A recent report on human rights breaches in the United States in 2023 released by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China has shown that the superpower’s human rights situation had worsened. A startling 76 percent of Americans think that their country is headed in the wrong direction.

“While a ruling minority holds political, economic, and social dominance, the majority of ordinary people are increasingly marginalised, with their basic rights and freedoms being disregarded,” the report said.

Political infighting, a dysfunctional government, and poor governance have undermined civil and political rights in the US. A bipartisan agreement on gun regulation is still elusive. In 2023, there were at least 654 mass shootings in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, leading to about 43,000 deaths, courtesy mainly of the powerful gun lobbies.

Irene Mulvey, the President of the American Association of University Professors, referred to gun violence as an “unacceptable national menace” and pushed for changes to the country’s gun laws. The UN Human Rights Committee is gravely concerned about the rise in gun-related injuries and fatalities in the US.

“However, American politicians ignore the international community and the domestic public’s call for gun control, only for money and political self-interest so that the proliferation of guns in the US cannot be effectively controlled for a long time,” says the report.

Native Americans have endured unrelenting cultural persecution, with their indigenous customs and religious beliefs brutally suppressed. Racist ideology is virulently spreading throughout the US and beyond national borders.

On August 29, 2023 the Associated Press revealed that three African Americans were shot and killed in Jacksonville, Florida, by a white man donning a mask. The USA Today website said that African Americans were growing more and more terrified following several shootings that targeted them.

Former House Homeland Security Committee chairman Representative Bennie Thompson claimed the shootings in Jacksonville and other racial incidents were a part of an increasing pattern of violence against Black communities. Some 3,424 hate crimes against African Americans were committed in the US in 2022, revealed FBI hate crime statistics made public in October 2023.

A study issued by the California attorney general in 2023 revealed that hate crimes against Black individuals rose by 27.1 percent from 513 in 2021 to 652 in 2022.

A 2023 Pew Research Centre survey found that about 60 percent of Asian Americans reported having experienced racial or ethnic prejudice. An Associated Press survey found that 51 percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders thought racism was a “very serious” or “extremely” prevalent issue in the US.

A March 23, 2023 Science magazine story details how Chinese scientists are being persecuted as part of the “China Initiative”. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US conducted an investigation into 246 individuals, of whom 103 lost their employment and over half were prohibited from applying for new NIH funding for a period of four years.

Of these 246 scientists, 81 percent were Asian. Among almost 1,400 Chinese-Americans holding tenure-track or tenured posts at US colleges, 42 percent of respondents were hesitant to conduct research in the country and 72 percent said they felt unsafe, found a study conducted by Princeton, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The so-called national security idea has been widely applied in recent years by the US government, which has also weaponised and politicised academic research and created a number of false pretexts to obstruct international collaboration, and scientific and people-to-people exchanges.

— The writer is a PhD candidate in International Relations