any other nation on Earth," said U.S. President Joe Biden when he held a moment of silence and a candle-lighting ceremony at the White House in remembrance of the deaths.

The first COVID-19 infection in the United States was reported in the state of Washington in January last year, while the first fatality occurred in early February in Santa Clara County, California.

Money politics

The document also underscored the disorder in American democratic institutions that has led to political chaos, and further tore the fabric of society apart.

Money-tainted politics distorted and suppressed public opinion, turning elections into a "one-man show" of the wealthy class, and people's confidence in the American democratic system dropped to the lowest level in 20 years, it added.

Despite getting battered by COVID-19 and a deep economic slump, this year's U.S. presidential elections have blown past previous record to become the most expensive one in U.S. history.

According to CGTN calculation, Biden, Donald Trump and other candidates spent an estimated $6.6 billion on the campaign trail. The money spent in the costliest U.S. election ever is greater than the GDP of the Maldives, Fiji, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Bhutan.

Racial discrimination amid pandemic

Racial discrimination and hate crimes also surged during the pandemic.

According to the report, ethnic minority groups in the United States suffered systematic racial discrimination and were in a difficult situation.

Though the pandemic seems to equally affect people of all races and backgrounds, the report pointed out that in the United States Black or African Americans are dying at disproportionately higher rates.

African-Americans were three times as likely as whites to be infected by the coronavirus, twice as likely to die from COVID-19, said the report.

Data from COVID Racial Data Tracker echoed the saying. During the first few months of the outbreak, over 20,000 Black or African Americans were known to be killed by the coronavirus in the United States.

The group, accounting for 13 percent of the U.S. population, made up 25 percent of COVID-19 deaths.

Throughout history, Black or African Americans have been disproportionately afflicted by pandemics, including the 1918 influenza, known as the "Spanish flu," and the H1N1 swine flu.

Even after a century, their relative circumstances have barely improved. The coronavirus outbreak is just the latest disaster to amplify these racial disparities.

Graphics: The most vulnerable amid U.S. COVID-19 crisis, as deaths near 100,000

Police violence

People of color are also treated unfairly when it comes to criminal investigation and judicial decisions.

Making up about one third of all minors under the age of 18 in the United States, the people of color accounts for two thirds of all of the country's imprisoned minors, as the report pointed out.

Furthermore, African-Americans were three times as likely to be killed by the police, according to the report. One in four young Asian-Americans had been the target of racial bullying.

George Floyd, the African American who died last year after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has become a fresh symbol of police brutality against blacks in the U.S.

"Mapping Police Violence," a research and advocacy group, found that in 2020, 28 percent of killings were of Black Americans, despite only making up 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Its research data also shows there were only 18 days in 2020 where U.S. police did not kill someone and in seven of the 100 largest U.S. city, police departments kill Black men at higher rates than the U.S. murder rate.

Background: Police brutality and race protests in the U.S.

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Gun Violence

The gun trade and shooting incidents also reached a historical high throughout the year, the report added, noting people are losing confidence in the social order.

The United States – the world's largest civilian gun-owning country - has suffered the most mass shooting incidents.

Data showed that in the past 2020, the U.S. had 592 mass shootings nationwide with more than 41,500 people killed in the incidents, over 110 people a day on average.

Graphics: U.S. mass shootings 2014-2019

Poverty and inequality

The report also drew attention to the widening gap between the rich and the poor in America where the people at the bottom of society are living in misery.

The problem has been exacerbated due to the pandemic as the outbreak also triggered unemployment, making millions of people lose their healthcare insurance.

Vulnerable groups became the biggest victims of the U.S. government's mishandling of the pandemic, said the report.

The China Society for Human Rights Studies in its report noted the wealth of the top 0.1 percent U.S. households equaled the wealth of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. households.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's data published in last September, about 34 million people in U.S. lived in poverty in 2019 with a poverty rate of 10.5 percent.

Bloomberg in January reported the U.S. last year brought the sharpest poverty rate rise since the 1960s, which reached 2.4 percent.

Meanwhile, it said the poverty rate for Black Americans in 2020 is estimated to have jumped by 5.4 percentage points, or by 2.4 million individuals.

The report also criticized the unilateralism, isolationism and America-first policies boasted by the U.S., and its untimely actions such as imposing sanctions wantonly, bullying and threatening international organizations, and treating asylum seekers cruelly.

In doing so at the moment when global unity is most needed in the fight against the pandemic, the U.S. has made itself the biggest troublemaker and threat to global security and stability, it said.

(Cover: A city-sanctioned homeless encampment at San Francisco amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S., May 21, 2020. /AP)

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