Mike Pompeo arrives to speak at the National Press Club in Washington DC, US, Jan 12, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

On his last day in office, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was still spreading rumors against China by claiming "genocide" in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. And his successor hurried to say similar things upon taking office.

To their fabricated words, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian had a good response when he repeated "There is no genocide in China" three times. And in a latest video, a 91-year-old female surnamed Balati replied too by saying that she had seven children, and 40 grandchildren and grand-grandchildren in all.

In a larger perspective, the Uygur population in Xinjiang grew from 10.17 million in 2010 to 12.72 million in 2018, a 25 percent growth rate, twice that of the whole population.

How damaged does a brain have to be to call this "genocide"?

From "forced labor" to "genocide", certain US politicians have been making increasingly absurd claims about Xinjiang. Their purpose is evident: To "contain" China and curb the nation's prosperous development.

Their efforts are doomed to fail. Anybody who travels to Xinjiang can see the truth and know immediately what big lies US politicians such as Pompeo tell.

Ironically, the words of Pompeo and his successor make people wonder why US politicians are so interested in the word "genocide". Maybe the answer lies in their own history — A history in which "genocide" happened more than once.

Whenever the word "genocide" comes up, the first image that flashes in people's minds is of American Indians, or the natives who inhabited the continent there. Some US scholars estimated that before the White immigrants arrived in North America in 1492, there were at least 15 million indigenous people living there; They helped the white immigrants to survive but the latter brought guns, viruses, as well as used cruel measures such as scalping to pay back.

As a result, the number of indigenous people in the US dropped to its lowest point to 237,000 in 1900, as per the US Bureau of Census. It grew in the past 120 years but already lives were lost permanently.

Africans are another race that suffered from "genocide" in the US. A widely quoted BBC report estimated that "more than a million people are thought to have died" during their transport, while some predicted that more died soon after their arrival.

And those who survived had to labor as slaves in the plantations, where mortality rate for their children was twice that of White children.

Their descendants, or whatever survived, had to face sterilization abuse in the 1900s. In North Carolina alone, from 1958 to 1968, over 2,100 sterilizations were done, with rates increasing with the size of the unemployed black population.

William Darity Jr, a professor at Duke University, called it "genocide".

There are many more examples that could be called or associated with "genocide". Even today the US military runs more than 200 biological labs all over the world and they are able to commit "genocide" everywhere.

Now we know why certain US politicians are so dedicated to fabricating rumors about Xinjiang and China as a whole. Their rumors are based on true stories in their own history. They just want to erase the time and place and write China on the blanks instead.

Their efforts are doomed to fail and by making such rumors they turn themselves into clowns laughed at by everybody.