HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA

People are still subject to an approach to human beings learned from the Soviet Union in the 1930’s by a Party which, in its pursuit of total power, abandoned all civilised values.

The PRC is a one-party State in which executive, judiciary and trade unions are subject to Party dictates, and in which censorship is pervasive.  In 2005, controls on journalists and religion were revivified and people were imprisoned, often in degrading conditions, for offences which include accessing foreign websites, informing people abroad about regulations, advocating ethnic rights, being involved in worker protests or overstepping the lines as a journalist.

There have been improvements.  In 2004, the Constitution was amended to recognise the expression “human rights”; in 2005, regulations were promulgated to punish officials who take revenge on whistle-blowers or who fail to deal reasonably with petitioners.

From the 1980’s, there have been many initiatives aimed at reforming the administration of public order, making it less arbitrary.  But this is a society in which, for generations, cruelty and contempt for human life were deliberately fostered.  As many reminiscences have eloquently reminded us, under Soviet instructions in the 1920’s, the communists deliberately set out to be savage, to turn people against each other, to abolish all rules and inhibitions, and to harden their hearts against pity so that they would not blink as they saw neighbours tortured to death before their eyes.  After the victory over the Nationalists in 1949, the wanton brutality got worse, with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in campaigns against this or that category of people, the purposes of which were to terrify the remainder, to give employment to thugs and to create complicity in those who were incited to seize the property of the persecuted, or  forced to witness their destruction.  The most decent of instincts – empathy, altruism, charity – were made shameful or dangerous.

It is not therefore very surprising, now that the Party is trying to re-establish the civilisation – attitudes and institutions – it destroyed in the period 1927 – 76, that if finds this difficult, not only because power, unchallenged and unaccountable, is still in the hands of a small ruling class, but particularly since many of its own personnel have been reared in a mind-set completely at odds with either traditional civilised virtues or modern sensibilities.  How can such people have any care for the kind of human rights that brave farmer representatives deserve or idealists expect?  What does it matter to them if the cities and villages that have survived communism’s onslaught and still provide the ecology of decency, are available to be smashed to become mere real estate opportunities?  The law can protect only if there are people prepared to abide by it.

Public order is the responsibility of two ministries, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the intelligence agency of the PRC, and the Ministry of Public Service (MPS).  The latter is more akin to a Western ministry of internal affairs, dealing with day-to-day police work, while the MSS’s main responsibilities are counter-espionage at home and intelligence-gathering abroad.  One very particular function of the MPS is its responsibility for the Household Registration or hukou system, which determines where you are allowed to live.

What is often referred to as the Chinese concentration camp system, or laogai, in fact covers two types of incarceration, laogai and laojiao.  Laogai, or “remoulding through labour”, is the harsher, and in principle reserved for enemies of the State and criminals, whereas laojiao (laodong jiaoyang) aims to provide ‘re-education through labour’ for troublemakers.

Although in the 1980’s laojiao sentences were restricted to three years (having previously been open-ended) sentencing remains arbitrary, the decision of a local police officer.  Prisoners of both categories are often obliged, upon ‘release’, to settle in the vicinity of their camps, into a regime which may differ little from that within; however, the number and conditions of those in this situation (jiuye) have improved greatly since 1988. The word laogai is no longer official, having been replaced by jianyu (prison) in 1994.

It is believed that there were about 2 million prisoners in the late 1990’s, with only 10 per cent being politicals, compared with 4-6 million in the early 1950’s of whom 90 percent were politicals. It is possible that since the repression of the Falungong  these numbers may need to be revised.

A historian of the laogai system has wryly suggested that the CCP put fewer people in camps than Soviet Russia only because its oppression of the population at large was more extensive and brutal.  In 1949, the CCP, which had controlled only limited areas of China before, extended methods of oppression learned from Russian advisers to the whole country. 

Socialism provided the pretext for throwing out all laws and restraints as ‘bourgeois’.  Once the CCP got power in an area, it behaved exactly as its counterparts did in other socialist countries such as Poland, Albania, Bulgaria or Hungary – and eliminated anyone who might form the bases of opposition.  The CCP categorised people according to arbitrarily awarded class origins – excepting in its own leadership, most of whom were from affluent families – and in that category you and your descendants would stay in perpetuity.  During all subsequent campaigns, anybody left from the undesirable categories would be brought out for public vilification, torture and assault, including the very old and children.  The idea of equality before the law was anathematised.  The same ‘crime’ might be punished with execution for the offspring of a farmer hiring labour, but with ‘merely’ hard labour for the hard hand. 

Today the terror campaigns and the categories have gone, but the laogai system remains.  Its distinguishing characteristics have been: (1) the ease with which you can be admitted and your term extended indefinitely, by mere administrative order or judicial process that is in fact controlled by the Party; (2) thought-reform techniques intended to abolish the personality of the prisoner; (3) the mixing together of criminals with, say, religious or bourgeois or dissident inmates; (4) unrewarded forced labour; (5) starvation; (6) torture; (7) the isolation of the camps from society as a whole, made possible by geography.

Once Deng Xiaoping came to power, hundreds of thousands of innocents were freed, and conditions in the camps are believed to have improved.  Yet many people who would not be considered criminals elsewhere have continued to be imprisoned.

In its international dealings, the PRC has regularly sought to impede the investigation of human rights in other countries, for example Sudan, Burma, Korea and Uzbekistan, and is working to suppress the issue generally.  One fruit of recent cooperation with Russia has been that Russia helped China ensure that ‘discussion of human right policies was not placed on the agenda of the human rights conference held in Geneva in the middle of [2005].’

Nevertheless, and despite obstruction, human rights projects are growing in number in China, and the objective of the activists are understood widely.  Heroic individuals in China, and campaigners in Hong Kong, Taiwan and abroad, prove that it is not merely foreigners who regard these questions as important. By contrast with communism, Confucianism regards people as precious, and those mistaken are to be remonstrated with rather than treated as mis-shapen objects.  Moral suasion rather than cruel repression is the Chinese traditional ideal.