China on Wednesday said the US House speaker Nancy Pelosi was "full of lies" after she called for a "diplomatic boycott" of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights abuses.
US lawmakers are getting increasingly vocal about an Olympic boycott and have lashed out at American firms, arguing their silence about what the state department has termed "a genocide of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in China was abetting the Chinese government".
"What I propose - and join those who are proposing - is a diplomatic boycott," Pelosi said, in which "lead countries of the world withhold their attendance at the Olympics".
Pelosi's comments drew a strong response from China, which denies ill-treating Muslim minorities and has claimed that camps in Xinjiang, where an unknown number have been held, are vocational training centers, meant to deradicalise and train them for employment.
"Some US individuals' remarks are full of lies and disinformation," foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday.
"US politicians should stop using the Olympic movement to play despicable political games," Zhao said. "Some people in the US hype themselves up as moral authority. I don't know where they get the nerve to say so."
Zhao said that the US' intention of using human rights issues is to divert attention from its own historical and present human rights crimes, disclose the US' motive of containing China's development under the guise of so-called human rights issues, and expose the hypocrisy of the so-called democracy and human rights of the US.
