BEIJING – China has announced to go for a tit-for-tat move against the US, days after the country announced travel restrictions against its officials.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the country will impose, on a reciprocal basis, visa restrictions on U.S. individuals who spread rumors to smear or have long meddled in Tibet-related issues.
Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a daily news briefing that the United States imposed illegal sanctions on Chinese officials based on fabricated lies about Tibet while disregarding the facts, saying that this move gravely interferes with China’s internal affairs, harms China’s interests, and violates basic norms governing international relations.
“We once again call on the U.S. side to respect facts, change course, stop spreading disinformation on Tibet, and stop using Tibet-related issues to interfere in China’s internal affairs,” elaborated Wang.
The background of the retaliation is the fact that the US had imposed curbs specifically for the alleged involvement of Chinese officials in the “forced assimilation” of over 1 million children in state-run boarding schools in Tibet.
In this regard, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not reveal the identities of those who face curbs but urged Beijing in August to end its “coercive” policies in the region.
“These coercive policies seek to eliminate Tibet’s distinct linguistic, cultural and religious traditions among younger generations of Tibetans,” Blinken said in a statement.
“We urge PRC authorities to end the coercion of Tibetan children into government-run boarding schools and to cease repressive assimilation policies, both in Tibet and throughout other parts of the PRC,” he said while referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The US is not the only force pushing China to revisit its policy as in February, a group of United Nations experts expressed concerns that the residential schools system appeared to ‘act as a mandatory large-scale programme’ intended to assimilate Tibetans into dominant Han culture.
The latest visa restrictions come on the heels of broken ties between the two countries over a range of issues mainly related to trade, the COVID-19 pandemic, the treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighurs, and the situation in Taiwan.
On the other hand, the Chinese authorities had dismissed the visa curbs as “smears” that “seriously undermine China-US relations”.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, told newsmen that the schools were built to cater to the needs of the local population.
“Boarding schools have gradually developed into one of the important modes of running schools in China’s ethnic minority areas, and the centralised way of running schools effectively solves the problem of ethnic minority students’ difficulty in attending school at a distance where the local people live scattered,” he said.
