Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday released a statement accusing China of "unjustly detaining" "lawyers and human rights defenders" six years ago. The US government has taken every opportunity to attack and discredit the People's Republic of China.

Times flies. The Global Times believes that from a certain perspective, China's national path has been clarified and consolidated through the political frictions with the US and the West more broadly.

Looking back today, those so-called lawyers and human rights defenders were first politically confused and became saboteurs of the country's legal order. Encouraged and even funded by Western forces, they instigated confrontations over local grassroots legal cases, agitated group incidents and drove a trend of disturbances that was incompatible with social governance. It is inevitable that their activities will be governed by law.

Western public opinion exaggerated the scale of the activity at that time, and included many people who assisted in the investigation into the concept of "detaining." In fact, most of the people who were subjected to judicial investigations and assisted investigations were released very quickly. Only very few people were sentenced for subversion of state power or other crimes, and some of them have also been released from prison after serving sentence.

Looking back at the so-called "709 crackdown," the major lesson is to avoid being brainwashed by the West into taking anti-government activities as a kind of glory. They especially should not be hot-headed and conceited when they became influential. The stability of China's system is unshakeable. Chinese people support the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and they are proud of the continuous development of the country and people's lives. There is no basis for collective rebellion in today's Chinese society. Whoever makes the misjudgment like sleepwalking and follows the US and the West will pay the price.

As the China-US conflict intensifies, both societies will inevitably pay more attention to internal unity and become more vigilant about the forces that threaten national cohesion. It is a trend that Chinese and American intellectuals serve their own national interests and cheer for their own countries in order to win the competition.