There are quite a few international
organizations interested in the human rights issue with China, but
probably the two biggest are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International. (By biggest, I mean the amount of trouble they
create for China.) I serve as chair of the advisory committee of
the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, so Iâve been in the
thick of that. Some of my writing deals with that....
The real problem lies in civil and political
rights.
The trend [on the
human rights issue] has been similar to what I have described for
some of the other issues. The Chinese government has said: "This is
a foreign pressure on us. Itâs interfering with our
sovereignty. Weâre not interested in it. We handle these
things our own way." Slowly, step by step, through a combination of
foreign pressure and internal developments, they have begun to get
on board. I think one of the major dynamics there was that after
the Tianenmen incident, the human rights issue began to cost them
something in their foreign policy. They were sanctioned by the G7,
and while those sanctions were pretty light if you look at them
from our point of view, from the Chinese point of view they were
rather important.
One of the most important things
was that the American president would not meet with the Chinese
head of state from 1989 until Clinton met with Jiang Zemin in 1997.
They were in the diplomatic doghouse and it mattered to them for
various reasons-international and domestic legitimacy reasons. So
they got together and said, "What are we going to do about this?"
And the advisors said, "Hey, we have a great human rights record.
You know, we feed our people, and so on. They are all in our
constitution. We donât have to go around with our tail
between our legs. Letâs go out and do Madison Avenue about
how great our human rights are."
So they re-entered the game of
international diplomacy around human rights, and they have played
that game very skillfully. Recently, as you know, they signed the
International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights and
then, most recently, the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, both of which have yet to be ratified by the
National People's Congress. When they ratify them, they'll probably
do what many countries do, which is to say "nothing we have signed
here contravenes anything we have in our domestic law."
If you look at their domestic
law, they have a constitution that gives everybody all these
rights, but how is that constitution really implemented? Now we get
into the nitty-gritty, which again is a mixed picture. As for
social, economic and cultural rights, they have fed, educated and
provided work for a vast population. Social, economic and cultural
rights generally in the U.N. system are viewed as programmatic
rights-you know, things that you're aiming for. And the Chinese
certainly are aiming for those things.
There's been a certain amount of
backtracking connected with economic reforms. You put people out of
work. Your socialist enterprises collapse. You're not providing
socialized medical care. Education is compulsory on the books for
nine years, but a lot of students don't go. So in many ways, the
social, economic and cultural rights situation is worse than it was
under Mao. But the whole economy is better. Worsening social and
economic rights might be a stage on the road to improved rights, if
they can succeed in making a transition. They're certainly trying
to build up a modern social welfare system.
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The real problem area lies in
civil and political rights, which are by and large illusory. The
totalitarian system under Mao has disappeared, so there is a
widening sphere of privacy, and in the private sphere people even
can talk about politics and have opinions. Taxi drivers can grumble
to foreigners and stuff like that. But as soon as it becomes any
type of a threat to the very tight vision of national security that
the government has, the crackdown is there. They have a vast police
system. They've basically moved from a totalitarian state to a
police state. So that if you want to publish an article criticizing
the government, if you want to demand human rights or have a number
of people sign a document to demand human rights, or if you want to
form a political party, you get arrested.
After you get
arrested, the local police have a lot of leeway. They may
interrogate you and release you. They may put you into something
called labor re-education, which the police can do [by themselves].
It's not a criminal sentence; there's no court trial. Or they can
take you to trial, have a rigged trial with a pre-judgment, and
send you to jail with a long sentence. All those things have
happened to a lot of people. Lately, they've been leaning more
toward interrogating people and then letting them go. That's
progress, but it's a very insecure type of progress because all the
cards are in the hands of the government.
Another area
that we often include in the human rights ambit is Tibet, which is
only partly a human rights problem-it's also a big political
problem. The human rights piece of it is relatively easy for us as
human rights activists to identify. That's the part where you throw
people in jail for the peaceful exercise of freedom of speech and
then beat them up in jail. Those two things clearly violate human
rights, and they do them a lot. And the reason they do them is
because of their fear that if they don't crack down very hard on
the Tibetan independence movement, that movement will gain a
certain momentum.
The rest of
the Tibet problem is a much bigger area that's really not about
human rights, I would say, though some people might disagree. That
is the fact that the Chinese government, which predominantly
represents people of Chinese ethnicity, has sovereignty (it's
recognized by every country) over this big piece of territory that
traditionally was occupied by a different ethnic group-the
Tibetans. And the Chinese won't give it up. They're keeping that
control by military means, essentially. They have, as you know, a
garrison there. They're using military force against the will of
the local people, as I think pretty much everyone will
agree.
And they're engaged in a
rapid economic development in the hopes of winning away the loyalty
of the local people from the Dalai Lama. They're sending in, or
allowing the natural inflow via the economic magnet, a lot of
Chinese people into that territory so there's a demographic tipping
taking place. We don't consider these issues to be human rights
issues. They don't violate any UN document. The Tibetan movement
overseas, however, considers a lot of that to be a human rights
issue.
No progress
really has been made on the whole package of Tibet issues--the
human rights piece and the other piece--despite its being of great
concern to the outside world. The reason is that the Chinese
believe they are holding a winning strategy here. They say, "If we
just keep this up, we're going to win. The Dalai Lama is going to
pass away." The Chinese have control of the Panchen Lama. In the
Tibetan system, the Panchen Lama, who is now a 6, 7, 8-year-old kid
the Chinese are educating, gets to pick the next Dalai Lama. So
it's a very long-term strategy. But the stakes are tremendous for
the Chinese. Just look at the map....China could lose a big hunk of
what you now see on the map as China, and it's a very important
hunk. No Chinese government will ever willingly give that
up.
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