How U.S. plays with "tag-lomacy"

BEIJING, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- From "promised land" and "city upon a hill" to "beacon of democracy" and "human rights defender," Uncle Sam has been adroitly creating beautiful tags for itself that conjured up an image of a noble and glorious country full of opportunities.

But the tags the United States has created for its rivals and enemies are just the other way round: rogue states, axis of evil, authoritarian regime ... The list goes on and on. The United States has literally become a "factory of tags," using its media power to define itself and others at will.

Make no mistake here. It is extremely easy for the United States to make tags without any solid evidence or moral responsibility to prove the tags are suitable. All it needs is a trumped-up accusation to obfuscate public opinion, squash its competitors and wheedle its followers into being at its beck and call.

So it is quite understandable that the tag of "autocracy" will never be attached to the U.S. allies, although some of them might be well suited to this title. Also the tag of "bridgehead of democracy" conferred to its allies like Japan and South Korea will never be related to the democratically elected Hamas.

The fact is that this professional wheeler-dealer does not worry or even care about the truth at all. The U.S.-made tags are nothing but deliberately fabricated lies and rumors, driven only by geopolitical calculations to serve its own interest.

Now the "labeling and blaming" game has become part of the U.S. strategy to attack its self-deemed "arch-rival" China. "Wolf warrior diplomacy," "forced labor," "coercive diplomacy," "debt trap" and many more tags have been invented by the United States to discredit China. Those tags have become perfect excuses for Washington to adopt relevant bills and sanctions, or rally its allies and partners against China.

Some U.S. politicians' remarks have exposed the real intention behind Washington's recent "tag-lomacy" campaign. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former senior U.S. official, stated back in 2018 that the United States "would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external." Thus there came the "forced labor" narrative about Xinjiang.

The "wolf warrior diplomacy" and "coercive diplomacy" tags attached to China are other smokescreens of the U.S. astute political footwork and new versions of the "China threat" narrative.

History and reality show that many of the U.S.-made tags for other countries are most suitable to the tag-maker itself.

It is the United States that committed genocide when millions of Native Americans were slaughtered, expelled, assimilated and discriminated against for centuries.

William Patterson, a leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Congress, in the petition titled "We Charge Genocide" submitted to the United Nations General Assembly in 1951, argued that the crimes committed by the U.S. government against Black Americans constituted crimes of genocide as defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

It is also the United States that exercised "coercive diplomacy" against Cuba, Laos, Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea through sanctions and embargoes, as well as Alstom, Toshiba and Huawei through kidnapping and coercion.

The American history is a textbook full of stories of how the country cooked up excuses to suppress its targets. Now the U.S. politicians are still busy concocting tags for the next victim. They have just failed to realize that every time they play with "tag-lomacy," they simply slap their own face and offer new proof of U.S. hypocrisy, its double-standard nature and incredibility. Enditem

(The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Global Times, China Daily, etc. He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com)