If we were to look then at China's human rights record over the past 25 years through Chinese eyes, then the big picture would look pretty impressive: as the latest United Nation's Human Development Brief reports,
"China has registered some of the most rapid advances in human development in history, with its Human Development Index ranking increasing 20 percent since 1990." China is now ranked 85 out of 177 countries.
The report recognises China's massive achievements in poverty relief in the past 30 years, saying that if "China's achievements were not recorded, the world would have actually regressed in its progress towards poverty alleviation." Keep in mind here, that China, since the Deng reforms were first introduced,
has managed to lift roughly 250 million of its people out of poverty.
"China was the world's fastest growing economy over the past two decades, with per capita incomes rising threefold," says the report, "although growing inequalities have left Guizhou ranking alongside Namibia (ranked 125 on the index) whereas Shanghai is more comparable to Portugal (which ranks 25 on the index)."
The central government, of course, only recently announced its plans to address what it has identified as the nation's two biggest human rights problems: the growing social inequalities between those who reside in rural and urban localities, and the country's deteriorating environment. As one of the authors of the excellent China Law Blog recently reported, the central government has just recently allocated a huge budget of 1.3 trillion yuan (US$162 billion) to clean up its environmental problems, to be allocated throughout the period 2006-2010.
Indeed, as Curt Goering of Amnesty International pointed out in a recent interview for NOW magazine,
"there is a growing recognition of economic, social and cultural rights as rights: that the right to food, to housing, health care, employment, education, etc. are rights every bit as important as the right to freedom of speech or the right not to be tortured or arbitrarily detained. There is a growing understanding of the interrelationship and indivisibility of rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural." China, as I mentioned earlier, is a shining example to the world when it comes to focusing on the improvement of peoples' access to quality food, housing and education, though sadly it has been failing in the area of healthcare over recent years.
China has steadily been improving its human rights record over the past ten years, though few would realise this because Western bodies through Western media have consistently, over the decades,
exaggerated the extent of China's human rights abuses.
Last year, in 2005, the first visit to China in a decade by the
UN Special Rapporteur on Torture found improvements in the treatment of prisoners but, according to a concluding statement, "serious shortcoming" in rights protections still exist.
The Rapporteurs’s entourage, according to one report that I read in Law and Rights, "also acknowledged central government efforts to clamp down on infringements of personal liberty. Efforts have been made to define police powers, which previously set no time limit for the confiscation of property, gathering of evidence and investigation and examination of suspects. The Supreme People's Procuratorate has also announced that confessions obtained under duress cannot be used to justify continued detention. Public Security officials in Zhejiang
have spearheaded efforts to implement central directives by drafting local regulations that oblige police chiefs to resign if more than two cases of forced confessions, resulting in injury, miscarriage of justice or public order problems, come to light. Other measures to check police powers, including equipping interrogation rooms with audio and video equipment, are a further sign that eliminating torture is being taken seriously."
Furthermore, it needs to be said that China's human rights abuses have been considerably overstated at times. Let us take the number of prisoners supposedly incarcerated in the country's laogai prisons to begin with. Most of the figures published by the world's media as "fact" are supplied by Harry Wu - the world's foremost laogai "expert". On November 3, 1996, the London Sunday Times ran an article quoting Wu as saying that China had 20 million prisoners. A year later he claimed to the world that China also had 1,100 laogai prison camps, overseeing some 6 to 8 million prisoners. He also claimed that "out of every 100,000 people in China, 500-667 are prisoners." Note the contradictions already: the prisoner population went from 20 million in 1996 to 6-8 million in 1997. In his book, A China Gulag, a best seller at Walmart, he came up with different figures again, this time claiming that China had 3,000 laogai prison camps, controlling 12 to 16 million prisoners. A few weeks after his book was published, he told the London Daily Telegraph that there were 30 to 40 million political prisoners.
The reality looks more like this: Columbia University researchers Seymour and Anderson say in their study, New Ghosts, Old Ghosts, that in the 1990s, the incarceration rate in China had averaged 166 out of every 100,000;
the Chinese government figure was 117/100,000. These are still the most recent figures available, to my knowledge. Now compare these figures to incarceration rates in the U.S. By midyear 2002, America's jails held 1 in every 142 U.S. residents. By 2003 the figure had climbed even higher. "The United States continues to lead the world in incarceration with a rate of 714 prisoners per 100,000," it was reported.
And serious human rights abuses also occur in U.S. prisons too, just as they do in all other Western countries. A 1998 report titled Torture in the United States, complied by the Coalition Against Torture and Racial Descrimination, claimed that "prison abuses and extra-legal punishments are becoming more frequent rather than less, as new forms of prisoner control and harassment are introduced, such as widespread use of long-term solitary confinement, arbitrary application of punitive violence and long-term restraints, increasing use of control unit and super-maximum prison facilities that isolate prisoners and impose other harsh treatments on a punitive basis, and the re-introduction of 'chain gangs' for both men and women prisoners. The practice of indiscriminate use of largely untested chemical sprays and electronic stun equipment to control and punish prisoners has become widespread, often with harsh and painful results disproportionate to any potential threat. The tendencies to 'privatise' detention facilities and to house prisoners in facilities far from their homes make it more difficult to monitor and prevent these practices. Protections for prisoners also have been weakened by new laws reducing the ability of prisoners to bring their situations to the attention of the federal court...Considerable evidence recently has surfaced that the U.S. government, in past years, has conducted a number of what have been classified as 'scientific' experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent. This includes large-scale exposures to radiation emissions, and purposeful denial of available medical treatment to African-American syphilis victims, allegedly for medical testing. Recent media disclosures and admissions by government officials suggest that the scope of these 'experiments' has been far wider than previously acknowledged. Although the tests that have been publicly acknowledged took place some time ago, sufficient action has not been taken to compensate victims, and to assure that similar forms of abusive experimentation would be prevented in the future, especially in newly emerging areas of technology and weapons development."
And this report was made back in 1998, before the commencement of the so-called "War on Terror", and as we all know, the situation is worse now.
As I keep saying, the situation in China isn't as different from most Western countries as many Westerners would like to think, which is why Harry Wu's outrageous lies and distortions have even angered people like Fan Shidong, who himself is a Chinese dissident from Shanghai, arrested and sent to prison for talking to American officials in 1983 and released in 1994. He spent most of his prison life in Xinjiang, so he knows just exactly what conditions are really like in laogai prisons. Fan fled to Hong Kong after his release and is now living in the United States.
Fan, along with independent researchers Seymour and Anderson, argue that Harry Wu's claims about laogai prisons and what goes on in them are largely untrue. "Equating China's prison system to Stalin's gulag is but one of Wu's many ways of promoting his message to the West," says Fan. However, "Wu does not bother to explain the equivalence with a political analysis nor with a comparison of the per capita imprisonment data, which, in my view, is the most crucial indicator of any national policy towards its prison system. Westerners seeking facts and figures to form their own conclusions will not find them from Wu." The per capita incarceration rate during the Stalin era was 12 times that of today's China.
And then there are Wu's claims to the world (once again, often reported uncritically by the Western media as if fact), that the laogai prisons are so important, that without them China's economy would collapse. According to Seymour's study, all "economic estimates that show output from laogai show that it is but a tiny part of the national GDP."
"Harry Wu is saying that China's laogai is an essential and basic part of its national economy," and that "trading with China is to help China's laogai economy and therefore become accomplices in oppressing China's political prisoners," notes Fan, with some considerable anger, because "exaggerating China's human rights abuses can only be counterproductive...Perhaps many members of Congress in both Houses choose to believe the falsehoods and innuendoes because of the need to influence American policy towards China from a particular historical perspective, reflecting the U.S. mainstream's distrust and doubt toward China during this period of transition and reform."
Not only this, but just because China's northwest region holds laogai prison camps, Wu and his enthusiastic supporters in Congress oppose World Bank financing of irrigation projects. As Fan says though, "this is not justified and can directly harm the welfare of the prisoners detained there. To eat, prisoners need to plant and need to water and need to use advanced equipment and technology to increase yield. Instead of reforming the prison system, Wu's protest will only deprive prisoners of potential benefits."