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

TaiShang

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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.

Read more:

China reveals human rights violations in U.S. in 2019 in seven aspects

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.


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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.

Read more:

What's the price tag for 2020 U.S. presidential election?

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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.

Read more:

The redlined, the underpaid, the uninsured: Black Americans in COVID-19 pandemic
Graphics: The most vulnerable amid U.S. COVID-19 crisis, as deaths near 100,000

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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.

Read more:

Three data points on African-Americans and police brutality in the U.S.

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.

Read more:


U.S. mass shootings: Will 2020 be any different?

Graphics: U.S. mass shootings 2014-2019

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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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Following a traffic stop and car chase on October 20 in suburban Chicago, a police officer opened fire on an unarmed Black couple. Nineteen-year-old Marcellis Stinnette died and his girlfriend, Tafara Williams, was wounded.
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The incident provoked protests as hundreds, again, demanded justice for the ever-growing list of Black Americans killed at the hands of police: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace Jr. and now Marcellis Stinnette.
So, why are Black people subjected to police violence in the U.S.? An underlying reason is systemic racism, which is deeply rooted in some police departments and echoes through racial profiling at traffic and pedestrian stops, as well as the use of excessive force.
A Stanford-led study of traffic stops across 31 U.S. states reveals that Black drivers are stopped at 1.4 times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, yet the Black population is only one-sixth of the white.
Take Chicago, Illinois, where the shooting of Stinnette took place for example. Data from the Illinois Department of Transportation shows that in the past five years, on average, 60.6 percent of the traffic stops were of Black people, double the average for Chicago's population – 30.1 percent.
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When it comes to pedestrian stops, the practice of racial profiling is even more evident.
In a Pew Research Center survey, 44 percent of Black adults said that police have unfairly stopped them and 65 percent of them were considered "suspicious" in public settings, outstripping other racial groups in similar situations.
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"Looking suspicious" can trigger police on patrol to suspect, stop or even arrest someone.
In New York City, the most populated area in the U.S where Black residents make up 24.3 percent of the city's population, the New York Police Department (NYPD) launched a "Stop-and-Frisk" program in 2002, permitting police to stop, interrogate and search pedestrians in the city if the officers have a "reasonable suspicion."
However, the NYPD's data from 2002 to 2019 reveals that although the total number of reported stops has plummeted, Black people still accounted for 51.7 percent on average, five times more than their white counterparts at 9.37 percent.
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In Stinnette's case, the traffic stop was not the immediate cause of his death. It was the ensuing use of force by police. And Stinnette was not one in a million.
According to data gathered by the Mapping Police Violence organization, from 2013 to November 18, 2020, police had killed 8,629 people, 2,158 of whom were Black. While the number is smaller than that of white people, Black people are killed at a much higher rate: 6.26 per million compared to 2.39.
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From George Floyd to Marcellis Stinnette and many many more, systemic racism in the U.S. has segregated the police from the people and put more Black lives in jeopardy.
Some might attribute the disproportionate number of Black victims to "a few bad apples" in police departments, but one bad apple alone can cause great harm to a community. And it is just too corrosive for the police to have bad apples rot its core.

 
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