In a statement on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said visa restrictions would be placed on individuals believed to be involved in the harassment of religious practitioners and human rights advocates. The names and precise number of those blacklisted were not disclosed.

At a regular press briefing in Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Blinken’s statement was full of “prejudice and lies,” before calling it an interference in its domestic affairs.

The U.S. should take an “objective and impartial” view of China’s human rights situation, “and immediately lift the so-called sanctions against Chinese officials, otherwise China will respond with countermeasures,” he said on Tuesday.

In his statement, Blinken accused China of efforts to “harass, intimidate, surveil and abduct members of ethnic and religious minority groups, including those who seek safety abroad, and U.S. citizens, who speak out on behalf of these vulnerable populations.”

“Today’s action imposes visa restrictions on [Chinese] officials who are believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers and peaceful protestors in China and beyond,” Blinken said.

“We again call on the [Chinese] government to cease its acts of transnational repression, including attempting to silence Uyghur American activists and other Uyghur individuals serving the American people by denying exit permission to their family members in China.”

China’s human rights record and its treatment of Uyghurs in particular have been areas of contention between Beijing and Washington, despite the Chinese government’s attempts to point out America’s many failings.

Last year, Blinken upheld an assessment by his predecessor, Secretary Mike Pompeo, whose office determined that China’s policies in its northwest region of Xinjiang amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, which President Joe Biden’s administration says is ongoing.

Detailed research and extensive reporting have uncovered what rights groups described as years of systematic abuse and even population control targeting Uyghurs and members of the other mainly Muslim minority groups.

This includes the arbitrary detention of more than a million Uyghur men and women, forced sterilization to decrease the natural birth rate as well as “labor transfers” that force Xinjiang residents from their homeland.

China denies any wrongdoing: Re-education camps, it says, are part of a regionwide anti-terror campaign, while coerced labor programs are a form of poverty alleviation. Uyghurs are living through an “optimal period of development” and will be happier for it, a government white paper declared last summer.

America’s latest measures follow the sanctioning in December of two Chinese officials said to be responsible for the mass internment campaign against Uyghurs. The same month, Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act to ban goods from Xinjiang unless importers can prove they weren’t produced by repressed Uyghurs or other minorities.

China responded by sanctioning four members on the Commission on International Religious Freedom and prohibiting them from traveling to China. Last month, the West led a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over China’s repressive human rights policies.

The most high-profile sanctions on the subject to date came exactly one year ago, when the U.S., U.K., Canada, and the EU jointly imposed sanctions on senior Chinese officials at the heart of the system-wide abuse against Uyghur Muslims.

Earlier this month, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet announced she had secured a visit to Xinjiang in May. However, it awaits to be seen whether China will guarantee her the meaningful access she requires to conduct an independent assessment.