Progressive groups are calling on the Biden administration to focus more on climate change when it comes to China and to cooperate with the communist nation rather than compete with it.
More than 40 progressive groups “sent a letter to President Joe Biden and lawmakers on Wednesday urging them to prioritize cooperation with China on climate change and curb its confrontational approach over issues like Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and forced detention of Uyghur Muslims,” Politico reported.
The letter, written by groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls “on the Biden administration and all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to U.S.-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.”
The groups focused their attention on climate change, offering only lip service to China’s grievous human rights abuses, including the internment of Uyghur Muslims in labor camps where they are often tortured and sexually abused.
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, leaked documents from the Chinese Communist Party show just how far the oppression of Muslim minorities goes. Leaks reviewed by BBC Panorama show that the re-education camps are intended to be run as prisons and not as educational facilities, as the CCP routinely claims. One nine-page memo included in the collection of documents, sent in 2017 by then deputy secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party, Zhu Hailun, explains how the prisons should be run:
“Never allow escapes”
“Increase discipline and punishment of behavioural violations”
“Promote repentance and confession”
“Make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority”
“Encourage students to truly transform”
“[Ensure] full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots”
These are things that are known and documented, yet these progressive groups are more interested in making apocalyptic claims about climate change – claims that have been repeatedly wrong for decades.
“To combat the climate crisis and build a global economy that works for everyday working people – in the U.S. and China alike – we must shift from competition to cooperation.”
As Politico noted, Biden has made China’s human rights abuses central to his foreign policy agenda, though he hasn’t shown any progress or taken any notable steps toward combatting the problem. Progressives, however, are more concerned with climate change than China’s attempted genocide of its Muslim-minority population. From Politico:
It’s not the first time progressives railed against the administration’s China approach. In May, prominent left-leaning lawmakers and 60 activist groups called on the president not to turn China into the 21st century’s Soviet Union. “We need to distinguish between justified criticisms of the Chinese government’s human rights record and a Cold War mentality that uses China as a scapegoat for our own domestic problems and demonizes Chinese Americans,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said at the time.
And last week, nearly 30 organizations pushed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to back a less confrontational version of anti-China legislation working its way through Congress.
These organizations also can’t differentiate between what they claim are human rights abuses in America with what China is doing to Uyghurs. Karen Orenstein, director of the climate and energy program at Friends of The Earth U.S. put China and U.S. on the same level.
“Cooperation with China on climate doesn’t absolve China or the U.S. on human rights,” Orenstein told Politico, as if there were no difference between the two countries. But, of course, Orenstein was more concerned with climate change.
“The climate emergency requires cooperation,” she told the outlet.