A senior US diplomat has said the Donald Trump administration does not consider the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a "legitimate system" of governance.
"The Chinese Communist Party is saying they have a legitimate system for the rest of the world to emulate. And we are saying they do not," Ambassador Sam Brownback, the State Department's special representative for international religious freedom, told the Washington Examiner.
The ambassador is one of the several State Department officials who are criticising China's human rights abuses on its minorities, especially Uyghur Muslims, who are imprisoned in the so-called 're-education camps' in Xinjiang province, situated in the western part of the country.
Brownback's comments assume significance in the backdrop of worsening ties between the US and China, which are at loggerheads over several issues including Beijing's human rights violations on its own people and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It's a basic human right. It's foundational to the United States' founding and it's being obliterated in China. It is a central piece of the dispute," he said.
However, Chinese officials have denounced US' criticism of China's treatment of Uyghurs, asserting they are taking steps necessary to mitigate terror threats in Xinjiang. Uyghur officials have accused the CCP of initiating a so-called 'Pair Up and Become Family' programme that places ethnic Chinese men in homes of Uyghur women -- which amounts to "mass rape" as a tool of genocide. Camp survivors have reported that guard thrashes inmates while mocking their religious beliefs, according to Washington Examiner.
"You have a Communist Party that continues the communist way of being at war with faith. We don't have a problem with the Chinese people. It's the Communist Party and the atheistic control that they seek," Brownback was quoted as saying.
US officials have tried to "put a face on the crime" taking place in China by slapping sanctions on Chen Quanguo, the party's top official for Xinjiang and a member of the CCP's ruling Politburo.
Brownback stopped short of denouncing the CCP that it should give up the central tenets of its ideology, saying that Chinese people enjoyed greater religious freedom before Xi Jinping assumed power in 2013.
"The Communist Party looks at people of faith as having another allegiance than the Communist Party, and they are going to stomp that out. Governments have tried to do this for millennia and they have never been successful. The Chinese Communist Party will not be successful (in) stomping out faith," the ambassador said.
( With inputs from ANI )