China’s Aborted Openness

Xiaorong Li

2005-10-24

[Today, six years after I wrote this article, the blind Chinese activist, "bare-foot" citizen lawyer Chen Guangcheng remains under house arrest after serving 4 1/2 years in jail. He has been detained at home since his release in September 2010, together with his wife and two small children, in Dongshigu Village, Linyi, Shandong Province. In the last few weeks, activists and public intellectuals have spoken up openly online, calling for "Free Chen Guangcheng". Some activists have traveled to Linyi, trying to break up the illegal confinement, so far without success. Chinese police have tried to stop them and intimidated them. It's nonetheless encouraging and it lifts my spirit to see such calls and actions.  I post this article here to join their call, in a small way, to free Chen Guangcheng.  - Xiaorong Li, Oct. 15, 2011.] 




China’s state-run Xinhua news agency recently reported on a government investigation into a string of forced sterilizations and abortions in the village of Linyi, Shandong province. The speed of the investigation – said to have begun days after the kidnapping of Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had been a public advocate for the victims – and the candor of the report created the impression of greater government responsiveness and bolder official media. Is this impression right?

The story in Linyi is the kind of news that propaganda officials usually bury in the Communist Party’s secret files. According to reports, local authorities in Linyi, seeking to avoid exceeding birth quotas under China’s “one-child” policy, forced several women to undergo abortions and forcibly sterilized many couples with more than one child. Villagers who hid to avoid the campaign reportedly saw their family members jailed. Some in Linyi alleged degrading treatment, torture, and extortion.

Why investigate and report this scandal? The Xinhua reports, I believe, are best read as damage control.

China is trying to secure funding from the United Nations to improve reproductive health – an effort that has been set back by reports of forced abortion. Central authorities did not investigate the Linyi abuses until news of the harassment of Chen Guangcheng – and his abduction with the help of Beijing police – spread into international media.

Chen had reported the abuses to officials and asked a non-governmental organization, the Citizens’ Rights Defense Group, to investigate. The group went to Linyi in May. A month later, the network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders reported the group’s findings and demanded the intervention of the central government’s Family Planning Commission (FPC). 

As a volunteer for the network, I was in touch with Chen and followed events closely. In July, having failed to elicit any government response, Chen began seeking legal aid from prominent lawyers to prepare lawsuits on behalf of the victims, causing alarm among local officials. Pursued by police, Chen went into hiding. My “personal safety was threatened,” he wrote on August 30 in the last email I received from him.

Following strenuous international protests over Chen’s kidnapping, the FPC decided to investigate. Xinhua announced that local officials responsible for the violence might be prosecuted. Central authorities seemed to sense an immediate need to quell criticism of its controversial population-control efforts. And Xinhua wasted no time in claiming that the abuses were limited to a few towns.

However, central government authorities have done little to halt intimidation of Linyi’s villagers. Chen was released from detention but remains under house arrest and was dragged back to the police station on September 2 for unknown reasons.

Police refuse to return Chen’s personal computer and cell phone. The village, too, is mysteriously without phone service. Meanwhile, through arrests, threats, and bribery, authorities are forcing villagers to withdraw accounts of abuse and back out of their lawsuits, warning of the dire consequences of cooperating with Chen and the lawyers.

The FPC declines to intervene, citing lack of law-enforcement powers. On October 10, the villagers’ lawyers were told that the court hearing scheduled that day was canceled. On their way back to Beijing, thugs reportedly assaulted the lawyers.

Viewed in this context, the belief that the government’s approach to Linyi reflects a new responsiveness to human-rights abuses seems naïve. If the government were truly becoming more responsive, why have we not seen similar responses to other disputes over the theft of farmland, compromised investors’ rights, or high-level corruption?

In all these cases, authorities have responded with repression, including the hiring of plain-clothes militias to kidnap or beat up people who attempt to publicize problems. China’s belated bouts of openness about the rural spread of AIDS and the SARS epidemic clearly indicate that the central government regards transparency solely as a matter of expediency.

Others argue that China’s government is simply losing its grip over local authorities. This prospect is hardly encouraging. If abuses and repression in the provinces continue no matter how attentive the central government, or how assertive the press might have become, what then? 

More likely, however, the central authorities are following a policy that most Chinese know well: neijin waisong, or “controlled inside, relaxed outside.” Applied here, the policy means consolidating power at home while disarming critics abroad.  

I believe that the government’s loss of control in the provinces has been stage-managed. Chaos provides a cover for crackdowns. It is too convenient when unidentified strongmen beat and harass activists who question Party rule, and it is too easy for officials to blame an out-of-control “criminal society” when international media start asking questions.

Suspiciously targeted “criminal” assaults have, indeed, occurred in places other than Linyi. Thugs thrashed civil rights activist Lu Banglie in the Guangdong town of Taishi in early October. Six villagers in the Hebei village of Dingzhou, protesting government seizure of their land, died after bloody clashes with a gang of toughs in July. The list goes on.

State media recently started releasing year-end “mass incident” statistics. Last year, the government said, there were 74,000 such incidents. Observers marvel that China’s leaders admit to such a staggering number of protests. But here, again, the government is hiding in plain sight. State-run media organs have been forced to admit that these protests test the Party’s will to maintain power. They neglect to tell the real story of how the Party exercises that will, trusting that the admission itself will satisfy us. We should not be so quick to play along.

(Published at Project Syndicate:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/xiaorong1/English)

旧文：我的“自由陈光诚”长跑

（今天是国际盲人节。国内许多网友在呼吁“自由陈光诚”，不少人最近还冒险去临沂东师古村，想突破地方痞子对陈光诚及其家人的非法监视居住。这篇短文写于5年前，贴在这儿，算是支持网友“自由陈光诚”活动的一点表示吧。这些年来，海内外有一批固执的人坚持为陈光诚呼吁，“陈光诚”这个名字已经在外交界和国际媒体广为人知。然而今天不同的是，有这么多国内的网友包括名人微博写手敢于出来为陈光诚说话。令人欣慰。  2011年10月15日）

我不是长跑运动员。中学时田径竞赛，班上体育委员为了凑数，把我拉去，跑过几次200米、400米。我也不是做文人的料，至从与灰色的理论接缘，整天培着书本和电脑，但是书桌前总坐不住，到下午时分老想起来动动。

我们家住处没什么锻炼的空间。眼下租借的公寓居巴黎城中，在一栋19世纪初建造的旧楼房里。这个区域的不少建筑逃脱了19世纪中、后期巴黎的城市改建大拆迁，这里狭窄的胡同旧楼曾一度为清贫的艺术家们提供一脚徙居之地，恐怕也是普契尼歌剧《波西米娅人》的素材。我们住在顶层上，起居室里的楼梯通到上面的阁楼。 外面异国情调的景色倒是不错：从临街的窗口能看到远处蒙玛特尔高地“圣心”教堂圆顶，下面街道近处是“疯狂的母羊妇”夜总会。 （据说法国大革命时老百姓痛恨路易16的一个原因是他和王后玛丽安东内经常在这个夜总会狂欢、搞化妆舞会，不顾百姓疾苦， 误了国事，不幸的国王一家，包括未成年的孩子，全被送上了断头台。看来还是和平的“颜色革命”文明一点）。

于是我就出门跑步去了。正好每天下午要去埃佛塔附近接放学的孩子，给跑步增加了实用价值。我这个实用主义者很难为了锻炼而锻炼。锻炼对我来说不是太累，而是太单调。于是本人长期缺乏锻炼，人到中年，开始有点害怕进入体态龙钟的年代了。

我经过的线路穿插着许多名胜，这些景点颇吸引眼球，丝毫不让人感到枯燥。第一天竞一气跑了五公里！ 几次跑步下来，我注意到一个有趣现象：我自己成了吸引眼球的对象！路上行人多半是外国游客，或疲劳的下班族，看见有人在跑步锻炼，不少人投来好奇、鼓励或羡慕的眼光。忽然，我来了灵感：为何不利用如此难得地吸引来的眼光去传递一点有用的信息？ 尤其是人们平时不会主动去收集的信息。这也叫送货上门、服务到家吧！

再次出门跑步时，我穿上了一位国内朋友夏天带来的一件T-shirt.，上面印着陈光诚图像以及“盲人，陈光诚，自由”和“山东临沂东师古村”字样。朋友们曾穿着同样设计的T-shirts 在北京召集记者招待会、去山东沂南法院声援被庭审的陈光诚。但是公安没收了大部分印制好了的T-shirts。记者招待会也被禁止掉了。好几位出面公开声援的人如今已经入狱或被监控起来。 如今恐怕穿出来这样一件衣衫也是“犯法”。可是我可以穿出去，警察不会过问。巴黎不愧时装之都，如何穿着打扮、奇装异服出门，都不会让人感到不自然。穿着自由、表达自由，不享受且不可惜了？

不知谁设计的，反正我挺喜欢这件T-shirt。 要是上面有法文或英文字样，则更方便。但是设计者可能万万没想到这样一件体惜在“开放、文明”的大国也没有容身之地，还会流亡到海外来？ 我喜欢体惜上陈光诚带着墨镜的照片，颇有摇滚乐歌星的风度！难怪呢，虽然文字都是中文，我这一路吸引了比往日更多的眼球。当我遇到成群的大陆游客时，我有意放慢脚步，让他们有机会看到“盲人，陈光诚，自由”。 我希望他们当中有人会叫住我，打听谁是陈光诚。我真想知道他（她）们看到“盲人，陈光诚，自由”的字样，心里是否有所触动或是否产生任何好奇？会有人敢给我来一张合照？

(巴黎，2006年10月7日)

What I Told Obama About Beijing’s Human Rights Problem

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/18/obama-china-human-rights-problem/

Xiaorong Li

                                           (January 19, 2011, 7pm, Penn. Ave, 16th St., Washington, DC) 

On January 13, President Obama invited me and four other activists and scholars—the writer Zha Jianying, whose brother is a former political prisoner in China;Andrew Nathan, a Columbia professor; author Bette Bao Lord; and Paul Gewirtz, director of Yale’s China Law Center—to meet with him at the White House to discuss the current state of human rights and reform in China. The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, took place as the president prepares for this week’s meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao in Washington. He wanted to know whether we think his approach on these issues is working, and how that approach might be improved. For me, it was an opportunity to bring to the direct attention of the president some critical questions about China’s human rights record I hope he will take up in the summit. The following outlines some of the issues I raised with the president, including a series of specific recommendations concerning US policy toward China.

The human rights situation in China has not fundamentally improved after a generation of economic development, after many rounds of US-China human rights dialogues, and after millions of dollars of assistance to promote “rule of law” and other “reforms” in China.

Despite the country’s impressive GDP and growing prosperity, popular discontent in China is deep and widespread. Millions of people have been flooding to governmentoffices to complain about injustices; there have been numerous workers’ strikes over lack of labor protection, violent clashes over land and housing rights, and demonstrations organized by teachers, veterans, bank employees, victims of pollution, and by parents whose children were poisoned by dairy products or died in school buildings that collapsed during the Szechuan earthquake in 2008. There have been protests by ethnic and religious minorities about discrimination and cultural destruction. According to the government’s own statistics, in each of the past five years, about 90,000 “mass protests” have taken place. The actual numbers are undoubtedly higher than this.

Fearful of losing control, China’s rulers have developed the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship system, which they use to block information, silence dissent, and conduct surreptitious monitoring of online activism. The security police have gained enormous power in recent years and use it against dissident writers like Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate who is now serving an 11-year jail sentence; or activists like Xu Zhiyong, whose NGO, the Open Constitution (gong meng), was shut down, and Hu Jia, who worked to raise awareness about AIDS and the environment, and who now also is in prison on charges of “inciting subversion against state power”; or the rural organizer and legal advocate Chen Guangcheng, who, recently released from prison, is now subjected to unlawful house arrest; or human rightslawyers like Gao Zhisheng, who was imprisoned, tortured, released, then taken away again, and now has disappeared without a trace. Today, there are unknown numbers of such prisoners of conscience in Chinese jails and extra-legal “re-education through labor camps” where hundreds of thousands of people are held without trial. In 2009 the Chinese authorities spent $75 billion on “internal security,” nearly as much as the $80 billion they spent on national defense.

Many Chinese activists view state-sponsored “political reform” in China as simply dead. Human rights lawyers and legal scholars have concluded that “rule of law” reform is regressing. Flagrant human rights violations—including torture, arbitrary detention, censorship, repression of religious and ethnic minorities—continue unabated. (These practices are well documented in annual US State Department reports and the Congressional Executive Commission on China, as well as by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.) Yet the major Western democracies have largely chosen to remain silent—as each competes, apparently, for a piece of China’s “miracle growth.” Such economic interests make multilateral efforts to address China’s human rights problems difficult. But the US could change this pattern by taking a strong stand now.

Looking beyond the upcoming summit, the US administration should also formulate a clear longer-range strategy toward the problems of human rights in China, bearing in mind that this issue profoundly undergirds virtually all of the other issues that the USand the world face with China. Here are some suggestions:

1. Support civil society, and in particular activists and lawyers who are taking great personal risks to promote human rights and democracy. The good news is that Chinese citizens are learning to speak up, to organize, and to demand that their rights be respected. For nearly a decade now, a civil rights movement known as the “rights defense movement” has spread among citizens of many backgrounds. Victims of forced eviction or migrant laborers are transformed into rights activists when they see their efforts to remedy injustices answered with censorship, police brutality, and corruption in legal institutions. Most of the 12,000 signers of Charter 08 —farmers, workers, AIDS activists, environmentalists, and others—are citizens who decided to endorse the charter even after police had suppressed it and imprisoned one of its authors, Liu Xiaobo.

Some practical ideas for supporting civil society:

(a) Make strong and clear public statements in support of human rights activists and that speak directly to the Chinese people: Rhetoric is important. The Norwegian Nobel Committee did a great service by speaking past the Chinese government and directly to the Chinese people, saying, in effect, “we see you, too, and we honor you.” The most significant and sensitive divide in China today is between the Chinese state and its citizens. People in the democratic governments of the world should bear in mind that the Chinese state still dominates the Chinese press and rules without popular consent. It is insensitive to lump rulers and ruled together as if they were the same thing and as if only the rulers can speak for the whole.

(b) Facilitate Internet freedom: Today the Internet is the most important way, in China as much as in other repressive societies, for ordinary citizens to access information, express their views, organize themselves, and engage in activism. TheUS government should do what it can to provide Chinese Internet users with technical support to get around the “Great Firewall” that the Chinese government has erected to block political dissent and prevent access to information. At a minimum, the USgovernment should work to discourage American IT companies from the sordid practice of supplying the Chinese government with technology that facilitates censorship and surveillance.

(c) Strengthen direct contacts with activists and provide them support: US officials should publicly raise concerns about individual cases at high-level meetings; USleaders visiting China should meet Chinese civil-society activists personally; the State Department international visitor program should invite civil society actors only; the current practice of sending the US ambassador or someone from his embassy staff to attend the trials of dissidents, or their talks at civic forums, should continue and increase; small grants from the embassy for public civil-society activities should increase.

2. Focus on holding the Chinese government to its own rhetorical commitments to its citizens. Such an emphasis is effective in its own right and will also help avoid stirring up “nationalist,” anti-Western sentiment. The Chinese government, although it constantly abuses human rights, continually claims to observe them. “Human rights” no longer is a taboo phrase in official discourse. Such rhetoric creates opportunities to push the authorities to deliver. Western democracies can answer the Chinese government’s accusations about “interference in China’s internal affairs” by citing its own rhetoric. If the Chinese government is called upon to observe the constitutional and legal commitments that it has made to its own citizens—some of which are inscribed in international protocols—it can hardly claim “interference.”

3. Strengthen US involvement in multilateral forums such as the UN Human Rights Council. The Chinese government participates actively in the UN Human Rights Council. If it is eager to be a global player in this forum for promoting human rights around the world, then of course it should observe international standards for human rights. The US should use the UN HRC more effectively, to press the Chinese government to adhere to the international human-rights conventions that it has signed and/or ratified. Such a policy would require the US to take a leadership role in forums such as the UN HRC and to build multilateral coalitions to hold the Chinese government accountable for its failure to respect international conventions. This kind of international scrutiny will undercut the Chinese government’s exceptionalist claims about “human rights views with Chinese characteristics” and will render vacuous its reflexive accusation that discussion of its human rights record amounts to “interference in internal affairs.” It will also limit the Chinese government’s ability to fan nationalist sentiment at home into opposition to “Western” human rights.

4. US programs to assist “Rule of law” reforms and to facilitate exchanges of “legal experts” should be designed to address the particular administrative and legal problems in China that have led to human rights abuses. Current US legal assistance to China is misconceived insofar as it assists the existing legal system in becoming more efficient. Instead, US assistance would be better directed toward problems such as widespread torture. The Chinese government ratified the Convention against Torture in 1988. On paper, “torture to force confession” is no longer legal in China, and in legal circles torture is no longer a taboo topic. The US might use its legal-aid resources to address issues such as how to prevent deaths in detention and how, in court trials, to reject evidence that was extracted by forced confession. US legal aid could also be used to strengthen protections for criminal defense lawyers to help them avoid arbitrary prosecution or disbarment. Such lawyers —especially those who defend human rights activists, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uighurs, and underground Christians—are already in very short supply.

5. The proposed US-China talk of “open government” must address China’s draconian “state secret” law. In January 2007, the Chinese State Council adopted the“Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information”that was supposed to take effect in May 2008. But the government has ignored these regulations wherever it relates to human rights. For example the number of death sentences and executions remain “state secrets,” and authorities continue to use vaguely-defined “state secret” provisions of the criminal law code to prosecute many people for “leaking,” “stealing,” or “possessing” state secrets. Victims of such abuses have included not only Chinese human rights activists and protesters in ethnic minority regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, but also American businessmen and a scientific researcher. Any talk about “open government” with the government of China must address this area of law and practice. Since Americans are among those who have been ensnared—and might again be in the future—this is not an “internal matter.”

6. Resume the “US-China Human Rights Dialogue” only if transparency and participation by representatives of civil society in China are guaranteed. Previous“dialogues” brought no real change and were even counterproductive because they allowed the Chinese government to claim an “achievement” on human rights when in fact no progress was being made. The dialogue should not only address abuses of social and economic rights but also sensitive issues concerning serious violations of civil and political rights. Any future dialogues should be open—i.e., publicly reported in full. The lack of free press and free association (genuine NGOs devoted to human rights) in China has allowed the government to distort earlier dialogues in the state-run media and prevented them from having any broader educational impact for Chinese citizens. Maintaining secrecy diminishes the opportunity to authenticate and follow up with what the Chinese officials provided as “information” or promised to do behind doors. Each round of the dialogues should be followed by an honest and public assessment of impact, and talks should be resumed only if it can be shown that real progress has resulted from the previous round. Non-government human rights organizations in both countries should be invited to participate, or to engage in parallel dialogues, or they should at least be consulted and heard well in advance and afterward.

Finally, I conveyed this message to the President: The US should lead by example. The US will have an impact on positive changes in China and elsewhere by respecting human rights and strengthening democracy at home and taking a global leadership in upholding human rights as the guiding principle of its foreign policy. When the US ends torture, protects free press, or makes healthcare affordable to everyone, those who promote human rights and speak out against abuses in hostile environments can hold their heads high and carry on their arduous struggle, often at great personal risk.

January 18, 2011 10:15 a.m.