United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region is downright political theater that has nothing to do with democracy, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Friday at a press briefing in Beijing.

Pelosi at a recent press conference claimed that her visit is about "Taiwan's democracy," adding her visit does not seek to change the status quo in the Taiwan Straits.

In response, Wang pointed out Pelosi used the so-called democracy as a pretext to find an excuse for her visit to Taiwan, which is completely futile.

Pelosi's visit goes against the will of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people and challenges the internationally recognized one-China principle, which is a trampling on democracy and a manifestation of the U.S. putting selfish interests above international justice, he added.

If Pelosi really cares about democracy and human rights, she should visit Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya to express her repentance to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who died under the U.S. military fire and to ensure that the U.S. will never again violate the UN Charter and the norms of international relations, Wang stressed.

He also noted China will work together with its peace-loving and justice-seeking friends to resolutely oppose all interference in the internal affairs of other countries, resolutely resist all risky moves that undermine regional peace, jointly defend the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and jointly maintain regional stability and world peace.

'The root cause of the U.S. fentanyl abuse is in itself'

The spokesperson reiterated that China's eight countermeasures in response to Pelosi's visit are totally justified and appropriate when asked to comment a White House official's remarks on the suspension of China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation.

Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, recently claimed on Twitter that 100,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives every year due to drug overdose, calling China's decision of suspending China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation "unacceptable."

"The root cause of the U.S. fentanyl abuse is in itself," Wang stressed.

According to International Narcotics Control Board, the U.S. is the largest production and consumption country of fentanyl-type drugs in the world, with 80 percent of the opioid drugs being consumed by the Americans who occupy five percent of the world population, he pointed out.

The spokesperson said the U.S. should take full responsibility of destroying bilateral counternarcotics cooperation, exampling that the U.S. sanctioned important institutions responsible for testing and controlling fentanyl-related substances as the Institution of Forensic Science of the Ministry of Public Security and the National Narcotics Laboratory in China by adding them to the "entity list" for two years.

China has offered huge support helping the U.S. with the fentanyl issue and showed adequate sincerity to carry out cooperation with the U.S., Wang pointed out, adding China as the first country in the world, scheduled fentanyl-related substances as a class on May 1, 2019, while, with the most prominent fentanyl issue in the world, the U.S. has not yet done the same.

As a responsible country, Wang said, China will continue to make contributions to global narcotics control.

Fentanyl is a strong opioid and in recent years the U.S. has experienced frequent fentanyl abuse issues. According to the data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 93,000 people were killed by drug overdose in 2020, 60 percent of whom were related to fentanyl abuse.