Pompeo slammed for attack on China education centres

China's foreign ministry Friday accused Mike Pompeo of slandering the Confucius Institutes "out of ideological prejudice and personal political interests", after the US Secretary of State called for the closure of all the Chinese government-backed education centres in the US.

Pompeo said on Thursday that the institutes have a "malign influence" on US students and wants them closed by the end of this year.

"It seriously violates the aspiration of the two peoples and is bound to suffer resolute resistance from people of insight inside the US," said Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of China's foreign ministry.

At Friday's regular press conference Zhao also refuted the tweet of Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies at the US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, on China's mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

In his tweet on Thursday, Zens said in one county alone in Xinjiang, over 10-thousand Uyghur children are in "hardship" due to one or both parents detained and 1,000 with both parents detained.

"He is a notorious anti-China 'gunman' recruited by the United States," said Zhao.

"The so-called China's persecution of Xinjiang Muslims and crimes against humanity is a sensational story concocted by some anti-China forces on purpose," he added. "It is a farce that slanders and smears China for the purpose of containing and suppressing China."

Xinjiang is a region of northwestern China where the government is believed to have imprisoned more than 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities as part of an ethnic assimilation campaign.

Labor and human rights groups say it's impossible to conduct legitimate inspections in Xinjiang because of the oppressive conditions. The Chinese Communist Party has an intensive surveillance network as part of its campaign to force ethnically distinct minorities to assimilate into the dominant culture.

China has denied widespread and consistent reports of abuse and mistreatment of the Uighurs and other minorities, defending the campaign as an effort to crackdown on extremism and claiming the detention camps are for vocational and Chinese language training.

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