China has imposed retaliatory sanctions on its US critics, including senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio

It comes in response to new US sanctions which take aim at Beijing's treatment of Uighur Muslims and other minorities.
'The US practice severely interferes in China's internal affairs, violates basic norms governing international relations and damages China-US relations,' said China's foreign affairs spokesperson on Monday.
The politicians have been vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
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China's government has announced that it will impose sanctions on a group of US politicians, including senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, in response to US sanctions which take aim at Beijing's treatment of Uighur Muslims and other minorities.

China's foreign affairs spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Monday that China would place unspecified sanctions on Rubio and Cruz, as well as Republican politicians Samuel Brownback and Chris Smith.

All of those politicians have been vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party and have urged President Trump to take a tougher line on Beijing, particularly against the mass detention camps of Uighur Muslims and other minorities which Beijing runs in Xinjiang province.

"The US practice severely interferes in China's internal affairs, violates basic norms governing international relations and damages China-US relations. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns this," said Hua Chunying at a press conference .

"It must be stressed that Xinjiang affairs are purely China's internal affairs. The US has no right and no cause to interfere in them," she added.

The spokesperson did not specify what form the sanctions would take.

Rubio and Cruz both reacted to the announcement with indifference. Cruz tweeted : "Bummer. I was going to take my family to Beijing for summer vacation, right after visiting Tehran.

Rubio tweeted : "The Communist Party of #China has banned me from entering the country. I guess they don't like me?"

China also announced sanctions against the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a group of senators and officials which monitors human rights in China.

It comes amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over issues including trade and human rights which have seen both administrations engage in an escalating series tit-for-tat sanctions.

The US on Friday announced sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials who it said were responsible for human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang province.

The UN and other international monitoring agencies say that at least one million ethnic Uighurs in China are held in re-education camps which resemble a "massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy."

Beijing has denied the allegations and says it holds some religious extremists in camps for the purposes of re-education.

The sanctions targeted the US-related financial interests of Chinese communist party officials connected to the region.

In June, President Trump admitted that he had held off imposing Treasury sanctions against Chinese officials involved with the Xinjiang detention camps because doing so would have interfered with his attempts to strike a trade deal with Beijing.

Asked why he had not imposed sanctions, Trump told Axios: "Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal.

And I made a great deal, $250 billion potentially worth of purchases. And by the way, they're buying a lot, you probably have seen.

Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton in June claimed that Trump told Chinese premier Xi Jinping that building concentration camps to "re-educate" Uighur Muslims was the right thing to do.

"According to our interpreter," Bolton claimed in his tell-all book on his time in the White House, "Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do."

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China has imposed retaliatory sanctions on its US critics, including senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio

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