The United States is fond of portraying itself as a champion of human rights and pointing an accusing finger at what it alleges are human rights abuses in countries that are in its bad books.

Thus it will have surprised few, if any, that US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns issued a statement on Saturday, which was International Human Rights Day, criticizing the human rights conditions in China and in particular expressing the now cliched concerns over the human rights conditions in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. These are familiar smears voiced by the US that were once again swiftly rebutted by China's Foreign Ministry, which decried them as "unwarranted accusations against China's human rights conditions" that were full of "falsehoods and bias".

As a ministry spokesman rightly said, the statement was part of the political agenda of the US, which is using human rights as a pretext to interfere in China's internal affairs with the aim of undermining stability and ethnic solidarity in the country.

These accusations of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" in Xinjiang, the so-called repression carried out in Tibet and the so-called disintegration of central government's commitment to Hong Kong's autonomy are unfounded fabrications that are politically motivated. China gives high priority to protecting human rights, and the human rights situation in the country is being continually improved. China has also earnestly fulfilled its international human rights obligations and is the only major country that has consecutively formulated and implemented four national human rights action plans.

The US should be the last country to cast stones at others, given its own notorious human rights record. The US has long been criticized both at home and abroad for acting too slowly and doing too little to protect human rights and address its own human rights woes.

Domestically, the US faces severe problems including systemic racism, forced labor, and infringement of the rights of refugees, migrants and Native Americans. It has also, in the name of protecting human rights, bullied, imposed sanctions on and waged wars against other countries, resulting in humanitarian crises, economic ruin and social turbulence in these countries.

Not even US politicians such as Burns could possibly believe the US really cares about promoting the international human right cause. Rather than being a champion of human rights, the US uses allegations of human rights abuses as part of its soft power attacks on other countries.

Throwing mud at China over human rights issues caters to the US' containment policy against China and helps to propel the narrative that it is trying to push that China is "evil". This is a tired old ploy from the Cold War that people are now wise to. Washington should give it a rest.