CHINA
The truth about its human rights record
By Frank Ching, Rider Books, 120pp.
Reviewed: 19 July 2008
In this short and accessible book, Frank Ching has provided a timely reality check. Many who believe that Australia needs to have good relations with China are uneasy about how to reconcile China’s economic and cultural strengths with its persistent disregard for a range of individual human rights that we claim to support.
China’s Olympic charm offensive has stirred up reactions from human rights special interest groups who question China’s fitness to play Olympic host to the world. This book offers a sober and thorough review of the broad environment of rights and restrictions that constrain the daily lives of all China’s citizens and of non-Chinese who interact with them.
Frank Ching is an American journalist of Chinese family who has been reporting on China for thirty years, mostly for the business-oriented Wall Street Journal and the Hong Kong-based Far East Economic Review. He can not be dismissed as a partisan idealist. His book is balanced. He recognizes where improvements have been made to human rights in China over time, but the overall picture remains bleak.
The heart of the matter is that the Communist Party refuses to allow any limitation to its monopoly of power. As Ching writes, “The basic problem with China’s legal system is that there is no culture of the rule of law”. Some structures and procedures have been put it place for individuals to defend their rights against abuse of state power, but the system remains heavily biased against the individual and in favour of anyone holding state authority, from internet censor or police constable upwards.
Torture is supposedly forbidden, but Chinese courts routinely accept evidence derived by torture, even after numerous public scandals when people have been put to death on false evidence derived under torture. Professional legal representation is allowed, but often stripped of safeguards such as client confidentiality and legal professional immunity.
The Communist Party’s obsession with monopoly of power also motivates restriction of religious freedoms. Nominal freedom of religion in the Constitution is hemmed in by legal requirements for any religion to “promote unity” and to be subject to the guidance of the state. Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims are more or less assumed to be separatists, and “terrorist” sympathisers, because they desire greater self-determination. Christians are suspected of being fifth-columnists for western imperialism. But China’s entirely home-grown Falun Gong movement is persecuted simply because it challenges the universal authority of the Communist Party.
Chapters on Health, Media, the Economy and the Environment document the consequences of the other Chinese political obsession: secrecy and control of information. Despite Constitutional nods toward freedom of speech, and various attempts to liberalise public information regulations, anyone conducting public debate or even private communication with “unauthorized” professional colleagues may be punished for “disclosing state secrets”.
The trump card for corrupt or incompetent state officials is that they are not required to specify in advance what information is classified as a ‘state secret’. Laws and regulations give wide scope for officials, police and the court system to decide, in retrospect, that any information at all was a ‘state secret’ because its disclosure was potentially ‘harmful’ to the state or to social harmony.
In the areas of health and environment, local authorities have suppressed inconvenient information with catastrophic consequences, in cases such as the slow response to the SARS epidemic and the poisoning of vital water resources. In the political and economic sphere, imagine the risks taken by Chinese journalists exercising a Constitutional “freedom of the press” to investigate horrendous levels of corrupt abuse of power by government officials. The Constitution requires journalists and publishers to “safeguard the security, honour and interests of the motherland”, but the Publishing Regulations then forbid them to publish anything “detrimental to the dignity and interests of the state”.
Fundamental citizenship rights are ignored for the tens of millions of migrant workers who have flocked from depressed rural areas to the booming industrial cities of eastern China, to work as construction and manual labourers. China is not alone in turning a blind eye to exploitation of migrant labour, but the scale of abuse in China is worth bearing in mind when ogling China’s supposedly stellar economic growth. This is a Communist Party with a rather lenient view of redistributing the national wealth. Industrial safety is generally appalling, and independent labour unions are banned. The state reported 210,000 deaths from industrial accidents in 2004, an ongoing average of 6,000 deaths per year in coalmines alone, and an average 40,000 workers per year “losing a finger” in factories.
China is making slow progress in many areas of human rights, but Ching’s up to date report makes clear that without changes in fundamental attitudes by those holding ultimate power, China is likely to remain near the bottom of the world’s human rights tables. A quick and worthwhile read on its own, this book also offers several pages of notes, chronologies and further readings for anyone seeking more depth.
Richard Thwaites is a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent in China.