Xiaorong's Blog 晓蓉博客

2011-10-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

China’s Aborted Openness

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 newsagency recently reported on a government investigation into a string of forcedsterilizations and abortions in the village of Linyi, Shandong province. Thespeed of the investigation – said to have begun days after the kidnapping ofChen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had been a public advocate for thevictims – and the candor of the report created the impression of greatergovernment responsiveness and bolder official media. Is this impression right?

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

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

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

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

As a volunteer for the network, I was in touch with Chen andfollowed events closely. In July, having failed to elicit any governmentresponse, Chen began seeking legal aid from prominent lawyers to preparelawsuits on behalf of the victims, causing alarm among local officials. Pursuedby police, Chen went into hiding. My “personal safety was threatened,” he wroteon 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 officialsresponsible for the violence might be prosecuted. Central authorities seemed tosense an immediate need to quell criticism of its controversialpopulation-control efforts. And Xinhua wasted no time in claiming that theabuses were limited to a few towns.

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

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

The FPC declines to intervene, citing lack of law-enforcementpowers. On October 10, the villagers’ lawyers were told that the court hearingscheduled that day was canceled. On their way back to Beijing, thugs reportedlyassaulted the lawyers.

Viewed in this context, the belief that the government’s approachto Linyi reflects a new responsiveness to human-rights abuses seems naïve. Ifthe government were truly becoming more responsive, why have we not seensimilar responses to other disputes over the theft of farmland, compromisedinvestors’ 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 whoattempt to publicize problems. China’s belated bouts of openness about therural spread of AIDS and the SARS epidemic clearly indicate that the centralgovernment regards transparency solely as a matter of expediency.

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

Morelikely, however, the central authorities are following a policy that mostChinese know well: neijin waisong, or“controlled inside, relaxed outside.” Applied here, the policy meansconsolidating power at home while disarming critics abroad.

I believe that the government’s loss of control in the provinceshas been stage-managed. Chaos provides a cover for crackdowns. It is tooconvenient when unidentified strongmen beat and harass activists who questionParty 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, occurredin places other than Linyi. Thugs thrashed civil rights activist Lu Banglie inthe Guangdong town of Taishi in early October. Six villagers in the Hebeivillage of Dingzhou, protesting government seizure of their land, died afterbloody 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 ofprotests. But here, again, the government is hiding in plain sight. State-runmedia organs have been forced to admit that these protests test the Party’swill to maintain power. They neglect to tell the real story of how the Partyexercises that will, trusting that the admission itself will satisfy us. Weshould not be so quick to play along.

(Published atProject Syndicate:

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

旧文：我的“自由陈光诚”长跑

2011-10-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

（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

2011-01-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

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.

奥斯陆的空椅子

2010-12-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

写于2010年12月8日

自1901年以来，诺奖委已经颁布了九十一个诺贝尔和平奖。除了没发奖的那几年外，其间只有四次出现领奖人缺席的情况。12月10日星期五，在奥斯陆的和平奖颁奖仪式上，又会有一把空椅子。

今年的得主刘晓波在中国东北锦州监狱中服刑，“罪行”是支持倡导民主人权的《零八宪章》，被判刑十一年。他的妻子和其他亲属近友也去不了奥斯陆，因为他/她们也被软禁或被监控起来了。

这次的这张空椅子比能有人去领奖更能说明中国人权状况的恶劣。中国的经济和政治实力在扩增，但是这种实力并没有带动人权的改善。这张空椅子也道出了人们在中国倡导自由民主所付出的代价。空而富有内涵，好比无声的呐喊。
自诺奖在10月8日公布以来，全国各地公安对那些敢于庆祝或传播这一消息的人们进行了威胁和惩罚。刘晓波的妻子刘霞最后一次在推特上发推条是10月18日，据说20日以后就再也没有她的任何音讯。官方警告刘晓波的老父和三个兄弟不准对媒体发表评论也别想去奥斯陆领奖。刘晓波在北京的好些朋友和同事被国保日夜监控。官方因担心他们会去奥斯陆，堵住了刘晓波的律师莫少平和北大法学教授贺卫方，不让他们去伦敦参加一个国际律协会议。有好几十人因商务或学术会议出国，包括著名经济学家矛予试和艺术家艾未未，就因为涉嫌绕道去奥斯陆，受到边控。至少已经有一百多人被公安传唤或请“喝茶”，有的受到威胁：如果就诺奖接受媒体采访将会面临严重后果。有几位支持晓波的人或“零八宪章”签署人已经被以无端捏造的罪名拘留或送去“劳教”。

中国政府的这些威胁和报复行为从一个侧面表明，诺奖委把今年的和平奖授予刘晓波很明智，也挺有勇气。这个决定使国际社会上更多人知道中国还有像刘晓波这样因言论被严重治罪的人，对其它上千中国狱中良心犯的关注可能会达到1989年以后的第二个高点。世界主流终于开始悟出一个道理：一个国家的经济总产值增长与人权自由压制可以并行，别以为前者一定会带动后者，因此也不要因为有了前者就不再批评后者。

抵制诺贝尔和平奖、报复获奖人，在这方面中国政府这次比缅甸的军统集团、甚至希特勒的纳粹德国走的更远。1991年，缅甸的反对派民主党领袖昂山素姬获诺贝尔和平奖，她当时被拘禁在家里，但她的儿子还能出席颁奖仪式致答谢词。在她2010年11月获释之前，昂山素姬有15年是在软禁中度过的，但她有时还能见到外国使节。1936年，德国的反战记者卡尔. 冯. 奥赛茨基获和平奖，他当时被关押在集中营，重病在身。纳粹德国把他转入市民医院，并公开宣布他可以自由去挪威领奖，但没给他办护照。刘晓波获奖后，中国官方发言人和媒体连篇诋毁诺奖委和诺贝尔和平奖倡导的普世价值：和平、公正、人权，不但没有任何释放刘晓波的迹象，而且对刘晓波进行人格攻击，把刘霞软禁起来，对他们的近亲好友进行了各种形式的打压。在国际层面，中国外交部门公开向各国驻挪威领馆施压，要它们抵制12月10日在奥斯陆举行的和平奖颁奖仪式。

过去十几年中，中国政府投入巨资在国际上营造“软外交”公关工程，塑造良好国际形象。耗资庞大的北京奥运和上海世贸就是这样的“公关”战绩。但是它对诺奖的反应是对这些工程的自我瓦解，与它这些年来刻意营造良好国际形象和信誉的意愿背道而驰。一个继续监禁诺贝尔和平奖得主的政府，不可能受到国际道义和舆论的亲睐，更不可能在世界上有“良好”形象。刘晓波继续被关押在监狱里多久，中国政府的人权劣绩被国际社会重点关注就会持续多久。诺奖提高了对民主国家和多国机构领导人的期望值：他们会感到更大的压力推动他们就人权问题向中国领导人加压。

历史可以佐证。除中国之外，近代还有四个个国家在自己的公民获诺奖后继续监控他（她）们：纳粹法西斯德国（奥赛茨基1936年获奖），苏联政府（沙哈诺夫1975年获奖），波兰政府（瓦文萨1983年获奖），缅甸军统政府（昂山素姬1991年获奖）。

中国政府在颁奖仪式前一天推出一个“孔子和平奖”与诺贝尔和平奖对阵，以此表达官方的一贯说法：“人权”和“民主”是西方概念、“和谐稳定”繁荣才是中国人所向往的。“孔子和平奖”第一任获奖人、台湾前副总统连战已经谢绝接受。在儒家伦理与人权理念之间制造对立，这不仅是一个学术不严谨的问题。当代儒家学者当中一个非常活跃的流派一直在论证儒家的“仁爱”、“宽恕”和“官逼民反”思想是与人权思想一致的。1946年，罗斯福夫人牵头、由世界各国学者组成《世界人权宣言》起草委员会里就有一位中国学者张彭春。他的渊博学术论述说服了起草委员会在最后的文本里接纳了饱含儒家伦理的理念，如《宣言》第一条“人人生而自由,在尊严和权利上一律平等。他们赋有理性和良心,并应以兄弟关系的精神相对待”中“良心”、“兄弟关系”等提法。

中国政府在国际台面上表现的很自信、强大，然而它在国内对待本国公民的作法却显得十分怯弱和恐惧。把一个书生文人打入牢狱11年，恰好说明了这个政府害怕他，怕他是因为他替普通人说话。限制言论自由、惩罚表达民怨的声音，这样的政府出面来说“中国人不要民主人权，”怎么会有信誉？只有开放言论自由，让人们充分表达自己的观点，自由辩论是非，才能真正了解中国民众的价值观和向往。否则，政府官员和官方操控媒体的说法只能代表中国政府的观点。也就是说，“不要人权民主”是中国政府，不是中国民众。

去年的诺贝尔和平奖得主奥巴马在他的答谢词中说，“在一个公民被剥夺言论自由、宗教自由，和无畏选择自己的领导人和集会的权利的国家，和平不可能长久。”奥巴马应该为那些没有表达自由的人们说话，为诺奖最新得主刘晓波的自由呼吁，只有这样，他才能说话算话。

诺奖颁奖仪式实况将会被网警屏蔽，但是中国的四亿多网民当中不少人会通过他们自己的途径翻墙观看并传播仪式的影像和信息。中国政府把刘晓波、刘霞和她邀请的140多中国贵宾都堵在了牢墙里或国门内，不让去领奖或参加典礼，但是它堵不住刘晓波多年来倡导的那些得到诺贝尔和平奖肯定的理念和价值观穿越国界和防火墙。

12月10日那天，人们会更加树耳倾听刘晓波从他的空椅子上发出的沉寂的声音。

Empty Chair in Oslo

2010-12-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

The missing Nobel laureate

latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-xia-nobelist-20101209,0,469228.story

Neither China's Liu Xiaobo nor his wife or family or friends will be in Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. Who will speak up for him?
By Renee Xia
December 9, 2010

Ninety-one Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded since 1901. On Friday, at the Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, there will be an empty chair.

This year's recipient, Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and dissident currently serving 11 years in prison for supporting the pro-democracy and human rights manifesto Charter 08, will not be here to receive the honor. Nor will his wife or any other relatives or close friends, as they have been placed under house arrest or police surveillance, or barred from traveling abroad.

The empty chair will speak volumes about the deteriorating human rights conditions in China, a rising economic and political power unchecked by democratic balances. It will also speak of the tremendous sacrifices that Chinese human rights and pro-democracy activists have made, and the urgent need to support their struggle for justice and human rights for those living in China, and for upholding universal values.

Since the Nobel was announced Oct. 8, police across China have been intimidating and penalizing anyone who tries to celebrate or spread the good news. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, was last heard from on Twitter on Oct. 18. Authorities warned Liu Xiaobo's father and brothers to stay silent. Several of Liu's friends and associates in Beijing are guarded around the clock by police. Border control authorities barred his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, and outspoken Beijing University professor He Weifang from traveling to London for a seminar, for fear they would go to Oslo. Dozens of other friends or supporters of Liu, including the economist Mao Yushi and the artist Ai Weiwei, also have been stopped from leaving the country for conferences. At least 100 activists have been visited by police and threatened with severe consequences for speaking to the media about the prize. Several supporters of Liu and signatories of Charter 08 have been detained or sent to "re-education through labor" camps on trumped-up charges.

This campaign of intimidation and retaliation makes it evident that the Nobel Committee made a wise and courageous decision to award the Peace Prize to Liu, one of thousands of prisoners of conscience in China.

Chinese leaders have outdone Myanmar's military junta and even Hitler's Nazi Germany in their efforts to snub the Nobel Peace Prize and retaliate against the recipient. When Burmese democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Peace Prize in 1991 while she was under house arrest, her son made the acceptance speech at the ceremony. When Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist journalist, won in 1935 while imprisoned in a concentration camp, Nazi Germany declared that Ossietzky was free to go to Norway to accept the prize, while refusing him a passport. The Chinese government is handing out a competing Confucius Peace Prize.

Over the last decade, the Chinese government has invested heavily in soft diplomacy and image beautification projects, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and this year's Shanghai Expo. But international opinion will not look kindly on a government that jails its first Nobel Peace Prize winner. Keeping Liu in prison provides a platform for international mobilization to end rights abuses in China, and will continue to shame the government for its failures to honor its international treaty obligations to respect human rights.

Beijing puts out the Confucius prize to boost its claims that rights and freedoms are Western ideas, and that "stability" and prosperity are more desirable to the Chinese people. On the world stage, China appears as a confident and powerful player. Yet at home, the government is nervous about losing control, terrified that the people will find their own voice. Liu Xiaobo has articulated their voice. By silencing him, the government is silencing the voice of conscience. It is not the silenced Chinese people but the government that rejects the universal values of human rights and democracy.

President Obama, the recipient of last year's Nobel Peace Prize, has a special responsibility to advocate for the freedom of fellow laureate Liu. Obama should attend the Nobel ceremony and take the opportunity to speak publicly about China's worsening human rights conditions. He should ask Chinese President Hu Jintao to free Liu, release his wife from house arrest and allow them to travel to Oslo. Indeed, Obama has a solemn responsibility to speak for the Chinese citizens who cannot, to give substance to the words in his acceptance speech in Oslo a year ago: "Peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please, choose their own leaders or assemble without fear."

Despite Beijing's information blackout on the prize ceremony, many of China's 420 million netizens will find ways to watch the ceremony and spread the word online. Chinese authorities may have succeeded in keeping Liu, his wife and invited guests from China away from the Nobel ceremony. But they cannot prevent the ideas and values that Liu has spent his life promoting from traveling across national borders and China's great Internet firewall.

Renee Xia is international director of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which documents human rights abuses in China.

Chinese Leaders' “Catch 22”

2010-10-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Since the Nobel Committee announced that the 2010 Peace Prize is awarded to Liu Xiaobo, China's prominent prisoner of conscience, the Chinese government has respond with furious denouncement of the decision, blockage of information in the media and on the Internet, and harassment of Liu's family and supporters.

The leaders of this one-party state could have reacted very differently, that is, if they would choose to do so. They could have welcomed this prestigious prize and demonstrate that China as capable of embracing universal values such as peace, freedom, and justice.
Either way, whichever of the two responses they choose to adopt, they’d have to abandon the oxymoron of holding on to authoritarian capitalism and, at the same time, gaining world recognition -- that they much desire – as a respected member of modern nations in good standing.
The reason that the government has demonstrated no intention to take the course of positive reaction to the Nobel decision is clear: If it had embraced the 2010 Peace Prize, the Chinese government would have to release Liu Xiaobo from prison, where he is serving an 11-year term for expressing his views critical of the one-party state, writing about its corruption and abuses of human rights. Releasing Liu Xiaobo would be tantamount to tolerating free speech and admitting the wrong of imprisoning and detaining thousands of others for peaceful expression. Releasing all prisoners of conscience would also open the floodgate for free speech and free press, lifting censorship on the Internet, and so on, which is very likely to undermine the Communist Party's monopoly of power and ultimately putting the “Chinese model” for development -- authoritarian capitalism – on its death bed.

However, by taking the opposite stance to the above – denouncing the Nobel decision for “interfering in China's internal affair” and “blaspheme” the principles of Nobel Peace Prize, telling the world that Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his speech, is “a convicted criminal”, and putting Liu's wife and other supporters under house arrest, detaining people who tried to celebrate the Peace Prize, and canceling trade talks with the Norwegians – the Chinese government sets itself back twenty years in its diplomatic quest for a polished image and investment in acquiring a world imminence fit for its economic power.

Indeed, by telling the Nobel Committee that it has “blasphemed” its mandate of promoting universal values, the Chinese government blasphemed the Chinese Constitution and its international pledges and treaty obligations.

The Chinese Constitution, Article 35, grants all Chinese citizens the rights to free expression, assembly, and association. China signed the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights in 1998, thus committed to not violating this international treaty. China is an active member of the UN Human Rights Council, to be elected to which, it made a voluntary pledge to uphold the highest standards of human rights, and China has run and won a second term on the Council. Each year in the past several years, China’s State Council released its annual report on the human rights records of the US. Early this year, the government released its Human Rights Plan of Action promising to comply with its international obligations to respect human rights.

Does the Chinese government care about the negative publicity, unflattering to the image it had invested billions to polish – displaying itself as an irresponsible, unreliable, self-contradictory, bullying power? Its reactions to the Nobel decision have only reinforced these seedy sides of this increasingly influential hereby intimidating player on world stage.
One could almost be certainly though that the Chinese government cares a great deal about its appearances as a respectable power player in good standing in world politics. In recent years, the government has engaged in “soft diplomacy” to polish its image and dissuade those who fear and warn against China’s ascending power status. The state-funded global 24-hour English TV news network will dish out positive news about China and “promote a Chinese perspective” on world events. Chinese government also funded hundreds of “Confucian Institutes” in many US and European universities, prompting worries about Chinese influence on academic studies and minds of youth by cultivating sympathetic sentiments toward the Chinese government. China had spent billions to host the 2008 Summer Olympics and the Shanghai Expo, making these glittering mega attractions.

Awarding of the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo practically canceled out much of the effort China invested. And it will take as long as the Chinese government chooses to keep Liu Xiaobo and the thousands of other prisoners behind bars to undo the damages. No doubt the Chinese government is so furious at Norway and its retaliation against Chinese activists has since the Nobel announcement reached frenzy unseen since before the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Only the top leaders in the Chinese Communist Party can bail China out of its dilemma. Otherwise, they can count on sustained pressure and its shaming factor on the regime as long as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate remain in Chinese jail. Everyday goes by, with Liu Xiaobo imprisoned, Chinese government’s efforts to soften and polish its image will have diminishing return. Releasing Liu Xiaobo now would win China good praises from all around the world, yet the one-party state and its authoritarian capitalism “model” will suffer a blunt blow.

Xiaorong Li

World Reactions to 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for Jailed Chinese Activist Liu Xiaobo

2010-10-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

World leaders, governments, and international organizations around the world have reacted to the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the prize to the jailed human rights campaigner. Below, following the official announcement is an incomplete list of these reactions, edited and amended on the basis of a BBC report.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2010
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 to Liu Xiaobo for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace. Such rights are a prerequisite for the "fraternity between nations" of which Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.

Over the past decades, China has achieved economic advances to which history can hardly show any equal. The country now has the world's second largest economy; hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Scope for political participation has also broadened.
China's new status must entail increased responsibility. China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights. Article 35 of China's constitution lays down that "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration". In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizens.

For over two decades, Liu Xiaobo has been a strong spokesman for the application of fundamental human rights also in China. He took part in the Tiananmen protests in 1989; he was a leading author behind Charter 08, the manifesto of such rights in China which was published on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 10th of December 2008. The following year, Liu was sentenced to eleven years in prison and two years' deprivation of political rights for “inciting subversion of state power". Liu has consistently maintained that the sentence violates both China's own constitution and fundamental human rights.

The campaign to establish universal human rights also in China is being waged by many Chinese, both in China itself and abroad. Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China.
Oslo, October 8, 2010

Chinese Foreign Ministry
The Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded to people who "promote national harmony and international friendship, who promote disarmament and peace". Those are Mr Nobel's wishes.
Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who violated Chinese law.

It's a complete violation of the principles of the prize and an insult to the Peace Prize itself for the Nobel committee to award the prize to such a person.

In recent years, Chinese-Norwegian relations have maintained sound development, which is conducive to the two countries and two peoples' interests.

The Nobel Committee awarding Liu this prize, which runs contrary to the principle of the Peace Prize, will bring damage to two-way relations.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg
I would like to congratulate Liu Xiaobo, who has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to promote democracy and human rights.

The Nobel Committee's decision directs a spotlight on the human rights situation in China, and underscores the links between development, democracy and universal human rights. Liu Xiaobo has been awarded the prize for defending freedom of expression and democracy in a way that deserves attention and respect.

China has made huge economic and social progress over the last decades. The standard of living has improved in step with these developments, and the Chinese people have gained greater individual freedom. However, there are still challenges that need to be addressed with regard to several universal human rights.

Norway enjoys close and extensive cooperation with China. Our ties are longstanding and cover all the areas that link our countries together. Discussions of human rights issues are part of these relations.

US President Barack Obama
Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I. That list now includes Mr Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs.

By granting the prize to Mr Liu, the Nobel Committee has chosen someone who has been an eloquent and courageous spokesman for the advance of universal values through peaceful and non-violent means, including his support for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

As I said last year in Oslo, even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal to all human beings.

Over the last 30 years, China has made dramatic progress in economic reform and improving the lives of its people, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected.

We call on the Chinese government to release Mr Liu as soon as possible.

Václav Havel, former president of Czech Republic
“I congratulate Mr Liou Xiaobo on the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize and I rejoice over the fact that he is historically the first Chinese citizen to receive it. Liu Xiaobo is the prototype of committed citizen to whom such award is due – that, too, is the reason why, together with friends, I have proposed his nomination and supported it during the whole nomination period. I would like to repeat my appreciation of the Charter 08 initiative, as well as of all its signatories and their families. Appreciation is due also to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for resisting the warnings aired by Chinese authorities and refusing to put economic interests above human rights.” http://bit.ly/cR0ar6

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's office
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo of China is a recognition of the growing international consensus for improving human rights practices and culture around the world.
The secretary-general has consistently emphasised the importance of human rights, along with development and peace and security, as the three main pillars of the work of the United Nations.
Over the past years, China has achieved remarkable economic advances, lifted millions out of poverty, broadened political participation and steadily joined the international mainstream in its adherence to recognised human rights instruments and practices.

The secretary-general expresses his sincere hope that any differences on this decision will not detract from advancement of the human rights agenda globally or the high prestige and inspirational power of the award.

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou
This is not only a personal honour for Liu but it has major historic significance for China's human rights development and the global Chinese society.

China's economic developments have impressed the world and it would win the recognition of Taiwanese people and the international community if it can make progress and a breakthrough in human rights issues.

UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay
I welcome the award because it recognises not only the prominence of Liu Xiaobo, whose release I have often called for, but it recognises the very important role of human rights defenders not only in China but in many parts of the world, where for bringing up human rights issues, calling for reform, they are being punished in various ways.

UN Human Rights Experts
Four UN experts* today added their voices to those welcoming the decision of the Nobel Committee, on Friday, to award the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, and urged for his immediate release.

Liu Xiaobo participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in 1989, worked as a professor at Beijing Normal University, and co-authored the Charter 08 document which called for multiparty democracy and greater respect for human rights in the country.

“Liu Xiaobo is a courageous human rights defender who has continuously and peacefully advocated for greater respect for human rights in the People’s Republic of China. We welcome the recognition of his work,” stated the experts.

“For many years, we have expressed to the Government of the People’s Republic of China concerns regarding violations of Liu Xiaobo’s fundamental human rights,” noted the experts. “This includes his detention in October 1997 and the sentence of re-education through labour for speaking out about the country’s one-party political system, found to be arbitrary in a decision** adopted by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.”

Most recently, Liu Xiaobo was convicted by the Beijing No.1 Municipal Court for “inciting subversion of State power” and, on 25 December 2009, was sentenced to 11 years in prison and two years’ deprivation of political rights. “Such a harsh sentence for his peaceful activities in drafting and organizing the signing of Charter 08 is a clear violation of international human rights standards on the right to freedom of expression,” the experts stated. They also noted that there were many irregularities with the trial which did not conform to international standards regarding the right to a fair and public hearing.

“On this occasion, we appeal to the Government of the People’s Republic of China to release all persons detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression and to respect the spirit of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Government is a signatory,” said the experts. “We encourage the Government to take the final step and ratify this important international instrument.”

German government spokesman
The [German] government would like to see him released soon and receive his prize in person. The government has pressed for his release in the past and will continue to do so.

He is a brave man, a man who wants to advance democracy and human rights in his country, but one who knows and has always said that this would be a difficult and drawn-out process that should stay peaceful whatever happens.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner
This decision embodies the defence of human rights everywhere in the world. France, like the European Union, expressed its concern after his arrest and has called for him to be released on a number of occasions. It reiterates that appeal.

British Foreign Office
The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr Liu Xiaobo shines a spotlight on the situation of human rights defenders worldwide.

British Ministers, including Foreign Secretary William Hague, have raised his case in China since his imprisonment in 2009. We continue to call for his release and to champion freedom of expression in all countries.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso
The decision of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is a strong message of support to all those around the world who, sometimes with great personal sacrifice, are struggling for freedom and human rights. These values are at the core of the European Union.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders
(Chinese Human Rights Defenders, October 8, 2010) – CHRD hails the Nobel Committee’s announcement and congratulates the imprisoned activist, writer and intellectual, Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), on being awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize honors Liu for his decades-long dedication to promoting democracy and human rights in China. Mr. Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power,” primarily for his support ofCharter 08, a citizens’ manifesto calling for democratic reform published in December 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The Prize honors the more than 10,000 Chinese citizens who have bravely signed on in support of the ideas expressed in Charter 08 and all prisoners of conscience in China,” said Zhang Zuhua, a Beijing-based activist who originally drafted Charter 08. “These principles of nonviolence, equality, and respect for human rights could not be more aligned with the values of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Of the 303 original signatories to Charter 08, many were interrogated by the police, and several had their homes raided and personal property confiscated. Others have been put under house arrest or police surveillance. The government has tried to censor the document within China by removing it from websites and online forums. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu will undoubtedly introduce Charter 08 to a new and wider audience.

“Awarding the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo also honors all Chinese human rights defenders—Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia, Gao Zhisheng, and countless others—who have suffered a great deal for advocating human rights,” noted Renee Xia, CHRD’s International Director. “We can only hope that the Peace Prize will add momentum to the efforts for their freedom and encouragement for their long road ahead,” said Xia.

CHRD specifically wishes to thank those who have worked hard to nominate Liu as well as those who have advocated on his behalf, especially the former Czech President Václav Havel. CHRD commends the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for standing up to the Chinese government, which tried to influence its decision by threatening severe consequences for diplomatic relations with the Norwegian government.

CHRD asks US President Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, to ask Chinese President Hu Jintao to free Mr. Liu at the G20 summit in South Korea on November 11 and 12.

Human Rights Watch
(New York, October 8, 2010) – The awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese writer and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo underscores the urgent need for rights reforms in China, Human Rights Watch said today.

“This award will no doubt infuriate the Chinese government by putting its human rights record squarely back into the international debate,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But this Nobel Prize honors not only Liu’s unflinching advocacy; it honors all those in China who struggle daily to make the government more accountable.”
“The Nobel Committee made an important decision this year to highlight a reality few want to acknowledge about China – that its government continues to persecute human rights advocates, lawyers, and journalists,” said Richardson. “Liu Xiaobo epitomizes the Nobel Peace Prize ideals by never deviating from his belief in peacefully expressing universal ideals and speaking truth to power.”

“The Chinese government should see Liu Xiaobo as the Nobel Committee clearly does: not as an enemy or an embarrassment, but rather as someone whose courageous advocacy embodies the best of China,” said Richardson.

Amnesty International
Liu Xiaobo is a worthy winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. We hope it will keep the spotlight on the struggle for fundamental freedoms and concrete protection of human rights that Liu Xiaobo and many other activists in China are dedicated to.

This award can only make a real difference if it prompts more international pressure on China to release Liu, along with the numerous other prisoners of conscience languishing in Chinese jails for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

The Dalai Lama
I would like to offer my heart-felt congratulations to Mr Liu Xiaobo for being awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Awarding the Peace Prize to him is the international community's recognition of the increasing voices among the Chinese people in pushing China towards political, legal and constitutional reforms.

Desmond M. Tutu and Václav Havel
On Friday, the writer Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
for his more than two decades of calling for democratic change in
China.

Immediately, the Chinese government responded by calling him a
criminal and accusing the Norwegian Nobel Committee of blasphemy.
Having already sentenced Liu to 11 years in prison, it moved quickly
on Friday to cordon off his wife, Liu Xia, from the rest of the
world, surrounding her with security agents in their Beijing
apartment. We have seen this before: in the dark days of apartheid,
under the long shadow of the Iron Curtain; whenever we took a small
step forward in securing the freedom of our people, we were stripped
of our own.

As we write today, Liu remains cloistered in a remote prison in
northeast China. Liu’s present incarceration—it is his fourth—came
after he co-authored Charter 08, which calls on the Chinese
government to institute democratic reforms and guarantee the
freedoms of assembly, religion, and expression. Though Charter 08
was modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter ‘77, the fundamental
values it invokes are no more Western than they are Chinese.

We nominated Liu for the Nobel Peace Prize this year because of the
universality of his call for fundamental freedoms for his people.

At its core, Charter 08 asks the Chinese government to honor those
rights already enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. The government
already willingly signed the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights and ratified the International Covenant on Economic
and Social Rights. Just last week, Premier Wen Jiabao, acknowledged
that, “Freedom of speech is indispensable . . . The people’s wishes
for, and needs for, democracy and freedom are irresistible.”

This need not be a moment of shame or insult for China. This should
be a moment of pride, celebrating that one of China’s own is
recognized as the world’s greatest contributor to that which all
nations seek: peace. It is an affirmation of humankind's oldest
living language that Liu’s words in Charter 08, Chinese words, could
inspire such admiration. It is a testament to the strength and
courage of the Chinese people that Liu’s actions have earned him
such widespread respect.

This is an opportunity for China to embrace its newfound standing in
the world and turn the page on a century of victimization. We know
there are many wrongs that have been perpetrated against China and
its people throughout history. But awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to
Liu is not one of them. Nor is the peaceful call for reform from the
more than 10,000 Chinese citizens who dared to sign Charter 08.

More than at any other time in history, the world looks to China as
a leader. This is an opportunity to show that China, as it has been
for thousands of years, is a forward-looking nation. If it keeps Liu
behind bars, the Chinese government is no more progressive than the
ever paranoid and closeted Burmese junta, the only other regime with
the gall to lock away another recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize,
Aung San Suu Kyi. Release Liu, and China continues its impressive
emergence on the world stage. It has helped keep the global economy
afloat; now it can show the world that it also has the confidence to
face criticism and embrace change.

China has done it before. Thirty years ago, while we—like Liu
today—were still being punished simply for speaking our minds, the
Chinese government opened up its economy and unleashed the
industriousness and ingenuity of the Chinese people on the world’s
markets. The world, in turn, has watched with awe as China has
pulled itself out of poverty and into a thriving, dynamic future.
This is an opportunity for China to open up once again, to give its
people the ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas where,
surely, they will prove just as extraordinary.

We know this because we have seen this before. We have seen it in
the churches of Soweto and the theaters of Prague, and in the hushed
corners of freedom all over the world, and we know how it ends. We
are able to write today, free of fear and full of hope, because in
the end, we won our freedom back, and so did our people. We know
that in time, Liu, and the Chinese people, will win their freedom.

After Liu's sentencing last year, he had a simple statement
released: "I have long been aware that when an independent
intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward
freedom is often a step into prison," it said. "Now I am taking that
step; and true freedom is that much nearer."

This is an opportunity for the Chinese government. It can continue
to fight a losing battle, against the forces of democracy and
freedom that its own Premier has called “irresistible.”

Or it can stand on the side of justice, and free Liu Xiaobo.

Guardians of Charter 77 Legacy & Czech Helsinki Committee
Dear friends from Charter 08, dear Mrs. Liu Xia,

As the guardians of the legacy of Charter 77 we, in the name of the activists and signatories of Charter 77 and the Czech Helsinki Committee that also originated in the pre-1990 era, send our congratulations on the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo.

We are immensely happy with the awarding of the prize. Please relay to Liu Xiaobo our hope that the Nobel Prize will aid in gaining his quick release from jail, and also in bringing about further concessions from the political state authorities, as well as acknowledgement of human dignity and protection of human rights. As a part of a world-wide effort we will urge for the People’s Republic of China to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 12 years after the Chinese government signed it. By doing this, China will commit to upholding the rights enumerated in the covenant. This covenant, along with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, is a strong link between Charter 77 and Charter 08, between Czechoslovak and the Chinese people. Both of the covenants were an inspiration for both of our charters.

Just as you, we are convinced that Chinese citizens should be guaranteed their basic rights and democratic freedoms, and that Charter 08 advocates the protection of these civil rights.
We wish to help you in this cause with all that is within our power.

We send you brotherly greetings

Prague, 11 Oct 2010

Guardians of the legacy of Charter 77: Rudolf Battěk, Jiří Gruntorád and Dana Němcová;
Chair of the Czech Helsinki Committee, Anna Šabatová

UN Chief's Imbalanced Statement on Nobel Peace Prize for Liu Xiaobo

2010-10-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s statement, released through his spokesperson, on the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded to China’s jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo last Friday, has gone too far in assuaging China’s furious authorities.

The statement offered little, if anything, about the achievement of Liu Xiaobo while devoting most part of this brief statement to sing the praises to the Chinese government for improving human rights. Facing potential pressure from China in his bid for a second term as the UN chief, Mr. Ban, in his well-known non-confrontational style, might have done better to stand firm on UN human rights principles while refraining from offering Chinese authorities praises that contradict the UN human rights expert bodies’ own findings.

Ban’s statement said, "the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo of China is a recognition of the growing international consensus for improving human rights practices and culture around the world." Ban went on to praise China: "Over the past years, China has achieved remarkable economic advances, lifted millions out of poverty, broadened political participation and steadily joined the international mainstream in its adherence to recognized human rights instruments and practices." “Lifting millions out of poverty” maybe, but “broadened political participation?” This claim pays no attention to the mere fact of China’s recent harsh crackdown on Chinese citizens who supported a political reform manifesto, Charter 08, since its publication on December 9, 2008, one day after Liu Xiaobo’s arrest for his role in drafting and organizing support for this expression of democratic aspirations.

Ban said nothing in terms of appealing to China to free Liu Xiaobo, but instead expressed his "sincere hope that any differences on this decision will not detract from advancement of the human rights agenda globally or the high prestige and inspirational power of the Award." This conclusion gives the impression that China was advancing the human rights agenda and it may also hint that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo might detract the prestige of the award while saying nothing about China’s bullying of Norway by issuing threats on diplomatic and trade relations for months prior to the Nobel Committee’s decision.

As if to counter-balance the UN chief’s statement, some UN human rights experts released a statement on Oct. 11 on Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Peace Prize. The experts urge China to “respect human rights and release all persons detained for peacefully exercising their rights”. The experts have communicated their concerns over the arbitrary detention of Liu Xiaobo for expressing his democratic aspirations in the past two years.

In contrast to Ban’s statement, President Barack Obama, last year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in his statement issued last Friday, praised Liu Xiaobo "as an eloquent and courageous spokesman for the advance of universal values through peaceful and non-violent means" and urged China to release Liu Xiaobo as soon as possible.

The reporter Nikola Krastev of Radio Free Europe called Ban’s statement a “congratulatory” message to both Liu and the Chinese authorities who jailed him. Krastev noted that Ban is caught between “a rock and a hard place”: on the one hand, China’s support to Ban as the UN chief, and on the other, the importance of giving this year’s Peace Prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident.

Colum Lynch, the longtime Washington Post correspondent who reports on all things United Nations for Turtle Bay, shared his view on what might be going on behind such a compromising statement: Ban’s statement took a “diplomatic approach to Beijing”. The UN Secretary General “who will need China's support if he hopes to win a second term as secretary general in 2011.”

China displayed an uncontrolled outrage at the Nobel Committee’s decision since Friday. It has quickly censored media reports and the Internet on related news. Chinese police warned against and rounded up Chinese activists who tried to spread the good news and celebrate, calling for his release.

Mr. Ban is reasonably concerned about a diplomatic show-down with China. Yet, Mr. Ban went one step too far than it is necessary in pursuing his signature “non-confrontational” diplomatic approach to the “China vs. Nobel Committee” face-off.

(Oct. 11, 2010)

An Important Follow-up to China's Obligations to Implement Convention against Torture

2010-09-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Chinese human rights activists tend to focus on urging the Chinese government to sign or ratify international human rights treaties, but the more demanding work lies in follow-up with the government's implementation of its treaty obligations. International human rights groups have done some good work in this front. But the participation in UN human rights activities by Chinese or China-based NGOs is a key to the UN system's success. It is in light of these observations, the work of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a China-based and international NGO, in trying to bridge some gaps deserves noticing.

CHRD has involved Chinese activists in some follow-up work with regard to the UN Convention against Torture, which China ratified some 22 years ago! CHRD just puts out a press release saying that “With China’s fifth periodic report to the Committee against Torture (CAT) upcoming, many key problems raised by CAT in 2008 as it considered China’s fourth periodic report have yet to be adequately addressed.” The organization produced a report, by working together with local activists, and sent it to CAT recently. The report “outlines a number of issues and cases for the Committee to include in the List of Issues that the Chinese government will be requested to address in its next report.” (http://chrdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Issues-and-Cases-CHRD-Recommends-CAT-Include-in-its-LOI-for-China.pdf)

“The Chinese government plays up its participation with the UN human rights regime for public relations purposes, yet it continues to ignore or actively challenge recommendations made by the Committee against Torture,” said Renee Xia, CHRD’s International Director. “Meanwhile, torture remains a serious problem across China, and some of the issues raised by CAT in 2008, such as unnatural deaths in detention and the harassment of human rights defenders, have worsened.”
CAT is doing something new, before a government submits a periodic report, the Committee is to present that government a “list of issues” (LOI), which will require information formt eh government on specific, follow-up issues that have previously concerned CAT. Before, the CAT only sent governments LOI after they have submitted their reports. (For information on the Committee against Torture’s working methods:http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/workingmethods.htm)

Thus, while the Chinese government is due to submit its fifth periodic report to CAT in November 2012, the Committee will present China with a LOI. To prepare CAT with an informative LOI, NGOs and civil society groups should provide information while CAT is preparing the LOI for China.
CHRD’s submission to CAT for this purpose “highlights a number of problems previously identified by CAT, providing updated information on recent developments and calling for continued pressure for positive change in these areas.”
Here are some substantive issues that CHRD has highlighted for CAT to ask the Chinese government to address:

1. The use of torture to extract confessions. The Chinese government promulgated in summer 2010 regulations banning evidence obtained through torture in criminal trials. That was more an indication of the prevalence of this problem than a sign of progress! CHRD points out that “these regulations contain problematic language and stresses that their true value will be determined only by their implementation.” One case CHRD brought to the attention of CAT is that of Fan Qihang, whose death sentence based on a confession extracted through torture is currently being reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court. If China’s highest court fails to ask the lower court to throw out evidence extracted by torture, Fan is likely to be executed within days of the highest court’s ruling. (http://chrdnet.org/2010/08/03/chinas-highest-court-must-overturn-death-sentence-based-on-confession-extracted-by-torture/)
2. The ongoing pattern of harassment and abuse of human rights lawyers, human rights defenders, and petitioners. Most people probably don’t consider this issue a matter of CAT’s concern. But it is. CAT raised this concern prominently in its November 2008 Concluding Observations and Recommendations after it reviewed China’s state report. (China’s fourth periodic state report to CAT, submitted February 14, 2006, and related documents, including CAT’s Concluding Observations, adopted November 21, 2008: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/cats41.htm) CHRD finds that the government “failed to take any concrete steps in the past two years to better protect the rights or personal safety” of human rights defenders.
3. Other problems such as “unnatural deaths in detention centers, arbitrary detention in Re-education through Labor camps, and illegal detention in black jails and psychiatric institutions, as well as abuses in these facilities”. CHRD points out that the government has been either unable or unwilling to effectively address these problems that CAT raised concerns about in its 2008 review.

Shanghai Expo of Human Rights Abuses 上海世博人权侵害展览

2010-04-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

Xiaorong Li

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders pointed out, in a press release on April 28, 2010, that "As the 2010 Shanghai World Expo opens on May 1, conspicuously absent from the festivities will be the residents of Shanghai who have lost their homes, businesses, and freedom to exercise their rights in the government’s drive to bring its ambitious plans for the Expo to fruition. Ahead of the arrival of an estimated 70 million visitors over the next six months, officials in Shanghai have detained, placed under surveillance, or threatened activists, dissidents, and petitioners across the city and in surrounding areas. Police in other cities have warned activists not to travel to Shanghai."

I wish that those few world leaders who plan to attend the opening ceremony of the Expo, including the EU President and French President, would be reading the CHRD press release! They may brush off the claims of human rights abuses associated with preparations for the Expo, insisting that the Shanghai World Expo is only a "trade show" and they ought to be there to promote trade and commerce. But the Chinese government has politicized the trade show. The CHRD press release cites one local activist as saying:

“The government is working to create an atmosphere of fear in the activist community in Shanghai and elsewhere,” said one activist who has been closely monitoring developments ahead of the Expo. “Many activists, dissidents, and petitioners are under some form of restriction of movement or surveillance. Some are refraining from speaking out for themselves or getting in touch with others for fear of serious retribution.”

According to CHRD, police have sought out high-profile local activists and made it clear that any efforts to expose abuses by the government will be met with swift and serious retaliation. For example, Feng Zhenghu (冯正虎), a veteran Shanghai activist who for years has sought to draw attention to the failures of the Shanghai judicial system, had planned to set up a “Shanghai Expo of Unjust Court Cases” during the Expo. Around midnight on April 19, Shanghai police raided his home, confiscated his computer equipment and took him away for a four-hour interrogation. Police threatened that if he spoke out during the Expo they would “make him disappear like Gao Zhisheng (高智晟).”

Other activists have been placed in detention to ensure that they will be out of sight for the duration of the Expo. CHRD has documented six cases of Shanghai petitioners-turned-activists who have been sent to Re-education through Labor (RTL) since January for reasons related to the World Expo, and a total of 10 dating back to the latter half of 2009.[1] For example, Tong Guojing (童国菁) was sent to 18 months of RTL on February 13. Tong, like most of those sent to RTL, started petitioning after his home was forcibly demolished, and became an activist as he learned about the plight of fellow petitioners.

A number of activists in the provinces surrounding Shanghai, such as Wen Kejian (温克坚) and Zou Wei (邹巍) in Zhejiang Province, and Zhang Lin (张林) in Anhui Province, have been warned by local police against traveling to Shanghai during the Expo. CHRD has received reports that activists in cities as far away as Guangzhou, Xi’an, and Beijing have been asked to “tea” or questioned by police in recent days, and warned not to travel to Shanghai or speak out during the World Expo.

Forced evictions carried out in preparation for the Expo have been a source of widespread anger among Shanghai citizens for years. According to official statistics, 18,000 households were relocated to clear the grounds for the Expo, but activists argue that, taking into account other development related to the Expo, many more residents were affected.[2] Shanghai officials estimated in 2009 that complaints over forced eviction and demolition accounted for “70 or 80 percent” of petitions originating from the city (for interviews with Shanghai residents affected by Expo-related forced evictions, please see CHRD’s report, Thrown Out: Human Rights Abuses in China’s Breakneck Real Estate Development).[3]

To prevent victims of forced evictions from drawing attention to their grievances during the Expo, police are detaining, harassing, and threatening petitioners. Many are being held under “soft detention” at home. For example, Huang Yuqin (黄玉芹), a resident of Minhang District, Shanghai, whose home was demolished on March 2, has been under “soft detention” since April 19. Security guards have followed her whenever she leaves her home, and have prevented her from leaving on at least one occasion. Huang also received a notice warning her not to gather with others or petition on or near the Expo grounds for duration of the Expo. Other Shanghai petitioners have received an identical notice in recent weeks, threatening “strict punishment” for any who disregard the instructions.[4]

Finally, some veteran Shanghai petitioners have been detained as a warning to others ahead of the event. For example, Shen Peilan (沈佩兰), who has been petitioning since the forced demolition of her home in 2003, was administratively detained for 15 days in the Minhang District Detention Center in late March and early April. Shen, who was beaten during her detention, has since been released, and has gone into hiding in Shanghai.

The international media and human rights organizations have, as of yesterday, turned their spotlight on the Shanghai Expo, exposing such abuses as forced eviction and demolition, interviewing disgruntled local residents, and revealing government ordinances restricting freedom of expression and the press. Un-intended perhaps by the Chinese government, the Shanghai Expo will also be an Expo to the world of Shanghai's human rights problems.

Googlegate: Raising the Bar of Business Code of Conduct 谷歌门事件：提升商业道德的水准

2010-02-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

Xiaorong Li

In mid-January, Google threatened to pull its business out of China unless China lifts filters of its search engine (google.cn and google.com) results. What is this all about? Only Google can explain the intent or motives behind its decisions. Despite the motives, Google may have done some good by spotlighting and picking fight with cyber censorship and cyber infiltration. Google and other foreign (mostly US) Internet technology corporations should have protested, even at the cost to their own profit, a long time ago or should have never accepted culprit role in the government’s online censorship as pre-condition for entering the Chinese market in the first place.

If Google did the right thing this time, then, it implies that Google has not been doing the right thing to doing business in China under the condition of assisting censorship. And it also means that the other Internet companies are still doing the wrong thing by keeping doing business under such compromising conditions. If hackers breaking into human rights activists’ email (gmail, Yahoo, hotmail) accounts should prompt such reactions as Google’s, then, such reactions are overdue since hackering emails has been an ongoing reality for several years. Typically, the hackers would enter somebody’s email account and send emails to all on the user’s address list, spreading rumors or sending attachments containing viruses. Curiously, such hacking seems to target activists rather than random victims. I have received “important messages” frequently from so-called Google Administrators alerting me “due to irregular actions in your account, it will be soon closed” and so on, trying to get me to click a link or open an attachment. But the senders’ addresses, upon inspection, often end with “.tw” or “.ho”. These are clearly fake email addresses and such emails cannot come from Google. Others who are less careful might have been tricked. Many in the Chinese activist community, inside China or on exile, have been victims of routine email hacking so much so they rarely communicate anything “sensitive” via emails.

Surely it is never too late to correct one’s mistakes. We all need time to get over our learning curve – to come to the realization of having made a mistake.

Google made a fuss more like because it is alarmed by the sophisticated, large-scale cyber attacks on its site and the sites of more than 30 other Internet companies doing business in China, intended perhaps to steel intellectual property or install spyware. Whatever the triggers are, Google’s act raises important ethical questions about the moral standing of American companies doing their part in assisting the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. It is worth raising such issues and sounding the alarm, since the other Internet companies who have said nothing will apparently continue their collaboration with the authoritarian regime. The repercussions of the Google action, including a televised speech on Internet freedom by Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, on January contributed to a wave of public discussions about corporate responsibilities in the era of globalization of Internet technology.

Aside from intentions and repercussions, many Americans may not know the fact that Google’s Chinese search engine in China, www.google.cn, accepted ethically compromising conditions set by Chinese authorities to censors so-called “sensitive” contents. Google.cn filters “sensitive” words, thus contributing to upholding the Chinese government’s Great Fire Wall to block Chinese users’ access to open information online. An easy test can be performed to demonstrate how much information is censored by Google.cn. A user on outside the Great Fire Wall can search for the same words such as “Tiananmen incident”, or “Falun Gong”, on both google.cn and google.com. One will see two very different pages of search results. In volume, the Google.com search produces 10-15 times more items of results than Google.cn does. In contents, predictably, the results out of Google.cn are one-sided, reflecting the government’s point of view. It is difficult for Chinese users to directly link to Google.com and gmail (which is hosted outside China) -- connecting from China is either very slow or not accessible. And like all websites outside the country, once opened in China, Google.com’s search results are subjected to censorship – politically sensitive contents would also be filtered and some pages are blocked.

Google wants to make clear that its mission is to promote open information and its motto is “Don’t be evil!” But this mission has been seriously compromised since Google entered China in 2006. Much like Google, other American internet companies, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, News Corp (MySpace), accepted the Chinese authorities’ policies of Internet censorship and practiced self-censorship under pressure.

One plausible argument for entering the Chinese market even if it means obeying ethically compromising local regulations is this: Internet companies will get a significant market share of the world’s largest pool of potential users, 1.3 billion. This will not only enable American companies to make profit, but also enable Chinese users to benefit from information technology. While some politically sensitive information is blocked, this argument goes, the vast majority of the Chinese population only need “un-sensitive” information about products, services, or daily life necessities.

This argument did not foresee the reality that, after years’ trying, most foreign Internet companies that had entered China have not been able to claim significant shares of the Chinese market. Google has about a 30% share of the market, while its Chinese competitor Baidu take more than 60%. Chinese companies are good at imitating foreign products but also have less or no prohibitions in providing services – such as free music download -- at the expense of certain regulations on copyrights and so on. And these companies are good at meeting the socio-psychological needs of Chinese consumers. Google is the only one so far who has go public about this frustrations and is willing to cut its looses, which may turn out to be insignificant in comparison to Google’s global revenues. Google may have calculated that the benefit of losing its share of the Chinese market is not worth keeping at the cost to its intellectual property being hacked and its reputation.

Though Google’s announcement raised the ethical bar for doing business in an authoritarian police state, other US Internet companies have not come around the learning curve to do such a calculation. For example, do the revenues for Yahoo in China really trump Yahoo’s interest in maintaining a clean reputation or peace of its CEOs’ conscience? Yahoo’s reputation nosedived after it was exposed for having handed over email recordings to Chinese police, which resulted in the imprisonment of several internet writers and journalists. One of them, Shi Tao, a journalist, is serving a 10-year sentence for leaking “state secret” through his Yahoo email! Microsoft also suffered in its reputation after it was exposed for shutting down the blog of the Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, who had written and posted an article about the government’s censoring of a Beijing newspaper. Unfortunately, most foreign Internet companies are so infatuated with their vision of selling products and services to a significant fraction of the 1.3 billion consumers, such that they would write off the losses of their reputation and overlook the fact that significant market shares have gone to Chinese companies. Thus, as of today, every page on the MySpace China site included a link allowing users or monitors to “report inappropriate information” to authorities, and Apple’s iTunes forbids Chinese users to download applications that refer to the Dalai Lama.

It may be true that the majority of China’s 380 million ordinary Internet users may not search for such words as “Tiananmen”, “Falun Gong”, or “Dalai Lama.” But if anyone ever does, Google.cn and other foreign Internet (website, blog, email) providers doing business in China have helped the Chinese government to make the information unavailable to that person. And the Chinese government’s increasingly long list of “sensitive” words for Internet blocking suggests that more and more people might be searching for these words, which is the only plausible explanation of the expanding official list.

Though victimhood does not relieve one of implication in Internet censorship, it is only fair to point out that Google and other companies, Chinese or foreign, are victims of China’s cyber policing regime, or at lease willing victims in the case of the foreign companies.

The cyber attack on Google website has been coordinated between technical and non-technological tactics. In June 2009, government-controlled media accused Google of spreading unhealthy pornographic contents. Chinese cyber activists conducted analysis of search words entered in Google.cn search engine, they found repeated searches from locations in Beijing of pornographic words. The frequency of such searches was later used by official media in its accusations against Google. Analysts believe that such deliberative acts are those of government-paid cyber thugs, known as the “50 cents party”. The objective of the members of the “50 cents party” is to harass and inform on online activists, monitor contents of websites, blogs, and Twitter, infiltrate activists’ interactive sites or chat groups, and hack websites\email accounts.

In addition to paying cyber thugs to petrol the Internet, the government also uses the following non-technological tactics:
1. The government adopted administrative regulations to control online magazines, scan mobile phone text messages, require internet/blog address registers to use real names, and so on. Various government agencies have issued many directives to control particular types of internet media, organizations, and usage, including online magazines, website registrations, interactive forums and bulletin board services (BBS), blogs, and video websites.
2. They deployed the “110 cyber police” on webpages. Cyber police petrol often appears as images of policemen or links for readers to click. They facilitate reporting of “illegal or unhealthy” contents on webpages.
3. They implemented a point system to punish internet media for infractions. Companies that accumulated points may have their registration licenses suspended or pay hefty fines. Through a complex system of administrative incentives and punishments, the government coerces companies into practicing self-censorship – to filter sensitive contents, block or delete articles, or close down websites and blogs on their own sites.
4. The government organized a "vigilant informants network", known at the "50 cents party" with paid cyber petrol men to collect information on netizens, infiltrate and subortage websites or online interactive sites frequented by dissidents/activists.
5. The government continues to use the criminal law to persecute internet users for expressing their views online.
6. In one extreme case, government shut down the Internet and cell phone networks for the entire Xinjiang Autonomous Region after the riot last July. As of last month, only a couple of official websites was made accessible.

Will Google’s pullout be a loss to Chinese users? Will it have any huge impact on online activists? If it is, this would offset any cost-benefit calculation that may have figured into Google’s decision to threat to pull out. Since the Chinese government has not budged, nor will it budge, to lift censorship. Lately, the government has indicated that hackers outside the government must be responsible for such hackings at Google’s sites.

Chinese online activists and even Chinese IT company professionals are delighted by Google’s announcement. One website portal owner was the first to lay flowers in front of Google’s Beijing headquarter. A card attached to a bunch of flowers reads, “Google [acted like] a real man”. (Photos) The Chinese internet companies too are victims of the government’s censorship.

If Google pulls out of China, general users will lose Google.cn as a search engine, but they can’t find certain information there anyway and they can instead find government-sanitized information on Chinese website portals like Baidu. Such Chinese competitors will have an even bigger share of the market. However, Chinese consumers have a taste for forbidden fruits – banned books, movies, or unavailable (pirated) brand-name designer handbags or CDs, often become hot items. Upon learning about the alternative, “forbidden” Google products – their superior quality and efficiency, consumers may have stronger desires than before to get their hands on them, which is what gives teeth to Google’s threat, otherwise largely symbolic move.

Those netizens who are un-satiable for information and online activists who have a penchant for alternative (un-censored) information, however, are unlikely to have less access to information and to Google tools, such as Google Document, Google Translation, Gmail Groups, etc., since most of them are already gaining access to the open Internet via proxy servers – which allow them to bypass the Chinese government blocking devises: the Great Fire Wall.

If the Chinese government’s Internet censorship is mostly furbished by American companies, a small fraction of the Chinese population – the online activists – have also benefited from technology. But the credit does not necessarily go to companies that have compromised principles to enter China. Rather, those Chinese who have the will to undermine official censorship have made creative use of Internet tools. The hope for a future of free expression and open information in China lies in these younger and creative Netizens. They are very vocal in denouncing cyber censorship and demanding Internet freedom. They have become very creative in using the new online media to mobilize and “climb over” the Great Fire Wall. Though Twitter is blocked in China, however, after China closed down the popular Chinese social networking site Fanfou last September, many users switched to Twitter and found their way to access the site by proxy or alternative links. Today, Twitter has become one of the most effective tools for networking and mobilization of Chinese activists. Another example of this is the protest in Panyu, Guangdong province, against the construction of a waste processing station last November, which was entirely organized and reported on Twitter. In another example, in January, when the government began implementing a new regulation to scan text message and suspend users’ accounts if “illegal, unhealthy” contents are discovered, many Chinese users repeated texted censored words in order to overwhelm the censors. Finally, when authorities censored the words “Charter 08” on Chinese websites, activists used words with different characters but the same spelling “county chief with swollen glands” to evade the blocking.

One of the most useful tools for bypassing the Great Fire Wall (GFW) is proxy server. Users inside the Wall can connect to such a server, which is based outside the Wall, which enables them to visit the open Internet, including all the officially blocked websites. The best known proxy servers are called Freegate and Gardengate, developed and maintained by Falun Gong networks in the US, which are providing the most-needed Internet technology tools to Chinese netizens walled in by perhaps the most sophisticated, high-tech engineered, state censorship in the world.

It’s hard to know how many Chinese netizens are served by such technologies – how many are using available tools to access the open Internet, to engage digital disobedience and online activism, but the number must have grown to such an extent that the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to strengthen its blockage with the Golden Shield Project while shutting down many websites, blogs, and social networking sites.

What we have seen is this pattern: the more draconic measures the government takes to censor the Internet, the more innovative the netizens become and the more of them manage to find their way to access online tools to undermine censorship. In this game between the super-fat cat and millions of mice, there may have not been a clear winner for now, but the price of controlling millions of mice is growing increasingly high. Google’s act of protest has the effect of raising that price.

(Adapted from a talk on Jan. 22, 2010 at a forum sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy and Center for International Media Assistance)

“Aspirations for Rule of Law Spur Growth of Civil Society” 对法制的追求刺激公民社会的成长

2010-02-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

Xiaorong Li

Obviously the growth of a civil society and the development of the rule of law are mutually supportive and mutually beneficial. Professor Cohen has made huge imprints in leading the way to develop the latter, but also indirectly and directly to develop the former. Let me use my 5 minutes to say something about one part of this point, that is, how developing the rule of law helps the growth of civil society.

When I say civil society, I refer to a public space sandwiched between the private realm where for-profit interests dominate and the space where the State dominates. A sizable and lively public space is a fact of life in China today. Yes, you’re right, this civil society still has to fight hard for its life and for every inch of the space for independent action, against powerful forces from both sides that try to invade it and obliterate it. No matter how fragile and precarious, the fact that such a Chinese civil society is alive and kicking is monumental and it is, to a large extent, a gift from those who worked tirelessly to help the development of rule of law in the past many years, and the person who has been at the forefront of that hardworking troupe is the person we’re honoring here today.

There are many ways in which the emergence of a legal system and the promise of rule of law have boosted civil society. Three come to mind:

First, the promise of rule of law gave people hope, inspires them, and the law supplied the ammunition. The Chinese law has been the double-sword which the party-state uses to put people in their place but it is also used by the people to hold the government accountable and seek justice.

Second, many young lawyers, products of the newly minted law schools in China’s universities, take the government’s promise of rule of law and what they learnt in law textbooks literarily, but as they meet the reality of rule by the CCP political and legal committees, they become the front-row challengers of the system, and leaders in the civil rights movement.

Thirdly, members of the Chinese civil society have used the law to some extent effectively to extract positive changes, not without paying the prices, of course.

Take for example what is known as the “rights-defense movement”. Several things about this phenomenon deserve our attention:

1st, it has commanded a broad participation from many social classes/groups, not limited to the educated elite.

2nd, participants have made good use of the internet as their tools for communication & mobilization – to bypass draconic rules controlling organizing, and they have NOT been crushed by the Great Fire Wall and the heavy deployment of cyber-police;

3rd, while NGO organizing has become the primary target of the government’s war against civil society, many forms of informal organizing have been invented and they are carrying on the bulk of citizen actions;

And finally, this movement remains largely non-violent, participants appeal to the law & the Constitution, despite the fact that there have been an increasing number of violent mass incidents in clashes between protesters and the police.

These features are worth noticing because they may offer explanations as to why some small positive changes have been extracted by civil society activism from the authoritarian police state. We need only look back at the past half year to find several mini-steps forward, not mentioning earlier landmark decisions like the abolition of the Custody & Repatriation detention system. These recent steps include:
- the uncharacteristically light sentence for the young woman Deng Yujiao who accidentally killed an official in self-defense last summer;
- the backing out by government from its order to mandatorily install filtering software Green Dam Youth Escort on new computers last July;
- the quiet acknowledgement of “black jails” in the official media in recent weeks,
- and the lift of ban by the Shanghai government two weeks ago on activist Feng Zhenghu's return from Japan after his 92-days protest at the Tokyo airport.

In short, three decades of foreign legal aid and rule of law programs have helped nurture aspirations and provide tools for activists in the Chinese civil society to fight for justice. Jerry and many of you who are here today played an important role in making this possible. I second what Jerry said in his South China Morning Post article 3 days ago that such programs and the international pressure have helped pave the way for an easier transition once the fundamental changes take place. However, we must face up to the troubling reality that none of these efforts has stopped the Chinese government from engaging in extra-legal persecution of Gao Zhisheng, and mis-use of the law to persecute Liu Xiaobo and many others good citizens including Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia, Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren (the list can go on), to punish them for having spoken up for or taken actions to protect the rights and interest of disadvantaged groups of fellow Chinese citizens.

As a testimony to Jerry’s integrity and contributions, I end my remark by reminding us that, over the years, Jerry has actually befriended some of those whose names I just mentioned, spoken up on their behalf, and, in some cases, acted as legal adviser to their lawyers. Thank you, Jerry!

(Remarks made at the Conference: “Half a Century of Asian Law: A Celebration of Prof. Jerome Cohen”, George Washington University School of Law, Feb. 19, 2010)

Copenhagen: China's Predictable Act of Game Change

2009-12-21T14:31:00.001-08:00

Xiaorong Li

The UN Summit on climate change ended in a non-binding agreement. China and the US, for different reasons, hail it as a victory. Toward the end of the negotiations, Politico reported that China's negotiators were pushing for "a short, noncommittal collective statement" rather than a full-fledged binding agreement. What came out of the summit is something that those monitor China’s human rights have predicted. China emerged as the central holdout, leading developing countries with high emission rates, which, they said, if they were mandated to lower, would slow down their economy and cost billions, which they wanted the industrialized countries to pay.
No one should be surprised to learn from Copenhagen that the last thing the Chinese government wants is a binding agreement, transparency of its actions in implementing it and any opportunity for international monitoring. Yet, China also wants to appear a key player in global efforts to combat climate change.
China also says it deserves being given “exception”. Now that sounds familiar! Chinese officials told the gathering of world leaders that China is still a developing country and should not be held responsible for its carbon emissions as a developed country should. But China has become a big industrial country and replaced the US in 2006 to become the largest greenhouse gases producer. Without firm commitment by China and the US to abide by an enforceable treaty, with measurable benchmarks, to cut down emission, there is little hope to slow down climate change.
Copenhagen accentuates the stark choices that the Chinese leaders must make sooner or later: Will China rise as a responsible, cooperative, and rule-binding world power, a force to do good in solving global problems? Or will China rise as a force to undermine international efforts, imposing its own political will, changing the rule of the game by swinging its sheer weight around on world stage?
While many have been charmed and seduced by China’s rapid rising power status, it is easy to turn blind eyes to the fact that the Chinese government rules above the law at home. It needs the law and uses it as its political tool. The Chinese leaders love rule by law, but they have kept rule of law at bay! The government has little transparency in its decision making. It is un-accountable to its people, even those who would be negatively affected by its decisions and policies. Such a power is naturally averse to any international monitoring and efforts at holding it accountable to binding rules constraining its exercise.
It is true that China has singed on to binding international rules. That is when there were enough pressure and incentives. In 1998, China signed and ratified the binding human rights treaty International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), and also signed (but has not ratified) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At that time, China was eager to return to international stage with as a respectable power player. It still had to struggle to shed off bad reputations after it had bloodily butchered peaceful pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen ten years back, in 1989.

The key to getting China to sign binding agreement on cutting emission, then, is making the government understand what is at stake for its own interest -- if climate change can’t be quickly contained. And monitoring is necessary if any quick effective emission cut is to be achieved.
Even if China had signed a binding international agreement in Copenhagen, it does not mean action. It is important to take seriously the lessons learnt from the way in which China evades its treaty obligations to international human rights law:
First, when ratifying an international treaty, China never fails to take reservations on key articles and opt not to accept optional protocols. Thus China took reservation on the article stipulating the right to form independent union in the ICSECR. It also took reservations on articles governing monitoring and refused to adopt the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. These moves practically exempted China from inspection by the Committee against Torture and prevented Chinese citizens from reporting individual cases to the Committee.
Secondly, international monitoring of China’s implementation of its treaty obligations and holding it accountable has been very difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-one years after China signed and ratified the Convention against Torture, the Chinese law has not yet been fully revised to conform to the treaty’s requirements, perpetrators have rarely been held criminally responsible, victims are hardly ever compensated, and torture remains rampant in detention centers, jails, and in law enforcement. (These are documented in the UN Committee against Torture’s 2008 “Concluding Observation & Recommendations” issued after its review of China’s own report on the implementation of this treaty in the past five years: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/457/10/PDF/G0845710.pdf?OpenElement)
Thirdly, even after a treaty is signed and ratified, China would resist very hard any monitoring efforts. China responded to the CAT “Observations” with a belligerent comment, denouncing its conclusions as “biased” and the sources it cited as “fabricated” by groups whose purpose was to “overthrow the Chinese government”. (See UN document CAT/C/CHN/CO/4/Add.1) At the UN Human Rights Council, where China lobbied hard and voluntarily pledged to promote human rights in order to get re-elected for a second term in 2009, it plays an aggressive role in trying to change the rules and practices that give the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms some teeth. E.g., China is trying to undo the UN practice of appointing independent experts to the Committee against Torture or to the positions of mandate holders of the Special Procedures monitoring different thematic issues of human rights or specific countries. China does not want the experts to do the job independently. If China has its way, the professors, lawyers, judges and NOG human rights advocates, who currently serve as volunteers in these posts will be replaced one day by diplomats and politicians from member states.

Taking these lessons seriously allows environmentalists and others who care about climate change to work more effectively toward their goals by, for instance, supporting efforts at democratic reform, rule of law changes, and improvement in protection of human rights in China.

China’s Indictment of Liu Xiaobo: What Does It Say about the Obama Administration’s Human Rights Policy?

2009-12-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

Xiaorong Li

The news came last Friday that Liu Xiaobo, the best known Chinese dissident intellectual who lives in Beijing, was indicted on December 10, 2009, “International Human Rights Day,” by the Beijing Procuratorate. This move seems rather provocative or defiant, considering that the US President Obama had just returned from his China trip, where he has, no matter clearly or opaquely – a subject of debate, made statements advocating freedom of expression and information.

The Chinese leaders’ defiance to Mr. Obama and his call for more freedom of expression at the Shanghai “town hall” meeting with students carefully handpicked by the Chinese officials cannot be more accentuated by the fact that Mr. Liu is indicted for “drafting Charter 08 with others”, which the prosecution said was a “serious crime.” This means that writing and expressing views urging democratic reform and improving human rights is officially “a serious crime” in China and people go to jail for doing that, like Mr. Liu Xiaobo has for the past year.

Many may have wondered why the Chinese authorities chose at this time to indict Mr. Liu. But why wouldn't they? What would they have been worried about? One interesting question is whether the Obama Administration would learn something about the diminishing effectiveness of quiet private engagement on human rights with a big and increasingly more powerful country like China – if such a policy ever had any effectiveness at all before.

From talking to many people inside China, including Mr. Liu’s close friends, supporters, and his lawyers, I have heard it said repeatedly, often passionately, that the move against Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08, after having detained him and harassed other signatories for an whole year, is the outcome of the US President’s timid appeal in China. They told me that Obama’s appeals for human rights, which came in the form of praising freedom of expression on the internet and in a statement about agreeing to disagree about human rights during the joint press conference with the Chinese President Hu Jintao, were too weak and too vague. This seems to signal green light for the Chinese leaders to take strong actions on detained democrats and human rights activists, whose fate had been put on hold, as if awaiting for Obama’s visit.

It now looks like that US officials handed a short list of prisoners of conscience to the Chinese officials and President Obama may have personally conveyed the US government’s concerns about the individuals on the list to Hu Jintao. It was a private, quiet effort, to the Administration’s credit. But precisely because it was quiet and private, the Chinese leaders could easily pretend that they didn’t know anything and feel not pressure to respond. If this laudable effort ends there, out of the public view, it practically re-assured the Chinese leaders that the US would not protest loudly if they refuse to release these individuals or improve their conditions. The Chinese leaders seem to have concluded, quite logically, that the Obama administration, coming to Beijing to ask for help on several issues of importance to the US -- constraining Iran and N. Korea’s nuclear programs, slowing climate change, and re-balancing the economy -- would be too distracted by its own problems and unwilling to offend China by exerting any real pressure if the Chinese government went ahead convicting Liu Xiaobo and accusing drafting Charter 08 a crime.

For the Charter 08 writers and signatories, it might be better to be acknowledged than ignored by the Chinese government, but being officially labeled as having committed “a serious crime” sends a chill through the community. Charter 08, a public petition calling for democratic reform and protection of human rights, was initially signed by 303 Chinese on its release day on Dec. 9, 2008. In the past 12 months, more than 10,000 people have signed the petition, including about 8,000 residing on mainland China.

During those 12 months, other than the initial arrests, summons, interrogations, raids of homes and confiscation of personal property, the government has only published articles in official media to denounce “universal values” and “multi-party democracy,” but officials have rarely responded directly to Charter 08 by naming its name and have refrained from calling it a criminal act. Coming out finally to label drafting Charter 08 “a serious crime” clarifies speculations that, within top ranks of the leadership, officials were divided and some reformist inclined officials might be sympathetic to the drive or might have seen this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in the high-level power struggle.

Calling drafting Charter 08 a “crime” sends a stern warning to those who wrote, edited, or promoted this text, about one hundred of people, I was told, and to the thousands who signed the petition. For being implicated in this “criminal” act, they too could face imprisonment. The Chinese authorities clearly want to put them in their place: stop them from voicing their political views and threaten them with legal punishment for engaging in any political organizing!

Once again, the Chinese leaders behaved like calculating maximizers of benefits. Since they see no costly consequences for locking up its most vocal critic, and on the contrary, feeling confident they have had other big world powers tied around their fingers, they no longer need to make concessions by making a soft landing on Mr. Liu’s case. There is no obstacle in their path: They revert to do what the nature of their power has always seduced them to do – silencing dissent, stamping out any civil society mobilization for political change. Being calculating, rational, does not make an authoritarian one-party regime less authoritarian.

Let’s face it, it would not be entirely fair to call Obama’s China trip the worst or least successful in comparison to previous US Presidents’ China visits on account of the lack of any deal on prisoners’ releases this time. China is almost a different country today and the US-China relations are in a very different place as compared to the days of the Clinton’s and the Bushes’ presidencies. But quiet private diplomacy, an old strategy that didn’t quite work under these former presidents, is less likely to work now as China sees little bargain in such deals and no real pressure for compliance.

Obama could still have done better at making clear, strong, and eloquent statements on human rights and democracy on his China trip. The outcome might not have been different, given the weakened position of the US vs. China. But even if that were the case, the President would have at least stood the ground of US values and made the American people proud. And more importantly, to many Chinese democrats and human rights advocates, he would not have let them down.

December 14, 2009

Speaking of Human Rights

2009-12-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

Here's the speech President Obama should give when he meets President Hu Jintao

By Xiaorong Li
November 17, 2009

While President Barack Obama is in Beijing this week, he has an opportunity to address two key issues, climate change and human rights concerns, simultaneously. Here's the kind of speech the president should give:

"President Hu Jintao, ladies & gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be in Beijing.

My administration has put climate change at the top of our diplomatic agenda. This is especially true when it comes to our relationship with China. Our two large nations share the title of top consumers of energy and the biggest polluters on earth. None of us can escape the impact of climate change. The security and stability of our nations and our peoples - our prosperity, our health, our safety - are in jeopardy.

Yet, we cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, including China, act together. The U.S., as one of the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our environment over the last century, has a responsibility to lead. China, as a rapidly developing nation that will produce a large share of global carbon emissions in the decades ahead, must do its part.

I am proud to say that my administration is actively pursuing its agenda to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. President Hu, I urge you to build on what your government has already done to combat pollution and promote alternative energy.

I also want to express my admiration for the independent environmental activists who have sprung up across China. In my country, activists have played a vital role in mobilizing public opinion, blowing the whistle on polluters and developing energy-saving measures. I salute them as part of the solution to environmental problems.

For this reason, I am concerned that they still cannot express their views freely. One of this country's most vocal environmentalists is behind bars. Wu Lihong, a farmer, should be released from prison where he is serving a three-year sentence in retaliation for exposing the illegal dumping of industrial waste in the famous Tai Lake. Another hero, Sun Xiaodi, is currently serving two years in a labor camp. He fought for recognition of the health problems caused by nuclear contamination among workers in a plant in Gansu Province.

In 2008, a plant producing harmful waste was constructed in the densely populated city Chengdu. Residents held a protest march. One organizer, Chen Daojun, is now serving three years in prison for 'inciting subversion of the state.'

Your honor, you told the U.N. General Assembly in September that your government will take bold actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such an ambitious plan calls out for the active participation of members of Chinese civil society. Free expression is a key to civil society participation. People who post their opinions on the Internet, like the writer Liu Xiaobo, should not be behind bars for voicing their political views.

It is also crucial to hold polluting businesses accountable through a fair and just judicial process. That is why I am concerned that Chinese lawyers have been stripped of licenses or, as in the case of the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng, imprisoned, tortured and made to 'disappear.'

The United States is willing to engage China as an ally and partner in finding solutions. The American people are flexible and pragmatic, but they hold dear to their hearts respect for liberty and human dignity. They will not give these ideals up for expediency's sake.

I look forward to working with you to achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of the children in China, in the United States, and in the world. Thank you."

Xiaorong Li is a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, who does consultant work for Chinese NGOs.

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

Václav Havel Honors a Chinese Prisoner

2009-04-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009

Letter to the editor

In response to China's Charter 08 (January 15, 2009)

A link to China's Charter 08

To the Editors:

Readers may be interested to know that Liu Xiaobo, a Beijing-based dissident now being held by Chinese authorities, and the other signatories of Charter 08, have received the 2008 Homo Homini Award in Prague. The award, which was presented by former Czech president Václav Havel on March 11 on behalf of the Czech-based organization People in Need, is given each year to someone who has "made an important contribution to promoting human rights, democracy and non-violent resolution of political conflicts."

For over three months, Liu has been held in incommunicado detention without access to a lawyer, in violation of Chinese law, for his involvement in the creation of Charter 08. Inspired by the 1977 Czech and Slovak protest movement Charter 77, of which Václav Havel was a founding member, Charter 08 is a document signed by more than eight thousand Chinese citizens that calls for greater respect for individual rights and democratic reform in China ["China's Charter 08," NYR, January 15]. Since Liu's detention, his wife has been able to pay him only two visits, under severely restricted circumstances. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The award was accepted on Liu's behalf by Xu Youyu, a political philosopher and writer, Cui Weiping, a literary critic, and Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights lawyer. In presenting the award, Havel said:

I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.

However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end; we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on the other, we know they may in fact end well.

...It is our experience—and this is perhaps more an appeal to our ranks—that international solidarity is very important and valuable. It helps, even if only as an encouragement to us, rather than as an argument convincing the powers that be. Having had firsthand experience with a totalitarian system and dictatorship ourselves, it is thus our duty to help those who are yet not able to enjoy freedom.[*]

Li Xiaorong
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
Notes

[*]The complete text of Havel's remarks and acceptance speeches by Xu and Cui.

Only a Matter of Speech? Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's China Blunder

2009-02-28T12:45:00.000-08:00

Words can topple regimes or shatter lives. That is more so about words uttered at important occasions by public figures with clout. What President John F. Kennedy told the crowds at the Berlin Wall “Tonight, we’re all Berliners!” and what Martin Luther King declared on the National Mall “We have a dream, one day…” have made imprints in change of course in history.

What Hilary Clinton told journalists on Feb. 20, on her way to China for a first visit as the top US diplomat, cannot be cast away into thin air as merely words. She said that human rights “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.” For all sides, these words have weight because they indicate the Obama Administration’s yet-to-be articulated China police.

Ms. Clinton’s words were ostentatiously quoted in an official Chinese Xinhua News Agency editorial on Feb. 23. Xinhua couldn’t help comparing Ms. Clinton’s tip-toeing around human rights to her well-known strong words about human rights and women’s rights when she attended the World Forum on Women in Beijing in 1995 as the first lady of the US, and her call last year, as a senator from NY, for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics to protest human rights abuses and repression in Tibet. Headlines across other official newspapers had the air of triumphantly celebration of the retreat of US pressure on human rights during Clinton’s two-day visit. Huanqiu (World), a hardliner newspaper run by the Ministry of State Security, had a long front page story titled “Clinton Visiting China Avoided Human Rights!”

Chinese human rights activists and dissident intellectuals, many of whom were put under house arrest or surveillance in and around Feb. 20-22, were indignant upon learning Ms. Clinton’s deliberate choices of words.
“I didn’t plan to meet her and now I have less interest in bothering her now since she has placed human rights at the bottom of her agenda!” said Weise, a Tibetan poet/writer who lives in Beijing.

“I told the police who followed me that I was going to my church, an officially banned house church, and Clinton was going to an officially hand-picked church – we had nothing to do with each other! Why you are wasting your time monitoring me? I bet she dared not to mention persecution of house-church Christians to avoid ‘interference’ with her talk here about N. Korea and trade problems!” said another Beijing dissident writer.

“I went over the list of women whom Clinton met. Except for Gao Yaojie, a veteran AIDS doctor, the others are all from pro-government or government-organized ‘non-governmental organizations’”, another Beijing intellectual told me. During the one-hour meeting with these women, Clinton said nothing about women’s rights or human rights, according to Ms. Gao, the AIDS doctor.
Glaringly missing from the women’s gathering were the Tiananmen Mothers who have been seeking justice for their loved ones killed twenty years ago by government troops who crushed pro-democracy protester in Beijing; also uninvited was Zeng Jinyan, an AIDS activist and the wife of Hu Jia, also an AIDS activist who is serving a three-and-half year sentence for “inciting sedition against state power;” and yet another woman who should have been invited is Liu Xia, an artist, who has been asking the police in vain for the whereabouts of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a dissident writer, who was detained on suspicion of drafting a widely popular manifesto of political reform known as “Charter 08.”

Ms. Clinton’s political postures on her China trip are painful to watch. They shamed us Americans. They signal a callousness to those Chinese who have suffered from their struggle for justice, freedom, and democracy – the values that define what America is about. Ms. Clinton’s usual compassion for injustice and for those who suffer is lost in crude calculations of political gains from the Chinese leaders.

What should concern us most may not be Ms. Clinton’s words of choice but the fact that it may have given substance to the unrevealed China policy of the Obama Administration. To be true to his inaugural speech, Mr. Obama should shun from thorny issues – human rights, Tibet, etc. – in dealing with the Chinese leaders, who by nobody’s stretch of imagination belong to the ranks of “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent”, those who are “on the wrong side of history”.

Feb. 26, 2009

China's Human Rights under Magnifying Glasses

2009-01-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

- Opportunities and Potholes of the UN “Universal Periodic Review”

Thank you for this opportunity to address issues related to the upcoming UN HRC Universal Periodical Review on China. As the previous speaker Ms. Gaer has expertly described, the UPR is a brand new, thus very little known UN human rights tool.
For an organization like the UN, the establishment of UPR is remarkable. Only a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable to put China under international spotlight to scrutinize its human rights record in a comprehensive manner. Since 1989, almost every year, China had successfully blocked any vote on motions at the now-demised UN Human Rights Commission to put on its agenda to examine China’s human rights behavior! This once seemingly insurmountable hurdle now suddenly vanished!

However, UPR can be abused by UN member states, esp. those who are unfriendly to human rights and the process can be highly politicized, its effectiveness minimized. The UN is an intern-governmental organization, where member states lobby, bargain, and position themselves to advance their own national interest. China in particular has demonstrated its skillfulness to mount impressive efforts to lobby its “friendly” countries at UN venues.

Some common tactics that member states have used to undermine UPR in order to prevent a critical report on their performance are: (1) use “national human rights institutions” and government-organized “non-government organizations” (GONGOs) to submit rosy reports to dilute the 10-page compilation by the Office of the High Commissioner’s Office for Human Rights (OHCHR) of stakeholders’ submissions; (2) fill the 3-hour “interactive dialogue” with praises or irrelevant remarks by delegations from “friendly” countries; (3) using the opportunity for state party response to dismiss critical questions or independent NGO submissions as “slandering” or “fabrications.”

So why does China bother to buy into UPR or become a member of the HRC? That is a much larger question than I could address here. There are some interesting hypotheses on the table: (1) China wants to be treated as a member in good standing in the international community; China could not have opposed UPR while keeping a straight face because, when China rebutted critics of its human rights, it has accused them to be “selectively targeting China” or “politicizing human rights”; UPR applies to all countries. If you look at the China’s National Report, it refers to its own position on human rights as based on “equal respect”, “fairness”, “objectivity, non-selectiveness” ; (2) UPR has been structured in such a way that the pain for a state to undergo it is minimized, a point that I will come back to soon.]

China’s own “National Report” to the UPR Working Group is typical affair. It follows a pattern, as we have seen in China’s reports to Committee Against Torture or Committee on Economic, Social, Cultural Rights, by presenting a positive assessment of its “great progress”, reiterating its commitment to promoting human rights, and highlighting legislative and regulatory steps, while glossing over ongoing violations and omitting the fact that many good-sounding laws are impossible to implement and officials who failed to implement them face little consequence.
One way to reduce UPR’s vulnerability to politicization and abuse is to facilitate active participation of civil society, or NGOs. One remarkable thing about UPR is its built-in openness, no matter how limited, for civil society intervention. To sufficiently explore the opportunity is the only way available to make UPR to have any impact.

[See Handout 1: the various opportunities for civil society involvement prior to, during, and after a country’s UPR review.]

So when the schedule to review China was set, the UPR Working Group called for NGO submissions last summer. 46 “stakeholders” (National human rights institutions and supposedly NGOs) submitted reports, each restricted to 5-pages. The UN OHCHR has compiled a file summarizing “credible and reliable” information from stakeholder’s submissions.

[See Handout 2: 46 stakeholders (NGOs and national human rights institutions). The list and the summery of submissions are on the OHCHR ]

Other than National HR Institutions, there are at least 3 types of organizations on the list: International NGOs, including Chinese, Tibet and Falungong groups overseas, Chinese (including HK) NGOs, and GONGOs. Two things are interesting: (1) Most of the groups from China are GONGOs, with few exceptions. The GONOG reports generally present “progress” and recommend legislations that are already been drafted or proposed. (2) Groups that working on Children, women, migrants, HIV/AIDS did make submissions. Yes there is no independent human rights NGOs like AI or HRW from the Mainland who made submissions, though some loose networks of activists/dissidents participated in the submissions with international groups.
The missing of Chinese domestic, openly operating, or “legally registered” human rights NGOs has to do with restrictive regulations and official crackdowns on independent NGOs.

So we can be almost certain, no Mainland Chinese human rights activist will attend the UPR session in Geneva in Feb., even though they might be invited to go by international NGOs. There is the risk factor: fear for being intercepted on the way out or retaliated against going back (one activist was recently interrogated several times, his home was raided and personal belonging confiscated. The policemen said they acted on the order from above to do anything to stop anyone from preparing a human rights report for the UPR!). But additionally, there are also obstacles such as travel costs, and UN ECOSOC accreditation, even for any legally registered groups.

Ironically, problems such as restriction on freedom of association, assembly, and speech, which the UPR is intended to examine and, hopefully, find solutions, play a key role in undermining UPR, diminishing its impact.

Another way to make UPR work is that human rights friendly member states should actively participate. The 3-hour “interactive dialogue” on Feb. 9 (9am-12) is open to all 192 countries (e.g. US is not HRC member, but can participate). The Feb. 11 session is when the record of the State reviews are considered, which lasts for 30 min (12-12:30), where China can respond or reject some recommendations. Then, there is a HRC plenary session several months later where the report is adopted. Only NGOs with ECOSOC accreditation can attend these sessions and can make statements only in the HRC session.

It is important to get into the final report of the UPR working group a concrete list of substantive recommendations with measurable results. This document will go in record as a testimony to China’s delivery after it has made pledges to promote human rights and signed numerous treaties, covenants and declarations on protecting human rights. All stakeholders in the next 4 years can refer to this document as yardstick to measure any progress China may or may not make. China will be in an awkward position to denounce such a document as “interference in its internal affairs” by “anti-China forces” with “ulterior motivations” – because China has gone through the process and participated in setting the rules and in reviews of other state parties. It can’t quite dismiss the process as “selective” or “unfair”.
What could the US delegation or any other human rights friendly countries do in the UPR process? The US is not a member of HRC, but has observer’s status.
Prepare one good question about an area of serious rights abuses and make one substantive but feasible recommendation.

For instance, given the importance of free speech as a fundamental human right, the US Permanent delegation could ask the question about the detention and harassment of signatories of Charter 08, who merely exercised their freedom of expression by endorsing a declaration on human rights and democracy. Ask for the release of detained signatory writer/intellectual Liu Xiaobo on suspicion of “inciting subversion against the state,” which is a crime frequently used in China to persecute free speech.

The US delegation could recommend that China to release Liu Xiaobo, and, for the long-term protection of free expression, to clarify and precisely define the meaning of the terms “incitement,” “subversion” and “state power” in Article 105(2) of the Chinese Criminal Code as well as the specific conditions under which a peaceful act of expression may constitute “inciting subversion against state power.” Such conditions must explicitly exclude any non-violent activity in the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, including expressions critical of political parties and government authorities.

In connection to this last point, I should mention that I’d like to submit the English translation of Charter 08 by Perry Link that appeared in NYRB for the record.
Thank you!

Xiaorong Li

(Congressional-Executive Commission on China Roundtable, "The UN Human Rights Council's Review of China's Record:
Process and Challenges", January 16, 2009, 10-11:30am)

Mr. Obama Must Respond to Chinese Civil Society’s Call for Change

2009-01-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

It appears imprudent to call the new Obama administration’s attention to China’s human rights problems. The US, in economic recession and in deep debt to China, is apparently in no position to demand anything of China. Yet, although a power player in the global economy, China is not immune to its own economic problems, which have caused social and political headaches for its authoritarian regime. At this critical moment, there is reason to hope that the US and the international community can actually exert a positive influence on China by promoting democratization and respect for human rights.

Democracy advocates in China have given President-elect Barack Obama and his Secretary of State-select an opportunity to provide leadership on these issues. A civil society campaign for democratic reform, emulating the Charter 77 movement in Cold War era Czechoslovakia and partly inspired by Mr. Obama, deserves the new administration’s support.

The call for sweeping political reforms in China came in early December in an online petition titled Charter 08. Upon learning about this petition, police detained one prominent intellectual, Liu Xiaobo, and interrogated another co-signer for 12 hours, after raiding their homes. Mr. Liu has remained in detention and more than 100 signatories have been interrogated since December 8. Vaclav Havel, leader of Charter 77 and former president of the democratic Czech Republic, denounced the arrest in the Wall Street Journal. Supporters of Mr. Liu in China are asking, “Why hasn’t the US President-elect voiced concerns about the detention of Liu Xiaobo and demanded a halt to the crackdown on the signatories of Charter 08?”

More than 5000 residents on Mainland China have since signed Charter 08, and Netizens briefly outsmarted Chinese cyberpolice censorship on the internet, indicating a measure of popular support for the Charter’s demands -- human rights, democracy, rule of law, and 19 steps toward an overhaul of governance, including putting an end to the one-party rule and protecting the natural environment. Compared to similar petitions circulated since 1989, Charter 08 has garnered support from a much wider swath of the population, far exceeded the drafters’ expectations. As a result, it has shaken those in power.

Chinese authorities have reasons to be nervous. Huge declines in Chinese exports and growth have prompted the closure of manufacturing plants and layoffs. This is the year that may reveal what happens when the Communist Party is no longer able to deliver on its deal with the population, a deal that Deng Xiaoping struck 30 years ago when he introduced market reforms: prosperity and morsels of personal freedom in exchange for political acquiescence to the Party’s rule.

The current economic recession has seen China’s nouveau middle classes disillusioned and workers disproportionately burdened. The Chinese official press reported that 10 million rural laborers, migrated to cities to look for jobs, have found no work in factories and are trickling back home. But 20% to 30% of farmers have lost their land to developers and have hardly any means of making a living. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ 2009 Blue Papers put urban unemployment rates at 9.4%.
Many in the hard-hit social groups are angry, and many are demanding justice and rights. According to official press, in 2008, from January to October, there was a 93.52 percent increase in labor protests from 2007, in the same months. Compared to 2007, there were 300% more protests demanding unpaid salaries in a city in the industrial costal regions.

The recent Third Session of the Seventeenth Chinese Communist Party Congress made economic recession and social unrest its top concern. President Hu Jintao’s speech at the October gathering of senior leaders stressed “stability” as the Party’s “rock-hard mandate.” A national conference on political and legal affairs held in Beijing in med-December made containing “mass incidents” (social riots) its priority.

Unwilling to allow China’s citizens to peacefully express their views and hold demonstrations, the Chinese state habitually responds to workers’ strikes, rural protests, and political or religious demonstrations with brute force, as it did 20 years ago to crush prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square, as it did 10 years ago to suppress the spiritual sect Falun Gong, and as it did 9 months ago to quell monks’ demonstrations in Tibet. The Party has never failed to rule out free expression and participatory governance as means to a peaceful transition to a stable society based on less corruption and more justice -- especially in times of widespread discontent and a pervading sense of crisis.

2009 happens to be a year of anniversaries with huge political symbolism: the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen suppression, the 50th of the exile of the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, and the 60th of the Communist Party’s rise to power.
The new administration must respond to the current call from China’s non-state sectors for political change. The Obama presidency will be under pressure to gain China’s cooperation on matters of global importance like climate change, regional security, and nuclear proliferation. Yet it is in America’s long-term strategic interest to engage China in reforming its political system and ending repression. This is the only sensible way to ensure that China will respect international law, play according to rules, and cooperate on issues of global importance. As soon as possible, the new president should articulate a China policy that makes supporting civil society and promoting human rights and democracy a pillar, not a bargaining chip.

Mr. Obama should reach out directly to the Chinese citizenry, making clear to them that the American people want to support their pursuit of justice, democracy, prosperity and sustainable development. Soon after his inauguration, President Obama should announce U.S. intentions (1) to work with non-governmental sectors to strengthen civil society and support grassroots initiatives for democratic change; (2) to broaden exchange programs to include more civil society actors; (3) to work through multilateral organizations that have mechanisms for civil society participation, such as the newly established UN Human Rights Council, which is playing an active role in monitoring human rights and supporting rule-of-law reform in China and around the world; and (4) to restructure the recently resumed US-China “human rights dialogue” such that NGO participation, transparency, and measurable results are integral components of the bilateral efforts.

A 14-year-old boy in Beijing, the youngest of the signatories to Charter 08, remarked: “If Mr. Obama can be elected President of the United States, we too can change China!” Mr. Obama’s election has inspired much hope for democratic change in China and around the globe. He can keep that hope alive by firmly supporting civil society actors in their efforts to bring about this change. A crucial first step will be for Mr. Obama to call on President Hu Jintao to release Liu Xiaobo and to end the crackdown on thousands of signatories of Charter 08.

Myths, challenges and opportunities

2009-01-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

Xiaorong Li
February 19, 2003

There is a risk that human rights concerns in China may be swept under the carpet as the international community focuses exclusively on terrorism. Li Xiaorong explains why monitoring of China’s human rights should remain a priority.
________________________________________

One effect of the Bush Administration’s “global campaign against terrorism” is that human rights problems in China have been pushed even lower down on the diplomatic agenda. But the rights problems remain serious, and the international community may be missing some unprecedented opportunities to affect positive changes.

Long before September 11, 2001, the US government’s China policies had been based on the premise that American trade and strategic interests in China should not be compromised by human rights concerns. China has been very successful in blocking foreign efforts to push for human rights. Its success, as the political scientist Andrew Nathan argues, has to do with its rapidly growing economy and rising power status; skillful management of the international media; exploitation of domestic fears about political instability and nationalistic fervor; a UN Security Council seat which enables it to take the lead among like-minded governments; heavy lobbying and “divide and conquer” diplomacy with foreign governments and businesses; and skillful management of bilateral “dialogues” on human rights, which, as the HRIC report From Principle to Pragmatism has demonstrated, are mainly designed to give Western politicians something to show their domestic audiences.

It is not my intention to discuss the ethics and options for US foreign policy here. Instead, the purpose of this article is to assess future opportunities for concerned members of the international community to affect positive change on human rights in China. Towards this end, I call into question four widely-believed myths about China:
 Myth No. 1: China is a much better place today than 20 years ago in that it has made huge progress in human rights, although its record is not perfect. There should be more encouragement and less criticism.
 Myth No. 2: China is doing so well economically and has lifted many Chinese out of poverty. This is a major achievement in human rights. Human rights activists remain critical because they invoke Western standards, which emphasize civil-political rights over economic rights.
 Myth No. 3: Critics of China’s human rights record only pay attention to a few individual dissidents. Individual liberties demanded by these dissidents matter little to the larger public or, worse, endanger public security and social order, which are crucial for China’s development and transition.
 Myth No. 4: China has joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), Beijing will host the Olympics in 2008 and the Chinese government has avoided censure at every annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission since 1990. There is no leverage left for the concerned international community to press for human rights improvements in China.

Challenging the myths
These claims can all be challenged. On Myth No. 1, is China really a much better place in terms of human rights today than it was 20 years ago? No doubt it is a more developed country and many more people are wealthier than ever before. But does this mean that China “has made huge progress in human rights”? There is not necessarily a logical connection between the two statements.

The claim that human rights conditions in China present a progressive trajectory is actually not proven. According to a study conducted by the China Human Rights Strategy Study Group from April 2000 to November 2001 and sponsored by the Open Society Institute and Human Rights in China, “Promotin

Other major problems include intensified repression of social groups that are perceived as potentially posing challenges to the government, including laid off workers, peasants who protest official abuse, local corruption, and heavy levies, and HIV/AIDS activist groups; excessive use of the death penalty; torture and police brutality; repression of religious groups such as the Falungong and Catholics loyal to the Pope; harsh repression in minority regions in Tibet and Xinjiang; persecution of political dissidents and the use of administrative detention under Reeducation Through Labor and Custody and Repatriation.

In a worldwide survey, Amnesty International found that China has had the highest number of reported executions of any country in the world every year since 1993. Last year, according to published reports China executed 2,468 people and sentenced 4,015 to death. HRIC found that about three million people are sent to Custody and Repatriation centers each year, mostly because they are away from their place of registered residence and have not obtained the proper papers. Approximately 5-20 percent of them are children. Those in C&R may be held for months, without any charge or trial, before they are sent back to their hometowns or villages. Currently approximately 300,000 people are being held in Reeducation Through Labor (RETL) camps for “crimes” ranging from “disturbing public order” to minor drug offenses. RETL may be imposed by the police without a trial for up to three years, while most sentences range from six months to two years. Finally, there are areas of ambiguous development in criminal procedure law, independence of the courts, birth control related violence and gay rights. Homosexuality had been penalized under the “hooliganism” provision under the Criminal Code but this has now been removed. The Chinese Association of Psychiatry has also removed homosexuality from its classification of mental diseases.

Based on this assessment, one cannot conclude that China’s human rights have improved across the board. Certainly no overall linear progression can be detected. Given the pattern of uneven changes, if the Chinese authorities are left to their own devices, without public scrutiny and international monitoring, it is not guaranteed that the ability of Chinese people to exercise their rights would automatically improve. Furthermore, even if it turns out that human rights progress has been made, this does not imply that China should from now on be praised and never criticized. For example, even though the United States is a better place today in terms of civil rights than it was 50 years ago when women did not have the right to vote and segregation was legal, should one no longer criticize civil rights violations in today’s American society?

Economy first?

The claim that economic growth has substantially improved rights conditions raises the question of whether growth in China’s economy has been translated into human rights progress, or more precisely, into better economic rights protection.

The Communist Party’s decision to allow market-driven, incentive-based economic activities has rendered impractical the totalitarian Party-state, which aspired to transform human nature by controlling people’s minds and private lives, and created a shift to an authoritarian police state. Notwithstanding that economic marketization has widened the sphere of individual autonomy, Chinese citizens still do not have reliable and legally–protected rights to basic liberties.

There are complex changes in the sphere of socio-economic rights that reflect the mixed effects of rising GDP and the collapse of the socialist welfare system. Aggregate growth rates do not ensure better or fairer access to adequate food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education and work. Today, economic disparities between the poor and the rich continue to grow. The number of urban poor are on the rise as workers who suffer from layoffs, unpaid salaries and lost pensions struggle for basic subsistence. While average salaries are more than they were 20 years ago, purchasing power has not increased at the same rate and people can no longer count on subsidized housing, education and medical care. The Chinese government may be justifying stepping up control and repression in order to manage these tensions.

Chinese government data indicate that, by the end of 1996, 58 million people in China were living under the official poverty line, which the State Council defined as $0.66 per person per day. According to the World Bank, at the end of 1998 about 11.5 percent of China’s rural population, or about 106 million people, lived below the poverty line, which the Bank defined as $1 per day or less. However, these data are questionable: only two years before, the Bank had put the number of people in China living on $1 or less per day at 350 million. Many so-called “winners” in the new economy have not had to play by market rules. They gained exclusive access to capital and vital investment information through positions of power or connections. And many so-called “losers” never had a chance, and have no social safety net to protect them.

The lack of protection for civil-political rights—which the government has rejected because they are perceived as a threat to its power monopoly—is an acute problem. The absence of such rights constrains the disadvantaged, exploited and marginalized citizens in demanding protection for their social-economic rights, particularly when they face a much higher risk of losing out and going under. For example, the constraints on the ability of citizens to petition against the health consequences of environmental damage, layoffs, unpaid pensions, workplace hazards and heavy burdens of numerous levies and fees imposed on farmers have left victims helpless and vulnerable to abuses.

One recent example is the independent efforts to address the emerging public health disaster of HIV/AIDS infections and deaths in poor, rural areas of Henan Province. Activists have encountered official hostility, harassment and intimidation because the local government apparently perceives such efforts as political threats, since they would tarnish the image of the leaders and expose systematic lapses in the government’s health care policies. In Henan Province, hundreds of thousands of villagers have become infected with HIV because they sold their blood to the officially-sponsored blood collectors. These used outdated and risky methods for the blood collection, which resulted in the rapid spread of HIV infection. The Henan government tried to cover up the scandal until 2001, and did not develop a plan or allocate the necessary resources to respond to the crisis. The non-existent health care system in rural China left hundreds of thousands to suffer and die in agony. This situation has created a new array of social problems, including prejudice and discrimination against HIV infected families, and orphans and elderly people left behind without care. Schools have even closed doors to children who are HIV positive or whose parents are infected. (See page 14 for more information.)

If the Chinese government, and local governments, had allowed more civil-political freedoms, particularly freedom of expression, association and the press, there would have been a better chance of preventing this devastating public health crisis

Another example involves migrant workers. Even though peasants are now able to migrate to work in cities, they are subjected to horrendous treatment and exploitation and, worse, they have few rights to seek redress or to protest. Some workers in state industries have managed to organize marches and sit ins, but their leaders have ended up in jail. The lack of accountability and a democratic system means that their voices count minimally in policy decisions concerning their livelihood.

Are individual cases illustrative?

The recent trends in China’s human rights record show that the rights of large population groups, such as migrant laborers, laid off workers and rural residents, remain unprotected. The more than 33 million Internet users are affected by the state’s censorship of telecommunications and information. The banning and subsequent repression of the Falungong group, which claims to have more than 100 million members, has obviously had an impact on millions.

Myth No. 3 involves clearly defining the term “individual rights.” Individual rights signify that each person has the agency to determine the nature of their basic rights. It does not mean that such rights are the exclusively determined by a few individuals. If a state has the ability to terrorize a minority community of political dissidents or unorthodox religious believers, this implies it could terrorize any group that held political views or religious beliefs that the government perceived as a threat. This is a simple point on which we tend to lose perspective. If Rodney King could be brutally beaten by up by policemen in Los Angeles, then the civil rights of all Americans (or at least all African-Americans) may be at risk.

In the United States, any government restriction on civil liberties, even if officials seek to justify it as being in the public interest, has to stand up to public scrutiny. Many Americans have questioned the way immigrants have been treated since September 11. Even given the extraordinary circumstances of the time, Americans insist that the Bush Administration be held accountable for demonstrating that the threats are real and that any measures taken are fair and justifiable. The Chinese government has claimed that opening fire on peaceful demonstrators in June 1989, imprisoning political dissidents, persecuting religious minorities, arresting independent labor organizers and curtailing information on the Internet are necessary to maintain stability and social order. But it forbids anyone to challenge these claims, and those who are bold enough to question such actions risk imprisonment.

No leverage left?

Pressure on human rights brought to bear by foreign governments and NGOs on the Chinese government has produced improvements that are either declaratory, such as accession to international covenants, or short-term, such as the release of particular prisoners. Prisoners of conscience have reported improved treatment due to international pressure. However, efforts to bring about long-term, broad-ranging structural reform have not been successful. A few other strategies have worked well at specific times, in particular publicity campaigns focused on individual prisoners or cases, threats to “most favored nation” trade status and the use of “quiet diplomacy” to obtain information and secure prisoner releases.

Other strategies have not worked as well as advertised, specifically bilateral human rights dialogues, because of their exclusiveness and non-transparency, and Internet-based and other information dissemination programs, due to Chinese government “firewalls” and the fact that they are narrowly targeted at intellectuals and professionals. It is too early to assess the impact of programs in the area of “capacity building,” which include programs that train judges, National People’s Congress staff and other legal professionals, or help in legislative drafting.

Still, a concerned international community is now presented with unprecedented opportunities to facilitate positive changes in China through channels such as the United Nations and the WTO. China has become increasingly engaged in multilateral human rights institutions and has acceded to UN treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention Against Torture. China’s membership in the WTO has reduced the international community’s opportunity to use economic pressures. While WTO membership may accelerate legal reforms and add impetus to the pace of moves towards transparency, it may also exacerbate the mixed human rights impacts of economic restructuring by intensifying social tensions and thus create a perceived need for state repression. However, both UN treaties and processes associated with WTO offer new points of access for human rights work.

Furthermore, the impending retirements of Jiang Zemin and Li Peng are creating a power struggle within the top ranks of the government. The succession could make possible a transition to a more human-rights friendly regime, although a fierce power struggle is more likely to make it difficult in the short run for pro-human rights forces within China and in the international community to exert influence. To prepare for the 16th Party Congress, the authorities have tightened controls on the media and the Internet by increasing censorship, and the dissident community is under increased surveillance while some activists have been detained.

These opportunities and obstacles should be considered in the international community’s strategic thinking about international monitoring. Issues that are most serious and urgent include due process rights and the extensive use of the death penalty, arbitrary detention, the Reeducation Through Labor system, torture, religious persecution and harsh crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang justified as campaigns against terrorism and separatism. (In the Xinjiang case, this crackdown was provided with some “legitimacy” when the Bush Administration declared the East Turkestan Independence Movement a “terrorist group” and supported its addition to the UN list of such groups.) Areas where it may be easier to win improvements due to social or ideological changes include the rights of women, children and workers; class discrimination in education and health care; housing rights; and environmental rights. Finally, issues that are most amenable to influence from outside include cases of persecuted individuals and groups, legal reform, welfare reform, freedom of information and freedom of religion.

Looking ahead

To conclude, concerned governments, NGOs, and citizens of democratic nations should seize opportunities to affect positive change in China. Through their professional affiliations and through intellectual and cultural exchanges, they can exert a long-term pro-human rights impact. Exchanges between scholars, students and artists make possible the open communication of ideas, culture and values. Through their shareholder rights in corporations doing business in China, investors can demand ethically-responsible investment and protection of local employees’ rights and of the environment.

Through representatives and other channels of political participation, people can monitor their governments’ policies on China and insist that human rights issues should not be eclipsed by other strategic priorities or “national interests.”

In the post-September 11 era, the temptation for governments of democratic nations to sweep human rights under the carpet of national security is strong. If protecting US national security entails eliminating potential threats to American lives, then US foreign policies ought not to encourage and support authoritarian governments under which brutal repression and unjust policies alienate groups and individuals thus escalating political tension among disaffected and mistreated minorities. Promoting human rights and democracy in China is in the long-term interest of American national security.

(This article, published in China Rights Forum, is based on a written speech for the Unitarian Church organized retreat on Star Island in the summer of 2002)

UPR: a Quiet Leap-Forward at the UN, an Opportunity to Do Some Good

2008-11-20T12:34:00.000-08:00

No matter how overshadowed by inter-governmental politics, the UN Human Rights Council's "Universal Periodic Review" (UPR) is under-appreciated. When it comes to China -- in February 2009 -- this becomes regrettable.

In the US, there is a general suspicion of things that the UN is trying to do. This may not be without good reasons. But UPR is not your yet another piece of useless UN resolution, another wasteful opportunity where diplomats make deals and the violators of human rights pat each other on the back! I understand how we taxpayers in the US have come to see the UN as a circus of political dealings, where repressive governments banging together – defeating efforts to examine or criticize those among them.

The UPR no doubt has its flaw and can potentially be abused by members states that fear for exposure of their human rights records. As far as China is concerned, though, under-appreciation accompanied by lack of activism in participating in this process will let go by an opportunity to shame China hence pressuring it to improve human rights:

1. Since 1989, each year, at the annual session of the former Human Rights Commission, efforts were defeated to try to put the review of China’s human rights records on the agenda! The new Human Rights Council (which replaced the Commission) made such hard work to jump that hurdle suddenly unnecessary. Human rights NGOs no longer need to sweat over lobbying governments claiming to care about human rights to sponsor a motion and get other governments to sign on in order to put the motion to examine China on the agenda!

2. China lost one major weapon against any international attempt to scrutinize its human rights: that it is "interference in China's internal affairs" and "selectively tarnishing China." All 192 members states of the UN are to be reviewed within 4 years, including China. This is no small measure for those of us who went through years of difficult lobbying, followed only by disappointment. China lost the very opportunity to manipulate the Commission procedures to block efforts to examine its performance: UPR is automatic - every 4 years - and comprehensive - all areas of human rights are examined whether or not China has signed or ratified any covenants or conventions governing specific areas of human rights.

3. Prior to UPR review, NGOs are given several opportunities to get involved to make the review work though their impact is limited. They can directly provide the UPR Working Group with their own reports of a country’s human rights performance. They need not to be “accredited” by the incredibly difficult process set by the UN for submitting such non-governmental reports.

UPR is not without its flaws and limitations, which can affect the objectivity and accuracy of the outcome of the review. The Geneva-based group International Service for Human Rights did a rather useful assessment of UPR in a report of the new Human Rights Council (2005- ) first-year performance.

One limitation is that the final conclusion of the Review is a running record of things said during the "interactive dialogue" and only states are involved in this dialogue. UPR is thus largely a peer review by member states (as contrasted to independent experts review conducted by treaty bodies). This can be manipulated by states under review. They can lobby their friends countries to occupy the 3-hour dialogue with praises!

Still, the upcoming Feb. 09 UPR on China is the first opportunity ever to put China's human rights performance in the past 4 years under the magnifying glasses at the UN. The review is supposed to be systematic and comprehensive. Concerned goverments and international or domestic civil society actors must not be blinded by cynicism and should fully explore the opportunities for making UPR bite!

Xiaorong Li

November 2008

Human Rights Prospect beyond Beijing Olympics

2008-05-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

Many Chinese today still believe the official line about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre – a counter-revolutionary violent riot. On March 22, 30 Chinese intellectuals who publicized “12 suggestions” including un-distorted information about Tibet and independent investigation have been denounced by their friends and even fellow liberal reformists. This week, the 21 Beijing lawyers who offered legal service to detained Tibetan monks have been interrogated and some of them received death-threats.

It is difficult to tell how long it will take for the truth to be told to the Chinese about Tibet, or Tiananmen, or, for that matter, the current international criticisms of China’s human rights. For some time to come, the government censorship and propaganda will fan nationalism and anti-Western sentiments. Consequently, in a manner rather resembling the icy period post-Tiananmen, China will stage harsh crackdowns, pushing aside any pretence to respect human rights and rule of law. High rank officials told the visiting American John Kamm of the US based Dialogue Foundation bluntly that China is prepared to sacrifice the Olympic Games to counter threats to national security at end of March.

It is not too late, then, to think beyond August.

The problems with China’s human rights and Tibet will not be solved in four months. Western democratic countries’ leaders have done and will continue to do little about the problems for the sake of competing for China’s market. Chinese activists, those pushing for reform, advocating human rights, will continue their struggle and pick up where the protests and pageantries leave after the Games are over. For sure, the Beijing Olympics now goes into history, together with such types as Hitler Nazi Germany, the former USSR, Apartheid South Africa, and the former dictatorial South Korea. This will also be the “legacy” of the IOC under Rogge’s leadership, ironically, for having awarded the Olympics to Beijing and adamantly dismissed any efforts to get the IOC to speak up about China’s human rights. China paid a price. China has to learn about commonly accepted behavior of decency if it wants to act and be treated as a respectable big power in the modern world. Economic mighty does not always triumph over the right.

While somewhat unexpected, China’s Olympic-size headache is inevitable. The economically powerful and diplomatically sophisticated, but politically little changed China is bound to resort to the usual tricks of censorship, propaganda and suppression in handling such incidents. More precisely, China only has these “tricks” in its repertoire of tools. How else could an authoritarian police state that systematically censor and control the press, manipulating the media, suppress freedom of religion, imprison dissidents and critics, disrespect rule of law, could have handled the current crisis differently? This time, however, China may have wished it had alternative tactics for the outcome of its suppression clearly undermines its grandiose Olympics dreams.

In 2001, it was controversial to award China the Olympics, but enough people believed that this opportunity would encourage China to become more open and friendlier to ideals of fairness, human dignity, and tolerance, which are at the core of the Olympic spirit. China made some unusual promise at the time: Improving human rights and allowing more freedom in the press. Those who supported the decision or are willing to shelf their doubts are particularly caught unprepared by Tibet and by the international public outrage. As if all of a sudden, the call to boycott the Olympics over China’s human rights is not even that relevant. One main human rights objective of a boycott - drawing international attention to and scrutiny of China’s human rights behavior -- has been fulfilled beyond anybody’s wild dreams. Only one month ago, in a March 17 internal memo circulated by the IOC chairman, Jacques Rogge said the events in Tibet, though “disturbing,” would not jeopardize the "success" of the Olympics, counting on that no "credible" government or organization is supporting boycott.

So how has China managed to mess up its golden opportunity, as if it had “picked up the rock and dropped it on its own feet”?

First, it’s arrogance. Giving its growing power status and increasingly more sophisticated diplomacy, China has confidence that it could run the Olympics at a complete disregard to its own promise to “promote human rights”, a promise it made out of desperation to win the bid to host the Games in Beijing. China has failed spectacularly to keep its promise. Violent attack and imprisonment of human rights activists, censorship, political persecution – China’s preferred methods to ensure pre-Olympics security and harmony - have prevailed in spite of “silent diplomacy” and public criticisms. Any Chinese who dare to speak up to criticize pre-Olympics abuses now languish in prison or risk arrests, violent attacks, surveillance, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.

In the “year of Olympics,” China has, in the name of Olympic preparations (construction, security, harmonious image, etc.), failed to protect labor rights of construction workers in re-building Beijing and other cities hosting the Games; suppressed efforts to seek justice by victims of forced eviction from housing/farming land for constructing Olympic facilities; detained and tortured people arriving in Beijing to complain about local official abuses and corruption in clean-up operations to rid the Olympic city off “undesirables” or off potential protesters. Press censorship got worse despite official promulgation of relaxing pre-approval rules for foreign journalists to conduct interviews. Authorities closed down websites or blogs, shut down or changed management of journals and newspapers, patrolled online chat rooms, BBS, and monitored cell phone and SMS use. Outspoken critics of the authorities handing of the Olympics have been punished harshly. China has jailed a new set of prisoners of conscience – the “Olympics prisoners.”

Hu Jia, a soft-spoken activist who suffers from hepatitis B, was jailed this month for criticizing the Olympics-related abuses, among his other expressions critical of the regime. His wife and enfant daughter have lived under house-arrest and police surveillance. The Beijing lawyer Teng Biao, who co-authored with Hu Jia an open letter “The Real China before the Olympics,” demanding an end to Olympics-related rights abuses, was kidnapped and interrogated for 41 hours by Beijing security police who threatened him with violence. Yang Chunlin, a rural organizer of land-loss farmers in China’s northeastern province Heilongjiang, was sentenced to 5 years last month for organizing a petition campaign, in which more than 11,000 farmers signed the open letter “We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics!” Many people who had traveled Beijing to petition the Central government to intervene and stop wrongdoings by local officials – from forced eviction to unpaid salaries to lost jobs, were intercepted and locked up in make-shift detention facilities for the purpose of making Beijing “harmonious” for greeting its Olympics visitors.

Secondly, it’s old habit. China reacted to the Tibetan monks’ protests in mid-March with its usual tactics – harsh crackdown with iron-fists, blaming the “Dalai Lama clique” for instigating the riots, blocking information, sealing off areas of protests, manipulating reporting, and fanning nationalism. The Chinese leaders’ continuing refusal to talk to the Dalai Lama gives the international community neither reassurance of any sincerity to solve the Tibetan issue peacefully nor any credibility in its claims about the “criminal” acts of the “rioting” Tibetans. The escalating numbers of detention and arrests of the Tibetan “instigators” only feed the fear of further suppression of religious freedom and violation of due process rights in the larger Tibetan areas.

It is unlikely that China could have avoided its current political crisis, not just a public opinion “disaster,” and could have handled things any better. Expensive public relations firms could not have saved China. Determined by its nature, it is accustomed to using brute force to suppress protesters, dissidents, “separatists” or “terrorists,” or anyone perceived as a threat to the state. There might be some indication of top leadership disagreement about how to handle the Tibetan incident, but the iron-fist approach wins because no leader within the high ranks would want to appear weak. Local officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region, including ethnic Tibetans serving in official capacity, stand to gain from escalating suppressions of the monks – in securing their own posts and increased allocation of state funding.

In short, China messed up its Olympics Gala because its approach, from beginning to end, is excessively political. On February 15, Xi Jinping, a member of the Standing Committee China’s Politburo and a front-runner to become the next president, told reporters that “holding the Olympics and the Special Olympics in 2008 is a major event for our Party”. Authorities throughout Beijing and the country have been charged with “the political duty” of ensuring “successful” Games. China treats the Olympics with such top political priority because it is eager to showcase itself a newly rising power, modern, prosperous, responsible and competent enough to host mega international events. Chinese leaders count on the world’s focus on China during and before the 3-week sports to officially inaugurate its international power status, to reclaim world recognition that took a nose dive after the 1989 bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Domestically, Chinese leaders count on the international prestige to boost its legitimacy to rule over a country where the disadvantaged and marginalized are restless, posing political challenges. The leaders need this boost to strengthen their hands within the ruling elites’ internal power struggle.

China’s politicizing of the Olympics has backfired. To the Chinese leaders, the political objectives of the Olympic dream are paramount whether or not they have predicted the international reaction. They suppressed dissent and upended any potential “threat” in their cradles. The IOC and other Western leaders may have contributed to this dogged pursuit. In the above-mentioned internal memo, the IOC praised China for such “improvements” as resumption of dialogue between China and the US, the signing of a UN covenant on human rights and China's election to the UN Human Rights Council. But who would find “improvements” in this list unless one stupidly equivocates talking and promising to real changes in behavior! Human rights dialogues between China and the US, China and EU countries and others in the past 20 years have produced little in ending political/religious repression. China had signed and ratified the Convention against Torture in 1988, yet torture remains prevalent. China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998 but never ratified or reformed its laws accordingly. China has abused its status on the UN Human Rights Council to get rid of human rights monitoring mechanisms to its own dislike.

The US President Bush insists on the “non-political” nature of the Olympics. But his “non-political” presence at the opening ceremony, as democratically elected leader of the people of the United States of America will deliver a clear political message: that the US does not mind China’s crackdown on Tibet protesters and Chinese human rights activists, nor its handling of the Beijing Olympics on the ruins of many Chinese lives, homes, rights, and dignity – the Party must go on and business is as usual. This message will surely hurt those Chinese who have struggled to reform the repressive system and have suffered a great deal in the hands of the current leadership – particularly those who stood up to the government’s Olympics-related abuses and brutality. Mr. Bush may say something about religious freedom, which will be blocked or quickly brushed away by the government controlled media, while the spectacle of him standing side-by-side with Chinese leaders on the podium, admiring fireworks and pageantry at the opening ceremony will be prominently and repeatedly broadcast to the Chinese public. That spectacle is precisely the political boost that the Chinese leaders desire! Mr. Bush may maintain his “extraordinary relationship” with the Chinese President Hu Jingtao and enjoy himself as a “sport fan,” the American people will bear the moral disgrace of his political gesture endorsing China’s human rights repression at home and support to repressive regimes abroad!

Reacting resolutely to the Tibetan “riots” serves the Chinese leaders’ need to rally the population and divert them from the expanding social-economic disparities at least for now. Facing with “separatist” Tibetans, “instigated” by the overseas “Dalai clique,” trying to spoil China’s “coming out” party, Chinese leaders found the “external threat” to unite the Han Chinese. Defending the Olympics from being tarnished and ruined is now tantamount to defending national unity and sovereignty, defending the pride and glory of the Chinese nation. This tactic always works wonders. Government censorship that block independent media coverage and manipulate information to suit the government’s political agenda make this easy. The extensive control mechanism of official censorship has benefited from cutting edge technologies provided by foreign (mostly American) companies. A combination of information manipulation and demonizing of the Dalai Lama, long-time lack of public debate over Tibet (and, for that matter, over Xinjiang), not surprisingly, brought about the latest wave of nationalistic fervor. In interviews in Chinese cities, foreign journalists found a resounding agreement with the government over Tibet; dissident intellectuals who voiced their concerns over media blockade and lack of independent verification of official reports of “rioting”, and human rights lawyers who offered to provide legal council to arrested Tibetan monks, have received emails attacking them as “traitors” and even death threats. The huge number of ethnic Chinese showed up in the streets of San Francisco last week, the only stop of the torch relay in North America, to support the Beijing Olympics, seemed to consist mostly in youth from the Bay Area’s universities heavily populated with Mainland Chinese students, and backed up by the Chinese Americans business establishments with large import-export interest at stake in China.

Looking beyond Olympics, we must not lose sight of a growing civil rights assertiveness in spite of the current nationalistic frenzy. In the past several years, this assertiveness has grown in the face of harsh suppression. Public outrage at the beating to death by police of a young migrant laborer, Sun Zhigang, led to the abolition in 2003 of a notorious extrajudicial detention system – the “custody and repatriation” detention facilities – was the first landmark victory of citizen mobilization to fight rights abuses. Police had unrestricted power to lock up anyone in this facility without any judiciary oversight. Since then, Chinese citizens – mainly public intellectuals, dissident writers, journalists, lawyers, and a new class of NOG activists (though independent NGOs still face sometimes insurmountable legal, political, and financial hurdles) – have organized many campaigns, often online, over rights problems. The problems involve labor protection, rural migrants’ rights, housing/land forced eviction, rights of people infected with HIV/AIDS, unfair elections of village directors or representatives to the local People’s Congress, official ban on books, government Fire-Wall on the Internet, employment discrimination against people tested positive in hepatitis B, pollution, etc.

What has come to be known as the “rights defense movement” has taken the form of citizens’ actions such as signing open letters or public petitions addressed to government officials, proposing legislative suggestions to law makers, disclosing official corruption or violations on websites or blogs, filling lawsuits against government or officials to seek remedies and accountability, and organizing forums for public discussions or demonstrations. This activism has spread from political, economic, and cultural metropolitan centers to the less developed inland cities and villages. Coastal areas which have grown the fastest also see more indications of rights awareness. Increasingly more people from the professional, resources-rich, middle-classes have joined in. Initially, just as farmers were prompted to stand up to their land rights, these middle-class people are prompted by defending their housing rights, employment opportunities, privacy as consumers of Internet or cell phone services, which matter to their life style. But, after encountering official hurdles, repression, and retaliation, witnessing the lack of rule of law and serious defects in the system first hand, some have joined force with other groups and become more sympathetic to the less fortunate social groups’ causes. The fight for legal rights and personal protection, though may pitch one group against another, has seemed to unite different social groups when they come to realize that the lack of a rule of law and non-democratic unaccountability of officials lie in the roots of their diverse complaints.

This movement has cashed in to confront government abuses in the name of the Olympics. On the day of the one-year countdown to Games’ opening on August 8, 2008, several dozens of Chinese citizens – writer, lawyers, journalists, and professors – publicized an open letter “One World, One Dream, Universal Human Rights,” urging Chinese leaders to end persecution of out-spoken critics of its handling of the Olympics, stop harassment of protesters against forced eviction for Olympic constructions, lift censorship, release political prisoners, and protect labor rights on Olympics construction sites. In China’s northeastern province Heilongjiang, more than 10,000 land-loss farmers signed an open letter “We Want Human Rights, not the Olympics.” And a similar open letter was also publicized with 261 signatures of people fighting forced eviction in Shanghai, China’s most developed metropolis. By now, however, inside China, authorities have practically stamped out any public display of dissent from the official-line on the Olympics. The protests continued, mostly online.

It is not far-fetched to accept that the small handful of Han Chinese, initially 30, then increased to about 300, who signed an open letter to demand free press and independent investigation of the March “riot” in Lhasa, may in fact represented the views of a much larger size of the population. The repression of religious freedom in Tibet, unfair returns in social-economic benefits of the region’s boom for ethnic Tibetans, lack of freedom of expression, etc. should be easily recognizable by some Han Chinese as common concerns. This shared understanding, made possible by the rapidly deepening disparities among Han Chinese, will undermine ethno-centrism and nationalism fostered by censorship and official manipulation.

However, one must be warned against a period of post-Olympics overcast. The government is unlikely to back down under international pressure. The leaders in office would absolutely not want to look indecisive to their rivals in the power struggle at the high level. In stead, they are doing their best to transform international public opinion into imperialist interference, intended to demonize China, contain its modernization, and deprive it of its well-deserved great power status. This nationalistic rhetoric is counted on to divert attention away from the injustices and right violations suffered by many Chinese. To save face internationally, appear strong to rivals, and strengthen their legitimacy to rule, Chinese leaders will retaliate against those who have challenged their ways of handling the Olympics – after the 20,000 strong foreign reporters return home and the world attention shift elsewhere.

As long as the Chinese leaders perceive nationalism as politically beneficial, no meaningful dialogue with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama will be likely. International protests and pressures from some Western leaders will keep up. The Chinese government will do everything they could to transform this humiliation into a national crisis, justifying imposing more draconic measures against “separatists,” dissidents and reformers after the Dames. There may set in a period of freeze, so to speak, in a manner with resemblance to the post-Tiananmen era in the 1990s. Detained Tibetan monks (official number is put in the 900s now) and other protesters or critics may be forced to “settle scores after the Autumn.”

Yet, such set-backs on the treacherous road toward political openness in China, though inevitable, are temporary. China can’t shut its door to the global trafficking of ideas, activism, and solidarity with the repressed. The messages of the recent international protests are sipping through China’s Great Firewalls and will spread, thanks to globalization and the internet, faster than two decades ago. This will prompt some soul-searching among the Chinese populace. This prospect, depressing as it is, is no worse than the international lethargy before the current scrutiny on China: when business as usual with China predominated despite its disregard for human rights, while the international key players, preoccupied with the “war on terror,” seemed content with sterile “human rights dialogues” and quite diplomacy. International civil society actors can make a big difference as e have witnessed lately. They will keep the pressures on to extract good compliance to international norms and shining the spotlight on China.

The longer view beyond August also asks for better preparedness for assisting Tibetan protesters and activists inside China. Some of them are eager to take advantage of the unprecedented exposure to have their voices heard. The international community may be able to help cooling nationalistic frenzy, for instance, by keeping an focus on human rights abuses in both the Tibetan and Han Chinese regions by the same authoritarian regime. This would avoid playing into the hands of government-manipulated extreme nationalism and undermining positions for Han Chinese activists sympathetic and supportive to the Tibetan struggle for religious freedom, social-economic justice, cultural integrity, and human rights. A peaceful and democratic solution for Tibet requires fundamental political reform of the authoritarian regime. The international community can help the Tibetans more effectively by helping both the Tibetans and the Han Chinese to advance their common agenda.

Xiaorong Li
April 2008

(This paper, in Italian, appeared in the Aspen Institute Italia publication: Aspenia, No. 43 http://www.aspeninstitute.it/Aspenweb/Aspenweb.nsf/AspeniaUltimo?OpenForm&Li
ngua=I&Area=001000)

China’s Failures and Human Rights Council’s Challenge

2006-10-10T12:38:00.001-07:00

China’s “voluntary pledge,” made in May for the expressive purpose of winning a seat on the Human Rights Council, sounds ever more hollow these today. Breaking its own promises, China poses a serious challenge to the new HRC, which promises to provide stronger and more effective protection of human rights.

China pledged that, “The Chinese Government is committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Chinese people… The Chinese Government respects the universality of human rights and supports the UN in playing an important role in the protection and promotion of human rights.”

Having assured the votes to be elected, China went back to business as usual. In the same manner as in anticipation of major political events involving intense power struggle within the ruling elite, the Chinese leadership, citing security concerns, has staged a massive campaign to crackdown on human rights defenders, lawyers, and outspoken writers since mid-June. The leadership tries to strengthen its hand in controlling factions within the Communist Party and the party’s exclusive rule during the upcoming Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of Chinese Community Party (CCP) this fall, the 17th CCP Congress and general election to the National People’s Congress in 2007. Out of fear for critics and public exposes of its human rights problems during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the leadership has also begun silencing and imprisoning activists as part of the clean-up preparations.

The current crackdown has resulted in gross and systematic rights abuses. In the four months since it made the “voluntary pledge,” the government has acted aggressively to:
- Promulgate press control regulations on international media operating in China. In June, the government proposed huge fines (up to the equivalent of US$12,500) for journalists, foreign or domestic, who report “emergency incidents” such as clashes with police, epidemic outbreaks, or natural/man made disasters without official permission. On September 10, government imposed another measure making the official Xinhua News Agency as the only authorized distributor of all news and information by foreign news agencies operating in China, banning several categories of information.
- Close down countless online publications, discussion forums, and chat rooms, monitoring email correspondences, cell phone calls, text messages and instant messaging. In the past few months, government shut down popular websites and online forums frequented by activists and independent writers, such as the Aegean Sea, Century China, Dijin Minzhu, and so on.
- Detain human rights activists and lawyers. For example, the blind activist Chen Guangcheng in Shangdong, the rights activist/independent writer Guo Feixioang in Guangdong, and the Beijing human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng; the police have placed his wife and children under close and invasive surveillance since arresting him in mid-August.
- Charge democracy/human rights activists with political crimes that carry long prison terms or the death penalty: “incitement and sedition to overthrow the state.” For instance, the rights activists Guo Qizhen and several writers/democracy party activists have been charged with this crime. On September 6, authorities arrested Internet writer and former Aegean Sea Web site editor Zhang Jianhong. He is accused of “inciting subversion,” and faces a possible prison sentence of several years.
- Imprison (sentence) activists for peaceful activities. The blind activist was sentenced for 4 years and 3 months on August 20. On August 11, Tan Kai, an environmentalist from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province and founder of the NGO called “Green Watch,” was convicted of “illegally acquiring state secrets” and sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment. On August 25, the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court sentenced Zhao Yan, a researcher at the Beijing office of New York Times, to three years of imprisonment on charges of “fraud,” a trumped up charge to retaliate him paying close attention to peasant land rights and fair compensation, providing legal aid to help farmers who brought litigation against corrupt officials.
- Intensify persecution of unofficial “house church” members and demolish churches with many incidents in the eastern provinces. In one case, in Xiaoshan of Zhejiang Province, officials demolished a 200-year old Christian church in August and arrested more than 60 church members who opposed the demolition; Zan Aizong, a journalist, also a Christian, received seven days of administrative detention for reporting the demolition of this church. He was accused of “spreading rumors and disturbing public order.”
- Put hundreds of activists, outspoken critics, under house arrest or residential surveillance; some activists have been detained incommunicado or made to disappear for periods of time. On August 18, the activist Deng Yongliang and lawyer Zhang Jiankang, disappeared into police custody in Yinan, Shandong, and police denied knowledge of their whereabouts. They were eventually released.
- and authorize use of police force to suppress peaceful demonstrations by farmers demanding land rights. On August 9, 2006, Yao Baohua and Zhou Yaqin, representing landless peasants in Changzhou in Jiangsu Province were put under criminal detention by the local police and charged with “gathering a crowd to disturb social order.” They had been seeking to petition the local government and were expressing their views peacefully. On August 22, rights representative Liu Zhengyou in Zigong City, Sichuan Province was badly beaten by unidentified thugs right before the eyes of police. Liu has been urging the government to negotiate with peasants to settle a land dispute fairly and had been participating with the farmers in peaceful demonstrations.

This intensified crackdown on civil and political rights contradicts China “voluntary pledge” that “having signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), China is now in the process of amending its Criminal, Civil and Administrative Procedure Laws and deepening judicial reform to create conditions for ratification at an early date.” The government has instead switched on the green light for State Security Squads (SSS) and Public Security Bureaus (PSB) forces to override laws regulating detention and due process rights, which were recently enacted or amended, and to trespass the prohibits proscribed in ICCPR!

The government’s pattern of behavior also does not inspire any confidence that, even if the criminal, civil and administrative laws are amended and the ICCPR is ratified, rights conditions would see any brighter days. There is no indication the government will cease exempting itself from the country’s laws and its Constitution. Its behavioral patterns suggest it is now exempting itself from its membership obligations on the HRC.

Few among those who monitor rights conditions in China had their hopes up high upon hearing the “voluntary pledge,” though most had hoped the new HRC would handle China more professionally. The HRC faces a serious test to its ingenuity and sincerity – whether it too, like its predecessor, will play politics to the effect of muzzling critics of and diverting attention from rights abuses by a powerful member state. To some extent, the HRC’s promise to be a stronger, more effective, and more credible mechanism for promoting human rights, and to correct defects of the defunct Commission – politicization, double standards, regional alliance, “buying votes,” using procedures to block actions censuring abusive states, and other privileges in that “abusers club” - rest on whether and how the HRC will face up to China’s open challenge.

But can the HRC live up to its promises and does it have any real options in responding to China’s challenge? Consider the following two options that seem entailed in the promises the HRC made:

1. One is a review of China’s rights performance under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, a responsibility of the HRC, as set out in the General Assembly Resolution 60/251: This review would have a large body of “objective and reliable information” to draw upon since independent Chinese and international NGO monitors, foreign governmental and inter-governmental agencies (like the EU), have put out reports about human rights violations in China. During its current (second) session, the HRC has also heard reports from Thematic Special Procedures Mandates, for example, the report from Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, about his mission to China last year, which found “torture remains widespread” in the country. This body of information points to the failures of Chinese government in fulfilling its human rights obligations and commitments.

This option is at its best remote. The HRC has yet to schedule its UPR, which is understandable given its heavy agenda during the second session. At this point, it is unclear when the UPR will be ready to look into countries’ human rights behaviors and how politics among member states will play out in the reviewing process.

2. Another possible course of action is to conduct special review of allegations of China’s “gross and systematic violations of human rights” for consideration of suspending its membership: Under the terms of General Assembly Resolution 60/251, the Human Rights Council’s member states are elected in a secret ballot by an absolute majority of the General Assembly, but taking into account candidates’ contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and voluntary pledges and commitments, etc. And any member that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights can be suspended by the General Assembly by a two-thirds majority.

However, such a special review of China certainly will not take place within a meaningful timeframe. Even if such a review is put on the agenda, and sufficient information about “gross and systematic violations” is provided, it will be almost impossible to get two-thirds of the 47 member states to vote for suspending China’s membership.

It is very difficult to count on sufficient political will on the part of member states to make the HIC’s promises credible when it comes to China. Nevertheless, one can invest in international civil society stakeholders (NGOs, for example) to enable them to play an increasingly crucial role in pressuring the HRC to deliver on its promises, in providing reliable information, and in pressuring for reform of the UN human rights system – for example, by highlighting its inability to act when it must, as in the case of China.

Xiaorong Li

September 28, 2006

(This article appeared in Human Rights Features)

China’s Failures and Human Rights Council’s Challenge

2006-10-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

柏林行 Trip to Berlin

2005-11-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

第一次到柏林。时值隆冬，天色灰灰，空气冰凉。这座在二战废墟上重建的城市，点缀着许多现代派、后现代派风格的建筑，加之忙碌的节日前购物人群，倒也颇有生气。

应哈佛大学欧洲研究柏林中心邀请，我前往在该中心举办的“中国：人权与经济机遇”对话讲演会上发言。

抵达之前有一段插曲。会前三周，会议组织人来信说，曾答应与会的第三位发言人突然提出因故不能出席，剩下我们两位。另一位是《华尔街日报》前任驻北京记者尹.约翰先生。约翰今年刚出一本新书《野草》。书中记述三位普通中国百姓寻求社会公正的经历。约翰先生曾因为他在中国期间的新闻报道荣获美国的普里茨大奖。因故退出的第三位发言人是麻省理工大学的一位华人经济学教授。主持单位曾希望我们之间能有一场关于中国的经济、公民社会、和人权的对话。对话缺了一方，哈佛中心十分着急。几天后，他们另外邀请了一位欧籍经济学者、现任欧洲某商业公司驻上海代表。看来一场有趣的对话可以照原计划进行了。

没想到，会前三天，主持人来信说该商人也突然退出。不过他倒是坦诚，他说他的公司不允许他在这种讨论中国的人权状况的公开讲演会上露面，认为他答应出席太冒险，将损害该公司在中国的生意！到达柏林当天，笔者又听说，曾经提前注册的听众中的一些商界和金融界人士也来信表示歉意，说他们出于压力不得不缺席。

是这些金融和商界人士过于惧怕、因此实行自我审查（self-censorship）呢，还是有关机构在下面对他们施加压力、用取消合同和投资机会或者研究访问机会威胁他们退出？笔者不得而知。

这场讲演会定在柏林的“外国事务协商委员会”（相当于纽约的Council for Foreign Affairs）举行。好几位以短期进修大陆学生身份注册的同胞届时到达会场。陆续在会议厅后面落座后，当中不只一位举起相机纷纷对着我们几位坐在讲台上的发言人和主持人拍照。

出乎主持人意外的是，抵达的听众把一间能容纳120人的会议厅几乎装满了。后来得知，有些不能代表商界到场的人士以个人身份前来出席。

主持会议的塔夫茨大学（在美国波士顿）教授斯密斯简单回顾了20世纪各国在人权与经济贸易关系问题上失败与成功的经验教训。他谈到当年有些美国公司在希特勒上台后，继续与他治下的纳粹帝国通商好几年。二战后，美国人民接受了教训，支持政府对苏联实行经贸制裁以及随后在80年代对南非种族歧视当局实行的制裁。但是，89年后，美国很快解除了对中国实行的人权与贸易挂钩的政策。至于中国的人权与经济发展和国际贸易之间是否应该完全脱节，这是当前颇有争议的问题，他希望这次讲演会能激发听众的思考。

接下来，约翰先生发言。他注重介绍他在中国期间与普通百姓的接触，他的经历使他感到民间社会不屈的力量和困境，但是他相信这股力量将会推动中国社会自下而上的变革。

我的发言首先肯定了近年来中国政府在立法、乡村选举试验、以及把“保护人权”写入宪法等方面的正面尝试，但是，由于基本体制痼疾，在保护基本人权方面仍然存在严重问题，如大量使用死刑、酷刑（刑讯逼供）和非法羁押；民间自发争取经济和社会文化人权的团体和人士继续遭到迫害和压制，恰恰因为他们的参政、言论、结社、集会、信仰自由等公民政治权利受到严重侵犯；中国式的集权控制下的经济发展和官僚腐败造成社会分配不公、贫富悬殊急剧扩大；国外企业到中国投资经商对中国的政治改革进程和人权改进显然有直接影响，雅虎香港公司协助公安治罪网上作家师涛提供证据、雅虎和微软等公司签署进入中国市场自检条约、在其搜寻器上查封“民主”“人权”等字眼等例，就可以说明这个问题。

接下来听众提问，讨论了近一小时。主持会议的斯密斯教授最后邀请在场的几位“年轻中国学生”发言。他们之间悄声商议后，推出一位发言人。这位年轻女士用相当流利的英文说，邓小平的英明改革是中国历史上的伟绩，酷刑等只是文革中的现象，中国人口众多，是存在一些问题，但是要慢慢解决，不能因此造成社会动乱，繁荣的经济给外商带来极好的投资机会，不要错过，等等。台上台下各位的目光都集中到我身上，看来我不得不出来“应战”。

近年来在各种场合公开演讲，我已经习惯了这类“慷慨呈辞”，“应战”起来也有了经验。年轻人是中国的未来，出来留学的人更有挑起重任的机会。他们在海外公开场合如此发言，没准也是身不由己，但完全有可能是他们在言论、媒体控制下只能接触官方许可信息而形成了这些代表他们本人真实思想的看法。民族情绪或许也夹杂其中。

散会后的自由交谈中，这几位学生中的一位提醒我，德国、美国社会也有阴暗面。也许是这样，我回答说，但是我们不能因此就彼此心照不宣、闭口不谈阴暗面？可惜我当时没时间与这位继续交谈：既然中国签署了反对酷刑的国际公约、口头承认有关人权的普世性，官方媒体近来也大量报道美国士兵施行酷刑的消息，那么，为什么就不能公开批评中国现存的酷刑现象？

离开柏林前，我来到残存的“柏林墙”。当年隔绝东、西德两个世界，长达150多公里的森严壁垒，现在只剩下200米长的一段，作为历史遗迹保留下来。从61年东德修建“柏林墙”到它89年的倒塌，曾有150 多人因试图从东德越墙到西德而被东德看守击毙。

这里正好在举行一个露天图片展览：“恐怖的解析”。柏林市政府已经动工在这里修建一个纳粹反人类罪行博物馆，但因经费不足尚未完工。这块废墟曾是40年代纳粹盖世太保的总部。90年人们在这里的一块荒地下面发掘出盖世太保的监狱和刑讯室，旁边的一个荒土堆是他们执行示众绞刑和秘密枪决的地方。这个展览是柏林市举办的，有大量图片和文件翻拍，纪录了当时在这里被监禁、被施酷刑、和枪决的许多德国和国际地下抵抗人士，有他们身前的照片，被枪决的报刊新闻照，刑警的纪录，当中有作家，医生，记者，家庭妇女，有些仅仅因为发表了不满纳粹的文章，或参与了地下抵抗组织的活动，就被关押在这里，不少人在英美俄联军开始攻城时被草率枪决。展览的另一部分记载纳粹如何把柏林的犹太族居民，老人、小孩在内，解押到集中营，再一部分是战后纽伦堡审判战犯的图片和法庭纪录。

据展览引言介绍，当年纽伦堡审判期间对纳粹罪行的大量揭露在德国本土并没有得到充分的报道。世界各地媒体记者芸集纽伦堡，然而只有七个德国记者现场报道。战后德国百姓忙于艰难的日常生活，但是，人们也不愿正视自己身边的丑恶、更不愿承担自己的一份责任。希特勒的纳粹统治系统屠杀六百万犹太人的残暴反人类罪行和战争罪延续了十多年，没有社会各界（商界，媒体，知识分子、市民等）的普遍支持，可能吗？战后德国媒体和公众舆论的相对沉默，使德国社会错过一个极好的反思、教育机会。

在某种程度上，历史恐怕会在我们眼前重演。今天，一股无形的强大的压力正在迫使人们沉默，迫使他们对中国这块土地上发生的刑讯逼供、任意监禁、以言论信仰治罪等人权虐待避而不谈。不光是在德国，在法国，甚至美国，如果遇不到公证舆论的阻滞，这股压力将蔓延、侵蚀“自由世界 ”。

一位德国朋友告诉我，经历过二战的她的父母一辈至今仍然认为，“除了希特勒等头领，德国人民对二战罪行没有任何责任”；然而她的同辈人，60年代成长起来的叛离青年一代，则负有过于沉重的罪感和羞辱，以至失去了批评其他国度违反人权的勇气。这一代也是目前德国政界、商界和知识界的骨干。我可以理解这种心态，但是，他们这样做恰恰无助于杜绝让他们内疚的历史以别的形式、在不同程度上重演，也不利于巩固在斜恶和残暴的废墟上建立起来的德国民主自由。

灰蒙蒙的天空飘起小雨，我的脚趾头开始冻得发疼，我感觉步伐沉重。一群大陆游览者过来了，来参观“柏林墙”，他们没有浏览展出的图片，纷纷拍照留影，匆匆离去，可能是要赶到下一个游览胜地。他们渐去的谈笑声，是我联想起另外一些同胞：他们在做什么？忙于为狱中网络作家辩护？为维护土地权、寻求水源污染救助的同胞上访？为因“刑讯逼供”被判重刑的受害者准备上诉？为受到家庭暴力的妇女提供法律咨询？无形中我感到暖和了许多，加快了步伐。

晓蓉

2005年11月28日于巴黎

Tiananmen is not for sale

2005-06-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Xiaorong Li and Lun Zhang

International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2005

PARIS June 4 marks the 16th anniversary of China's bloody repression of pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square. The legacy of the massacre has been put sharply in focus by the current debate over lifting the arms embargo imposed by the European Union in response to that event.

The debate is not only about the meaning of Tiananmen in the context of rapid changes in China, but also the will of the EU to assert its values as it fashions coherent policies toward an increasingly influential China.

China has evolved in important ways, but not in its authoritarian political structure. Its dynamic economy has brought prosperity to many, fostered social pluralism and forced the state to scale back its totalitarian intrusiveness.

Yet those citizens who demand participation in decision-making or who criticize government policies risk retaliation, arbitrary detention, unfair trials or torture. The official verdict on Tiananmen as "counterrevolutionary" stands firm. Public commemorations and demands for an accounting remain punishable offenses.

Chinese leaders underestimate the potency of Tiananmen. After the "SARS doctor," Jiang Yanyong, earned international acclaim by disclosing official cover-ups of the epidemic, he joined the "Tiananmen Mothers" to demand an official re-evaluation of the massacre.

Mourners poured out their hearts for former Party Secretary General Zhao Ziyang, who died last January after spending 15 years under house arrest for having shown sympathy for the students in Tiananmen.

In April, the government hastily banned the anti-Japan demonstrations that it had tacitly permitted after demonstrators extended their focus from the atrocities committed by Japanese troops half a century ago to those committed by the Chinese Liberation Army in 1989.

By holding Tiananmen political prisoners, refusing any reckoning with what happened and burying the memories, it is the government that keeps the spotlight on the massacre.

China finds it humiliating to be classed with countries like Myanmar and Zimbabwe, which are also under EU embargoes for the violations of human rights.

Of course, China is worlds apart from these impoverished and woefully mismanaged states. However, like Myanmar, China harasses democracy activists and imprisons many for their ideas and convictions. Myanmar may have conscripted the most child soldiers, but China executes the largest number of people each year. Despite food insecurity and political violence, Zimbabwe has, unlike China, a functioning opposition, albeit tightly constrained.

Just as European leaders are not about to lift embargoes on Myanmar or Zimbabwe without real rights improvement, so they should keep the embargo on China until there is measurable progress.

The free world must reject the convenient assumption that the Chinese prefer prosperity to political freedom.

The explosion of independent reporting and information has been accompanied by the deployment of an estimated 50,000 cyberpolice who block Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor the use of cellular phones and track down Internet activists.

Enhanced economic performance has not meant better protection for those whose lives and interests inconvenience those in power. When China ratified the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, for example, it entered a reservation explicitly rejecting the right of workers to form independent unions. Workers who produce the products flooding European markets are powerless to fight hazardous sweatshop conditions and low wages.

International pressure after Tiananmen in the form of trade sanctions did some good, until the argument prevailed that they punished ordinary Chinese. That argument hardly applies to the weapons embargo, since it is the Chinese state and its military that benefit from the arms trade.

China threatens to retaliate by withholding business contracts and cooperation in other areas if the EU stands firm on rights conditions for lifting the embargo. Heeding these threats only encourages further use of this tactic.

The ball should be in China's court. It can have the embargo lifted by making concrete and structural progress on civil rights.

Even if a proposed "code of conduct" is applied to future weapons sales, the symbolic act of lifting the embargo would signal triumph of business interest over human rights, sending the wrong message to people in the region who aspire for what Europe stands for.

(Lun Zhang was a student leader during the Tiananmen protests and now lives in Paris. Xiaorong Li is visiting at the Center for International Study and Research in Paris.)

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