“Concrete facts show that the United States saw continued deterioration in some key aspects of its existent human rights issues last year,” the introduction reads. “With the gunshots lingering in people's ears behind the Statue of Liberty, worsening racial discrimination and the election farce dominated by money politics, the self-proclaimed human rights defender has exposed its human rights ‘myth’ with its own deeds.”

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A number of flaws in the U.S. system are documented in the text, including gun violence, crime rates, incarceration rates, the influence of money in politics, voter turnout, the expense of the 2016 presidential election, media bias, social polarization, income gaps, a shrinking middle class, poverty, falling life expectancy, falling health standards, a flawed Social Security system, poor race relations, police killings of African Americans, racial disparity, prejudice against Muslims, the gender pay gap, sexual harassment, inadequate protection for children's rights and abuse of the elderly.

In addition to these domestic issues, U.S. foreign policy also comes under scrutiny, with the report noting the number of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and citing figures on civilian casualties compiled by Airwars, an independent project aimed at tracking the war against the Islamic State.

Despite allegations of media bias, Western sources are frequently cited in the report. In an accompanying chronology of U.S. human rights violations in 2016, reporting by The Washington Post is referred to more than 60 times. Some information does appear to be misrepresented, however: The Chinese report appears to mix up 2016 figures on the economy from Gallup for the previous year's, for example.

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The release of the report marks something of a tradition for Beijing: China has released a similar report on human rights in the U.S. shortly after the State Department's report is released every year since 2000. Reading the report, there can be no doubt that it is designed as a response to the U.S. report on human rights in other countries.

“Wielding ‘the baton of human rights,’ [the State Department] pointed fingers and cast blame on the human rights situation in many countries while paying no attention to its own terrible human rights problems,” the Chinese report states. “People cannot help asking about the actual human rights situation of the United States in 2016.”

The State Department has released human rights reports on every country that receives U.S. foreign assistance or is a United Nations member state for the past 41 years. The intensely researched report includes a year's work by embassy staff around the world and requires almost 100 editors.

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This year's State Department report said that freedom of expression was on the decline around the world. It singled out China for its “severe” repression of civil and political rights, noting that despite China's denials, there were tens of thousands of political prisoners in the country, and that torture and illegal detentions at “black jails” remained an issue.

However, despite the strong wording of the report, many human rights activists were dismayed that Rex Tillerson, the new secretary of state, had not appeared in person to present the report and had only offered limited written remarks about the report. “Such a decision sends an unmistakable signal to human rights defenders that the United States may no longer have their back, a message that won’t be lost on abusive governments,” Rob Berschinski, a senior vice president at Human Rights First, told The Washington Post last week.