- 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)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Mr. Obama Must Respond to Chinese Civil Society’s Call for Change
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.
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.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Myths, challenges and opportunities
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)
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)
Thursday, November 20, 2008
UPR: a Quiet Leap-Forward at the UN, an Opportunity to Do Some Good
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
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
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Human Rights Prospect beyond Beijing Olympics
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)
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)
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
China’s Failures and Human Rights Council’s Challenge
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 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
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 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)
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