CHINA’S Foreign Ministry told US politicians today to stop poking their noses in the country’s business and posing as human rights authorities.

Spokeswoman Hua Chunying was responding to a letter signed by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, New Jersey Representative Chris Smith and 15 others and sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanding sanctions on Chinese officials supposedly involved in the mass internment of Muslims.

The letter, released to the media, alleged that there is an “ongoing human rights crisis” in the Xinjiang autonomous region, where it said national minorities are detained and tortured and face “egregious restrictions on religious practice and culture.”

Ms Hua insisted that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of religion according to the law and that members of the US Congress should not “threaten to impose sanctions at every turn on other countries.

“I would like to advise the individual US lawmakers to focus on and perform their duties well because they are spending taxpayer money.

“They should certainly serve the US people properly, instead of poking their noses in other countries' affairs and pretending to be judges of human rights.”

China denies that internment camps exist, while accepting that offenders involved in minor crimes are sent to “vocational education and employment training centres” to help with their rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

“The argument that ‘a million Uighurs are detained in re-education centres’ is completely untrue,” Beijing’s UN representative Hu Lianhe said earlier this month in Geneva.

The government insists that tough measures are needed as part of a “People’s War on Terror” to purge separatist and religious extremist elements from Xinjiang.

Ethnic riots in its capital Urumqi killed hundreds of people in 2009 and there has been sporadic violence since then.

Public protests by thousands of Hui Muslims earlier this month over plans to demolish the towering Grand Mosque in the city of Weizhou were caused by local officials’ recklessness, Communist Party official Bai Shangcheng said yesterday.

Mr Bai, the director-general of the Ningxia regional party committee’s united front work department, which oversees religious groups, said local officials have been ordered to review the incident and “handle it properly.”

He said the regional party secretary had been out of the region when the protests erupted.