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Human Rights in China

Have they improved in recent years?

The Post Tiananmen Generation

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The 1989 killings in Beijing have become a distant memory. In many ways this is good news for opponents of the CCP.

The CCP has made great efforts to win over the new generations of students and intellectuals by promoting party membership. CCP membership, allied to a degree, is a passport to a good career. The material wealth available to China’s well educated has also impacted on dissent.

Financial security has been the trade off for the lack of human rights and democracy we take for granted in the UK

The Tiananmen Anniversary

Economic Inequality3

Statistics, especially from a country as secretive as China, can be unreliable.

But economists often use a formula called the Gini coefficient, which is an internationally used measure of how equally wealth is distributed within a country.

According to official Gini statistics, China’s wealth gap is growing.

Rural Children Left Behind

“Quality of work is more important than life”4

There are at least 3 million mingong in Shanghai. They will work for anything between £20-30 per week, doing 14 hours shifts, seven days a week on construction sites or factory sweatshops.

The Great Wall of Shopping5

Some Chinese, the new middle classes, are enjoying the economic miracle. Despite recession elsewhere in the world, “Communist China” continues to experience an economic boom that has seen China replace the UK as the world’s 4th largest economy. Those with good jobs in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing can enjoy high standards of living – and consumer goods, made at home!

Individual Rights6

Many restrictions have been lifted e.g. Chinese couples can marry younger and no longer need to have a medical before marriage. But there is still a great deal of pressure to have only one child.

Getting round the one child policy

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The Strike Hard campaign

The CCP have used the 9/11 attacks on the USA as an opportunity to crack down on its political opponents.

Hu Jintao’s zero tolerance “strike hard” campaign has been popular in the way in which it has tackled crimes of burglary and violent assault, but peaceful political opponents have been its victims too.

Portrayed as “ethnic separatists, terrorists and religious extremists”, dissenting voices have been imprisoned, placed under house arrest and harassed by the police.

Re-Education Through Labour8

Troublemakers are Insane

Since 1949 an estimated 50 million people have been taken to Laogai for “Re-Education Through Labour”.

They serve sentences of up to three years, entirely at the recommendation of the police without having had a chance to defend themselves in court.

Most of the inmates are drug addicts (about 40%), followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement (28%) and prostitutes (about 10%).

Drive-by Justice9

To speed up executions, mobile courts and mobile execution chambers have been introduced. The police decide guilt. Execution is by lethal injection, in the van.

Capital crimes in China include; Violent crime, drugs offences, separatism , aiding Tibet border crossings, bribery, pimping, embezzlement, tax fraud, insurance fraud, stealing petrol, selling harmful foodstuffs and disrupting the stock market.

Capital Punishment in China

Falun Gong10

Falun Gong followers have been selected for special intimidation by the Chinese authorities. Its religious code, which stresses “freedom of thought”, is dangerous to one party rule. The CCP feels it should “re-educate” Falun gong supporters the way a parent will “re-educate” a naughty child.

Assessing how many Falun Gong members have been taken into custody and how they have been treated is complicated by the Chinese government practice of treating or warehousing Falun Gong followers in mental institutions or psychiatric wards.

Falun Gong Arrested

Tibet11

Tibet made the news in 2008 as the Chinese authorities suppressed protests for Tibetan independence.

China “liberated”. or, to be more accurate, invaded Tibet in 1950. Its leader, The Dalai Lama, has been in exile for the past 40 years. He lives in neighbouring India. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his advocacy of peaceful protest. His photograph is banned in China.

Hundreds of monks and nuns who have supported him are imprisoned by the Chinese government, in violation of fundamental human rights. Around 11% of the inmates of Tibet’s notorious jails are imprisoned for publicly opposing the leadership of the CCP.

Tibet protest 15 March 2008

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Should the games have been boycotted?

Olympic Protests

Internet Freedom?13

China’s launch of Google.cn has shocked internet users. Google, like every global brand, is desperate to expand its market in China.

The company has agreed to censor its search engine, so that when a Chinese citizen enters, for example, “democracy” into the Google search, nothing meaningful, if anything at all, will come up. Google had caught most of the flak for its operations in China. Yet, Yahoo, arguably, has been worse.

According to Reporters without Borders, Yahoo “grassed” a Yahoo using cyber protestor to the Chinese authorities.

Google’s censorship