CNN
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foreign minister Antony Blinken said Sunday that the Biden administration supports COVID-free protesters in Chinaexplained that he will cover the topic when he visits the country early next year.
“Of course we have,” Blinken told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked about US support for protesters protesting against strict Covid-19 restrictions. of the Chinese government. “We support the right of people everywhere, whether it’s in China, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s anywhere else, to protest peacefully, to express their views. their own, to vent their frustrations.”
Blinken said he will present the protests in person to Chinese officials next month.
“We will say what we have always said and what President (Joe) Biden has said to (Chinese leader) Xi Jinping, which is that human rights and basic civil liberties are at the heart. of us humans as Americans. And no American government, no American president would be silent about it,” Blinken said.
The protests in China stemmed from a deadly fire on November 24 in Urumqi, the capital of the far western region of Xinjiang. The fire left at least 10 people dead and 9 injured in an apartment building – lead to public outrage after videos of the incident emerged showing lockdown measures had delayed firefighters reaching victims.
The city has been under lockdown for more than 100 days, people are unable to leave the area and many are forced to stay at home.
As the number of protesters grew, many also demanded more political freedoms – and some even called for Xi Jinping to be removed.
Protests on such a large scale are very unusual in China. While protests over local grievances occur periodically, the demonstrations are the most common since Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement in 1989.
The Chinese government cracked down quickly, deploying police at key protest sites, urging protesters to warn them and tightening online censorship.
Blinken said Sunday that the US would take a similar approach when protesters’ rights are suppressed anywhere else: “We speak out against that, we stand against it. And we take action against that.”
protest rocked Iran for several months, sparking a deadly crackdown from the authorities. The nationwide uprising was first sparked by the death of Mahsa (also known as Zhina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman of Iranian descent who died in mid-September after being arrested by the country’s ethics police. detention. Since then, protesters across Iran have rallied around a series of grievances with the Iranian government.
Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said on Thursday that Iran’s parliament and judiciary are reviewing the country’s mandatory hijab law, according to the pro-reform outlet Entekhab.
Montazeri was also quoted as saying that Iran’s fearsome moral police force had been “erased”, but Iranian state media strongly denied those comments, saying that the Interior Ministry oversees the force. This is not a judicial body.
In an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Blinken would not say whether the US believes a move to abolish ethical police would end protests in the country.
“It is up to the Iranian people. This is about that. It’s not about us. And what we have seen since Mahsa Amini was murdered is the extraordinary courage of young Iranians, especially the women, who have led these protests, to stand up for their right to speak out. what they want to say, wear what they want to wear,” Blinken said.
In an interview with Tapper, Blinken pointed to US sanctions against responsible for the suppression of protesters in Iranbut he did not mention any price China has to pay for suppressing the protests.
Blinken said that “basically” the protests in China and Iran were not about the US.
“This is about people in both countries trying to express their views, trying to get their aspirations and the response the government is making to that,” he said.
