‘Brazen Liar’ Pompeo Again Foaming against China as the ‘Most Unfree Nation’

July 2, 2020 (EIRNS)—In his press briefing on July 1, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went overboard in his fulminations, labeling China as “one of the world’s most unfree countries.” He also issued a statement based on a dubious report by Adrian Zens, a known anti-China hawk, who has been the prime “source” of everything Congress “knows” about Xinjiang, which claims that China is conducting a policy of “forced birth control” on the Uyghur population. The story was picked up by AP and is now making the dissident circuit.

The accusations were quickly countered by Foreign Ministry press spokesman Zhao Lijian, who called Pompeo “a brazen liar.” Zhao pointed out that “from 1978 to 2018, the population of Uyghurs in Xinjiang grew from 5.55 million to 11.68 million, registering a 2.1 times increase and accounting for about 46.8% of the total population of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. If Mr. Pompeo is telling the truth, how can he explain the big increase in the Uyghur population?” It should also be noted that even when China in the 1970s adopted the disastrous “one child policy,” the non-Han populations, and particularly those living in the countryside, were allowed to have two or three children.