Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

China has announced sanctioning measures against nine diehard British individuals and four hawkish organizations over the weekend to fight back their malicious fabrication and spread of "disinformation and lies" to attack the human rights in northwestern China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. 

These persons and their comrades in the US are harboring extreme jealousy about China's meteoric economic, technological and military rise in the past decades, wanting to provoke social instability in China's outlying regions, such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang, as they did years ago with Tibet. 

The sanctions are long overdue and have teeth. The punished politicians and researchers, together with their direct family members, will be forbidden from entering Chinese territory, and their property in China will be frozen, and all Chinese companies and citizens will be prohibited from doing business with them.

As an independent sovereign nation and a rising global power, it is reasonable and lawful for the Chinese government - which is overwhelmingly supported by 1.4 billion Chinese people - to set an example for the world community demonstrating that any act of smearing, demonizing and assaulting China is not to be condoned any more.

Chinese people do not fear "fierce" or "steep" competition, so long as it is done on equal footing and with good manners, but bullying China by instigating ethnic and religious discord and strife, and by spreading disinformation or funding their surrogates in China's territory won't be allowed. 

China has learnt the hard way that, when a country is poor and "strewn in a muddle" like this country was before 1949, it is likely to be bullied by others. After four decades of hard work, China is now becoming an industrial powerhouse and technology pace-setter. Naturally, the confidence and determination to safeguard its sovereignty, national security and development interests are being fortified.

And as China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi recently stated in Alaska during the high-level China-US strategic dialogue, no country can dictate terms and speak to China condescendingly. From now on, foreign powers should get accustomed to tit-for-tat sanctions, if they dare to launch sanctions on China first. 

A reminder is that, within minutes of Donald Trump's walkout from the White House on January 20 this year, his administration's 28 officials, including former CIA head and State Department chief Mike Pompeo, US national security advisor Robert O'Brien and Trump's trade advisor Peter Navarro, were sanctioned by China. 

And, Chinese authorities could learn from developed countries and start to institute a sanctioning system. Those Western politicians and scholars who hold outrageous bias and hatred toward China, such as members of the UK's Essex Court Chambers, which consulted with the secessionist and terrorist World Uyghur Congress and authored an article accusing China's policies in Xinjiang as "genocide," should be forever kept out of China's doors, together with their offspring. 

The loudspeakers used by the China-bashers like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ought to be punished too. 

In a brazenly skewed article recently, the BBC alleged that China is marshaling tens of hundreds of Uygur and other minorities to pick cotton in Xinjiang, asserting that "cotton picking is a notoriously hard work." Quite strangely, the news organization accused China of using "forced labor" to pick a crop used by the global fashion industry. 

The UK's Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab went further on this list of disgraceful fabrications, claiming "the situation in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. The reported abuses, which include forced labor, torture and forced sterilization of women, are extreme and they are extensive."

These blatant lies and assaults against China have shown the low and ugly side of some British politicians, which is certain to ensure that its already poor relationship with China is only going to deteriorate further. 

Britain has suffered a record economic recession in 2020, with its GDP plunging 9.9 percent from 2019 as London failed to address the new and more contagious coronavirus variant, while the country has become increasingly isolated from the European continent as it made a suicidal move to exit the EU. 

Boris Johnson's government reportedly wants to pursue a "positive trade and investment" relationship with China to help lift the UK's broken economy out of the pothole. But London giving up its policy-making independence and taking up a lockstep position with the US government to harass and impede China's rise is problematic, and won't bode well for the troubled country. 

China's $15 trillion economy - more than 5 times that of the UK's - is expected to gain impetus and accelerate by 7- 9 percent in 2021, supported by the Chinese people's rising disposable income and growing consumption power, and Beijing's vigorous infrastructure and technology investment plans. The Chinese economy will continue to be a major driver of the world in the coming decade, global economists say.

By all metrics, Britain needs to chart a friendly relationship with China. Its infrastructure needs Chinese investment, its schools need Chinese students, its tourism resorts need Chinese sightseers, and its companies need China's huge market.

However, the Johnson administration's policy U-turn in 2020, to oust Huawei's 5G equipment, despite the Chinese tech company's strong commitment and investment in the UK, has seriously poisoned the China-UK relationship. Also, London is reportedly considering sending its only aircraft carrier to the South China Sea in 2021, which will be taken as an explicit military provocation against China. Hopefully, Britons will search for what the "Opium War" means to Chinese people and stop doing something that will send them into an abyss. 

The author is an editor with the Global Times. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn