For serious observers, a casual perusal of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s (CECC) 2023 Annual Report on China would be a waste of time.

For those who have to read it for whatever reasons, a glance at its executive summary would be more than enough to conclude that it is just another propaganda piece for promoting Washington’s strategic interests by denigrating China, the US’ declared key strategic rival.    

What has been driving Washington’s China hawks’ Sinophobic hysteria is their paranoid belief that China is “systemically seeking to redefine the rules of the post–World War II international order”, as revealed by CECC Chair Chris Smith and Co-chair Jeffrey Merkley in their Statement from the Chairs, which prefaces the report’s executive summary.  

Driven by such paranoia, the China hawks churned out all the myths, lies and half-truths they could imagine to denigrate China including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The thing is, do they still have an audience around the world, except for the US’ few vassal states?  

The report accused China of perpetrating “genocide”, “censorship of the free flow of news and information”, “malign influence operations targeting US citizens and their families”, “arbitrary detention and torture of political prisoners in China and Hong Kong”, and “transnational repression”,  aside from posing “a challenge to the rules-based international order”.

Ironically, these are exactly what the US has done, or is doing. It has facilitated the genocide in Gaza by providing the Israeli Defense Forces with ample weapons and blocking the United Nations’ call for ceasefire for three times.

Washington is trying to shut down TikTok’s US operation because the online platform provides young people in America with narratives and information absent from the Western mainstream media. The tycoon Elon Mask commented on the move in his X social media account: “In my opinion, TikTok should not be banned in the USA, even though such a ban may benefit the X platform. Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression. It is not what America stands for.”  

In terms of “malign influence operations”, no actor has ever outperformed the US’ Central Intelligence Agency and its peripheral organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy. They were behind the various “color revolutions” that have taken place around the world, including the “black-clad” revolution that erupted in 2019 in Hong Kong, which was the strongest catalyst for the promulgation of Hong Kong’s national security laws.

The China hawks’ accusation about “arbitrary detention and torture” is a collective false memory. This is actually what has frequently happened in Guantanamo Bay detention camp. So is the accusation of “transnational repression”: Meng Wanzhou, deputy chair of the board and chief financial officer of China’s tech giant Huawei, suffered greatly from the US’ transnational repression under its long-arm jurisdiction; and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has suffered a much greater amount of such repression, which he continues to struggle to resist.  

The report emphasized that China is “posing a challenge to the rules-based international order and to the safety and security of US citizens and residents”. The world now knows without a shadow of a doubt that what Washington really means by “the rules-based international order” is US hegemony, including the dollar’s dominance in the global trading system, which ensures that America enjoys unjustifiable economic privileges. In short, it is a global governance system designed for Washington to dictate to others what and what not to do, while allowing the US to skip any rules, restrictions or agreements, such as the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, when they are not in its interests.  

The CECC said in its report that it has “championed bipartisan legislative and advocacy efforts to bolster US human rights diplomacy”. Yet the unvarnished duplicity Washington has demonstrated in all of its international dealings, including those in this report, attests to the widely received perception that Washington’s “human rights diplomacy” is merely a tool to promote US interests, a guise for perpetuating US hegemony.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.