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A woman walks past the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China, on June 7, 2018.STAFF/Reuters

The U.S. government has accused Beijing of putting its diplomats in danger by promoting fake quotes, attributed to two foreign-service officers, that the Chinese say cast doubt on human-rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

The names and faces of the officers, employed at the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, were splashed over Chinese media this week and credited with exposing a long-running conspiracy of lies by Washington.

Sheila Carey and Andrew Chira – according to the media – told guests at a reception last year that the U.S. was “using the Xinjiang issue to hype up so-called forced labour, genocide and human-rights abuses” as part of a “tug of war” with China, the ultimate goal of which was to “completely sink the Chinese government into a quagmire.”

U.S., other countries call for ILO to set up mission to probe alleged labour abuses in China’s Xinjiang

Since about 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region have passed through what former detainees have described as “re-education camps.” The authorities have also heavily suppressed the Uyghur language, as well as cultural and religious practices, and allegedly used detainees for forced labour. In 2021, both the Canadian Parliament and the U.S. State Department said the campaign amounts to genocide, an accusation Beijing has fiercely denied.

As the claims about Ms. Carey and Mr. Chira spread through Chinese state media, the U.S. embassy issued a forceful denial, urging Beijing “to stop attributing false statements to U.S. officials or taking other actions that might subject our diplomats to harassment.”

While China’s propaganda organs have pushed outlandish claims about the U.S. before, the naming of individual diplomats, let alone publishing photographs of them, remains relatively rare. In its statement, the U.S. embassy warned that this “potentially endangers” officials and is “inconsistent with [China’s] obligations to treat United States diplomats with due respect and take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on their freedom or dignity.”

It noted that, since 2019, “online activists” have exposed personal information about U.S. government officials and their spouses and subjected them to online attacks and harassment. “In all cases, PRC media either instigated the attacks with its own reporting, or amplified campaigns that may have started online,” the statement said.

The U.S. denial of the story has not tamped it down, however, with Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday saying “a recent statement by an official of the U.S. consulate-general in Guangzhou has once again clearly proved that the U.S. deliberately created and spread lies about ‘forced labour’ in Xinjiang in order to exclude China from the global supply chain.”

His boss, assistant foreign minister Hua Chunying, said it was “rare truth from U.S. officials who’ve been lying through their teeth.” She tweeted a photo of Ms. Carey, along with a purported quote from her saying, “Nothing is wrong about Xinjiang.”

This is just the latest in a broader anti-U.S. campaign that has gathered steam in China over the past year, despite early hopes for a reset in relations after the election of U.S. President Joe Biden.

“The outright deployment of the propaganda apparatus to demonize the U.S. government is a sign of a distinctly unhealthy relationship,” said Drew Thompson, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the National University of Singapore. “If this is the degree of official-level discourse and mistrust and false attribution that breeds even more distrust, then what are the prospects for managing the bilateral relationship effectively?”

Mr. Thompson said such attacks are “a very classic Maoist approach to personalizing political issues.” They are indicative of a “very, very embattled mentality of senior officials in Beijing that feel that they’re under attack from hostile Western forces from all directions.”

In 1949, Mao Zedong published a sarcastic essay titled “Farewell, Leighton Stuart,” in which he celebrated the recent departure of the U.S. ambassador, who he said had sought to “turn China into a U.S. colony.”

Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the story about the U.S. diplomats was “an example of [China] trying to set the terms of the debate and force the U.S. into a defensive mode where it has to scramble to formulate a response.”

He pointed to comments last year by Mr. Zhao, the Foreign Affairs Ministry official, about the need to fight an “active war” for international public opinion.

Mr. Ryan said Beijing was “setting the tempo” to a tune the U.S. has to dance to.

In this context, a forceful denial from Washington – as well as the sheer unlikelihood of professional diplomats making such comments – does not matter. Nor does the fact the Chinese narrative does not align with how evidence of Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang first emerged – or the U.S. response to them.

Washington’s declaration that a genocide was occurring in Xinjiang followed years of reporting by media outlets – including The Globe and Mail – and human-rights groups, drawing on trips to the region and interviews with former detainees.

Much of what we know about Xinjiang comes not from U.S. government reports or even witness testimony but from official Chinese documents and articles in state media. There have also been numerous leaks of secret Chinese government reports and speeches by top officials, including President Xi Jinping.

The fabricated quotes come amid high tensions between Washington and Beijing, particularly over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Mr. Biden last month said the U.S. is obligated to defend against Chinese invasion, breaking with a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the issue.

That will likely be high on the agenda at an expected meeting between U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, at a security conference in Singapore this week.

Mr. Wei may also face questions about recent Chinese interceptions of Canadian and Australian surveillance flights, which both countries have warned are highly dangerous and could lead to an unintentional escalation.

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