thepolitics.co.uk

While western liberal democracies celebrate China’s economic liberalization and the benefits its growth have brought to people inside and outside the country, its stance on political and civil rights is deeply problematic. According to the latest report by the United States State Department issued this March: ‘The government [of China’s] human rights record remained poor, and controls were tightened in some areas, such as religious freedom in Tibetan areas and in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR); freedom of speech and the media, including the internet; and the treatment of petitioners in Beijing. As in previous years, citizens did not have the right to change their government’. China does recognize the importance of human rights in a well functioning society – but it defines them in radically different ways, and has a well worked out justification for why it has taken this position. The elite leadership argues that at China’s current stage – a developing economy, aspiring to be a middle income country by 2020 – the most important rights are economic. In lifting more than 200 million people from poverty, as they have since 1978, and in delivering wellbeing to another 1.3 billion, they believe they have done more for economic human rights than any other government in history. In this they have a strong point. As a result, it comes to no surprise while China has signed the UN Convention on Civilian and Political Rights; it has yet to ratify it despite the urging of foreign governments. Since opening up to the outside world in the past thirty years, and perceptibly in the last decade, China has been an active participant in human rights dialogues. Bilaterally, these have involved Britain and the United States and multilaterally with the European Union (EU). It has become accomplished and adept at promoting its position. At the same time, because of the economic importance China has acquired, those outside who were once most critical about China have become much less ready to condemn or criticize.

Perhaps the most problematic of all the government’s current principles is its refusal to recognize any other political parties. Attempts even to register parties, like the China Democracy Party in 1998-1999, were met with brutal and rapid reprisals. Now China is alone among the world’s top ten economies in being a one-party state. On its borders, it has seen South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan introduce democratic systems. This has forced it to adopt a far more nuanced position, and the government has allowed a host of non-governmental organizations to set up, especially those lobbying on the environment. It has permitted far more petitions to central government from citizens, and the legal system has undergone radical reforms in the last two decades. Now judgments are frequently issued free of political interference, even if their implementation remains highly problematic. At the top level seventeenth party congress towards the end of last year, for the first time in the 87-year history of the Communist Party, there was clear recognition of the need for the government to look after people’s welfare. Provinces, which had had the authority to carry out death sentences, now needed authorization from the central government in Beijing. In that sense, the Chinese state is more mindful than ever before of broader human rights. A more strident press and internet community is holding the agents of the state, from police, to courts, to officials, to account for perceived misdemeanours. The public is far more aware of its rights, and willing to take legal or civil action. The days of Maoist absolutism, where the power of one man was able to ride unquestioned over the rights of anyone else, are fading.

And yet, despite the achievements, there are still areas of real concern. Last year, China sentenced more people to death than the rest of the world put together. According to Reporters Sans Frontières, 31 journalists are in prison for simply reporting opinion or fact. There is a clear area of political sensitivity where the Party will tolerate no opposition. Those who go into print about the need for multi party democracy are literally asking for punishment. Tibetan monks demonstrating in Lhasa in March, seen by western journalists, strikingly did not ask for independence but for human rights. Practitioners of Falun-Gong, and other belief systems, are persecuted. Those researching areas of sensitivity like the Tiananmen Square protests of May 1989 are frequently imprisoned or silenced. Minority rights for Uiguers in Xinjiang or Mongolians in Inner Mongolia are carefully circumscribed. Any attempts to articulate greater autonomy for these areas are sharply dismissed. The central government might say it safeguards people’s rights, and the laws may be well written, and guaranteed by the constitution, but how these are interpreted from province to province remains highly variable. Many Chinese simply argue that their society is not yet ready either for democracy, or western notions of human rights. They regard the promotion of these by the US and EU, in particular, as an attempt to weaken and undermine what they have achieved. The government has set itself a date of 2050 to fully introduce these systems. The Chinese government would like to argue that gradual evolution and development is better than the wholesale adoption of what it claims are ideas for developed countries. It has entered into dialogue with the West on this, and in some areas has made radical changes. Despite all these transformations, China is a society where the political will of the Party currently in power takes precedence over any other demands. On this fundamental feature, China has remained unchanged, and there are few signs that it is about to reform. The key issue will be how long the Chinese people, and especially the middle class, are content with economic rights, and when they start to demand other kinds of rights. That is one of the most critical questions for China over the coming decades.