BBC hosted Jeffrey Sachs, a professor with extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party, to defend the Chinese Communist Party’s actions against Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
“Economist @JeffDSachs says China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang should not prevent the US from engaging with China, considering the US’ own “human rights violations” abroad and at home,” BBC’s Newsnight program summarized on Twitter.
Sachs’s comments, which align with narratives pushed by Chinese state-run media outlets and party officials, follow a National Pulse exposé revealing Sachs’s ties to Chinese firms such as Huawei and United Front influence groups including CEFC China Energy and the China-United States Exchange Foundation.
“I’m not sure why BBC started with listing only China’s human rights abuses. What about America’s human rights abuses,” Sachs begins before adding “The idea that there is one party that is so guilty, how can we talk to them is just a strange way to address this issue.”
Sachs continues, attacking former President Donald Trump and insisting a “significant part” of America is racist:
A significant part of this country is racist, followed a racist president who led an insurrection on the Capitol, and so the framing of this issue is strange.
“So one can make anything one wants but we have really serious human rights violations by the United States abroad, not to mention an insurrection on January 6th in our own country, not to mention the continued massive racism, white supremacism, and abuse of incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.,” he repeated.
Sachs continued to alleged a double standard between how the media covers human rights abuses between the genocidal Chinese Communist Party and the U.S.:
The U.S. always attacks other countries. It holds itself sacrosanct. It’s really outrageous because I know what goes on in American foreign policy, and I know how abusive it is, and I know what it’s like to live in a racist society which I happen to do.
