Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian classified US President Donald Trump’s claim that Beijing had interfered in the US elections as a “totally invented” accusation and “malicious defamation”.
In a statement broadcast from the White House on Thursday night (16), Trump stated that “the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of electoral data in history”, with the alleged obtaining of data on 220 million American voters, including “names, addresses, telephone numbers and political affiliations”, from the 2020 electoral cycle.
Trump also accused the country’s internal agencies of hiding the case. “Our intelligence agencies have worked to actively suppress and minimize information about the extent of China’s sinister electoral activities, hiding it from both the president and the people,” he said. “The Chinese government wanted the US president to lose the next election, and they wanted me to lose because they knew I knew their game,” he said.
At this Friday’s press conference, Lin stated that China has always defended the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and that it has no interest in the US elections, in which it has never been involved. The allegation, the spokesperson said, “has long been proven unfounded.”
Lin returned the accusation without directly citing the US government. “The international community knows very well who habitually interferes in the internal affairs of other countries, maintains prolonged and indiscriminate surveillance of governments, companies and ordinary citizens around the world, and steals data from foreign citizens on a massive scale,” he said.
“We urge the US side to reflect on its own conduct, stop making groundless accusations against China, stop using China as an election issue and do more to promote China-US relations,” Lin said.
Trump’s statement accompanied the release, by the White House, of four blocks of documents under the title “Electoral Integrity”. The materials deal with alleged vulnerabilities in electronic voting and counting systems, the alleged obtaining of voter data by China, an investigation into voter registrations in the state of Michigan and the presence of non-citizens on state voter registrations. According to the official White House website, the documents respond to “concerns about potential irregularities” raised after the 2020 presidential election, in which Trump was defeated by Joe Biden.
NED Report
Trump’s accusation came a day after the Chinese foreign ministry countered another move by Washington. On Wednesday (15), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) released the report “Testing the Limits: Authoritarian Influence in a New Era of Impunity in China and Russia”.
Lin said at a press conference on Thursday (16) that the document is “full of lies, fallacies and false information” and stated that it promotes the “Chinese threat theory”. According to the spokesperson, the NED uses the pretext of “promoting democracy” to “subvert the regimes of other countries, interfere in their internal affairs, incite division and confrontation, influence public opinion and carry out ideological infiltration”.
Washington’s ‘white gloves’
The Chinese ministry has denounced the character and actions of this foundation. In August 2024, it published a report on the foundation, entitled “The National Foundation for Democracy: what it is and what it does”. The document describes NED as the “white gloves” of the US government: an entity that presents itself as an NGO, but was created by law of the US Congress in 1983, is financed by budget appropriations (US$315 million in fiscal year 2023, approximately R$1.7 billion) and operates under the guidance of the State Department. The text quotes American researcher William Blum, who denounces that “the idea was for the NED to do openly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades”.
The report lists the foundation’s actions in dozens of countries, including the transfer of US$65 million (around R$350 million) to the Ukrainian opposition during the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, the financing of groups involved in destabilization actions in Hong Kong and annual funds of US$5 million to US$6 million to the “World Uyghur Congress”, a separatist and coup-president organization. In 2015, Russia declared NED an “undesirable organization” and banned its activities from the territory; In 2021, Mexico’s government classified the foundation’s funding of anti-government organizations as an “act of interventionism.”
Source: www.brasildefato.com.br
