The immediate past U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has spared no efforts to undermine the bilateral ties of his country with China during his tenure. As the top diplomat of the only superpower of the world, he has unfortunately risen to prominence for pursuing lying diplomacy.

The former CIA boss, who prides himself on 'lying, cheating and stealing,' has spread a barrage of groundless accusations against China, leaving no stone unturned to slander the nation as if he were down with anti-China syndrome.

Hanipa Nabi (left), a villager from Altay, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region who has joined embroidery sessions offered by a local foreign trade company, makes embroidery works at home, March 26, 2020. (People's Daily Online/Aldak)

Pompeo has, therefore, continued spinning cock and bull stories about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Communist Party of China (CPC), and some globally leading technology firms of China.

Speaking in a US radio interview last November, Pompeo said: “Taiwan has not been a part of China.” With this statement, he has dishonored a UN resolution that declared Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.

He has also stood up against the long-standing official stance of the successive administrations of the US on Taiwan. The three joint communiques, based on which the China-US diplomatic relationship was established, have all affirmed the One-China Principle.

Pompeo has tossed out decades-old rules that helped the US navigate unofficial relations with Taiwan. Just 11 days before a new administration took office, he declared that all restrictions on official contacts with Taiwan were 'null and void.’

During the devastating riots in Hong Kong in 2019, Pompeo glorified the illegal violence of the rioters and criticized China for crushing the freedom of Hongkongers, terming the riots as 'peaceful' protests in Hong Kong.

In an article published at the website of the US State Department, Pompeo blamed the CPC for threatening global peace and security, claiming that the CPC poses the central threat of the times, undermining the stability of the world to serve its own hegemonic ambitions.

Against such blatant lies of Pompeo, many observers are of the view that the world has no reason to believe these accusations. However, it is would not be an exaggeration to say that the US has only itself, not the CPC, to blame for ransacking global peace. This is, as such, a dirty plot to justify and distract global attention from the US invasions and atrocities across the world.

Just one day before the new administration takes office, Pompeo said that China has committed “genocide and crimes against humanity” in its repression of Uyghur Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang.

I think his accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang are totally groundless and 'ravings of a madman.’ Though Pompeo has come up with the accusations lately, his administration has long been working on creating a suitable pretext of making the allegations against China.

Keeping this in mind, Pompeo and his like-minded politicians, along with their favorite media, have long been running a propaganda war over Xinjiang. As part of the war, they have been disseminating one after another fake news of concentration camps, human and labor rights violations, and forced birth control, to name a few.

However, many delegations of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), UN Human Rights Commission, journalists, diplomats, religious leaders, and politicians have debunked the propaganda by visiting Xinjiang and witnessing the situation on the ground themselves. They have also praised China for the vast development and poverty eradication in the region. As a result, the anti-China forces have fallen through to deceive the world believing in the propaganda stories.

Over the latest allegations of genocide, I would like to shed light on the population of the Uygur community in Xinjiang. If the accusations of genocide are true, the population must decrease in the region, but the fact says that in the four decades between 1978 and 2018, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased from 5.5 million to 12.71 million.

During the 8-year span from 2010 to 2018, the population of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang had a 25% increase of 2.54 million. This increase rate is not only higher than that of the entire Xinjiang population, but is also more than 10 times the growth rate of the Han population over the same period.

Article Two of the UN convention on genocide defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such": killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In light of the aforesaid definition, nothing has happened in Xinjiang that can be defined as genocide. Rather, the Chinese government has ensured tremendous development of the region by improving livelihoods, lifestyles, and socioeconomic situations of the Uyghurs, resulting in the eradication of poverty eradication Xinjiang one decade before the deadline set by the UN for sustainable development.

On the other hand, crimes against humanity refer to specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality. These crimes include murder, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, persecution, enforced disappearance, etc. Unlike genocide, they are not necessarily committed against a specific national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

In line with the definition of crimes against humanity, nothing has happened in Xinjiang. Rather the Chinese government has been dealing with the above-mentioned crimes with heavy hands, and Xinjiang has been one of the safest regions. As a result, Xinjiang received more than 200 million visits from tourists in 2019, up 41.6 percent year-on-year, and the number is expected to reach 300 million in 2020.

Finally, both the allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang are totally baseless political rhetoric. Pompeo has made the allegations to mitigate his pains of losing power, because he and his cohorts think Americans have rejected the Trump administration in the elections comparing between its failures and China's successes in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and economic growths of their own countries.

The author is a Bangladeshi journalist and columnist now based in Beijing, China.