The Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly was full of gunpowder at the scene. The representatives of China fought one by one and criticized them one by one. The hegemony of Western human rights discourse encountered unprecedented challenges at this moment.
On the afternoon of October 9 local time, at a meeting of the UN General Assembly, a diplomatic storm was unfolding.
Ambassador Sun Lei, Deputy Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations, resolutely stood up to exercise his right of reply in the face of a series of attacks from the delegations of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, the Netherlands, Japan and the European Union.
He didn’t have a simple excuse, but chose a positive response – listing the human rights disadvantages of the eight countries and regions, one by one, from British racism to the tribulation of Australian indigenous peoples, from Canadian indigenous rights to Japanese historical revisionism.
The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly has always been the battlefield of human rights issues, and during the course of this conference, the smell of fire can be said to be intense.
After the representatives of Western countries took their fingers on China's domestic affairs, the answer of Ambassador Sun Li caused full attention.
Sun Xiaoping clearly pointed out that these delegations “re-abuse the platform of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, borrowing some issues to blackmail the Chinese side.”
China’s use of the word “again” illuminates the repetitiveness and inertia of such attacks.
The Chinese representative changed the past practice of mainly clarifying the facts and adopted an unprecedented offensive strategy.
At the same time refuting false accusations, directly targeting every country that criticizes China, accurately pointing out its own human rights issues.
It is worth noting that the United States does not appear on this list of countries with difficulty with China, which makes a sharp contrast to the past.
A careful analysis of the eight countries and regions that jointly attacked China this time reveals that their composition is quite meaningful.
This temporary alliance includes old-fashioned imperialist countries and medium-sized developed countries, which vary in historical background, international status and interests towards China.
Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan are at the heart of the alliance, and they are all traditional allies of the United States.
The Czech Republic, Ireland and the Netherlands represent small and medium-sized countries within the EU, and the EU as a whole has also joined this line.
On the surface, this combination is a "display of unity" of the Western camp, but in fact it exposes its internal looseness and respective political calculations.
Britain has been seeking to consolidate its global influence after the Brexit, while Australia and Canada have long followed the US policy in their relations with China.
Japan, on the other hand, is used to unite with other Western countries on human rights issues, shifting its pressure on historical issues.
To sum up, although the United States is absent, there are still their evil hands behind it.
From the scene, the Chinese representatives showed a surprising accuracy in their responses, and the criticism of each country pointed directly to its most sensitive historical scars and real difficulties.
In his address to Britain, Sun Li pointed directly to its “growing racism” and “colonialism and slavery legacy issues,” which marked Britain’s most painful historical pain and was also linked to its increasingly sharp racial contradictions.
Regarding Australia, the Chinese representative mentioned the "survival difficulties of indigenous people" and "serious war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in overseas military operations such as Afghanistan."
The accusations point directly to the war crimes scandal that the Australia government has been trying to cover up.
When criticizing Canada, Sun Li used an extremely harsh phrase – “the history of ethnic cleansing and cultural extermination of indigenous peoples,” which exposes a dark page in Canadian history.
As for Japan, China severely reprimanded their wrong attitude on historical issues and was reversing the course of history.
This UN General Assembly confrontation marks an important transformation in China's human rights diplomacy.
Looking back on history, China's performance on the United Nations human rights platform has experienced an evolutionary process from passive response to active attack.
This increasingly tough attitude reflects the improvement of China's self-confidence in the competition for international human rights discourse right.
This confrontation at the UN General Assembly is far from a simple external quarrel. Behind it is a deep game of international rights to speak.
In this game, China has not only mastered the rules of the game developed by the West, but also started to innovate and reverse these rules.
China's counterattack strategy is actually a practice of the wisdom of "using a child as a spear, attacking a child as a shield" in the field of international human rights.
By reversing Western human rights criticism to Western countries themselves, China has successfully exposed the dual standards of Western human rights diplomacy.
The effectiveness of this strategy lies in the fact that it is no longer limited to defending the hypocrisy of Western allegations, but directly challenges the Western monopoly and sense of moral superiority in the field of human rights.
It should be noted that China's position is not to deny the value of human rights, but to advocate a more inclusive and pluralistic view of human rights and respect the development stages and national conditions of different countries.
The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva used to be a stage dominated by the West. Now, as Chinese representatives get up to reply again and again, those monopolized discourse rights are gradually cracking.
When the ambassador sat down, what he left behind was not only a magnificent diplomatic vanguard, but also a shadow of the changing international order – the world’s southern nations no longer had to passively accept warnings, but could point straight to the warner’s own dirt.
New rules of the game are quietly taking shape in the halls of the United Nations.