Human Rights: September 2007 Archives
By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
26 September 2007
Eight boys ages 14 and 15 have been detained in the Tibetan town of Xiahe since Sept. 7 for writing graffiti and distributing pamphlets praising the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader, and for calling for independence from China, according to Human Rights in China, which called for their release. The state-controlled news media have been silent on the case, and a man answering the phone at the Xiahe public security office said he had no information.
By Robert J. Saiget - AFP - via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 25, 2007
China on Tuesday said that a meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Dalai Lama had damaged ties between the two nations, and called for Berlin to quickly fix the problem.
"This not only grossly interferes with the internal affairs of China, it hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermines China-Germany relations," foreign ministry spokesman Jiang Yu said when asked about Sunday's meeting.
"We request that Germany... take concrete and effective measures to eliminate the negative impact made by this mistaken move so as not to bring any unnecessary damage to China-Germany relations."
Defying harsh warnings from China, Merkel held a historic meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader in Berlin on Sunday, during which she gave support to the Dalai Lama's quest for greater cultural autonomy for his homeland.
In an apparent response, China cancelled two top-level bilateral meetings, one a standing breakfast between the countries' foreign ministers on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly in New York.
By BBC News
September 23, 2007
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is to meet the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, on Sunday in talks that have angered China.
Chinese officials have cancelled planned talks with German counterparts in Munich on legal and patent issues.
Germany says the meeting with the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising, is a private exchange.
But China, which governs Tibet, says the meeting is part of the Dalai Lama's agenda for Tibetan independence.
'Conscious' decision
Sunday's meeting will be the first time the Dalai Lama has been received at the chancellery.
China has already summoned the German ambassador in Beijing to complain.
However, German deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg said: "The meeting will take place, the invitation stands, and the chancellor also extended the invitation very consciously."
The German justice ministry said the legal talks had been cancelled for "technical reasons".
The Dalai Lama told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that Beijing was showing the "arrogance of power".
"Wherever I go, China protests. The Chinese are simply testing how far they can go," the Nobel Peace Prize winner said.
By Mark Magnier | Los Angeles Times
September 18, 2007
Residents of Beijing's "petitioners' village," an area of cheap hotels and makeshift houses where the poor and downtrodden gather in search of justice, are bracing for the bulldozers.
Destruction of neighborhoods and forced relocation are common in the Chinese capital as traditional neighborhoods are rapidly torn apart by well-connected developers erecting gleaming towers. But this area has more political significance than your average neighborhood.
For several generations, it has been a repository of the pain and frustration felt by those who come to Beijing to appeal to national authorities to right perceived wrongs. Large white notices posted in recent days warn residents of the Fengtai district to vacate the area by noon Wednesday to make way for a new road and overpass complex leading to the nearby Southern Railway Station.
The plans have been in the works for a while. But some see secondary motives in the timing, including a desire to scatter the community of "troublemakers" in advance of next month's Communist Party Congress and to remove an eyesore before the 2008 Summer Olympics.
By Radio Free Asia
September 14, 2007
Chinese authorities in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa have detained six Tibetans after they lodged an appeal against the relocation of their trading stalls to make way for a new pedestrian walkway.
"The Lhasa municipal government detained six Tibetans on Sept. 13 for appealing against the official order of relocation of their shops near the Tibetan Medical Center in Lhasa," a caller from Lhasa told RFA's Tibetan service.
"All the traders selling their merchandise on stalls in front of the Tibetan Medicine Center...in the Central Cathedral area were ordered to move their shops to the third level of a new business complex in the Bakhor area."
A group of traders had staged a sit-in at the Lhasa municipal government offices in protest, saying that business wouldn't be nearly as good in the new location.
Petition to government
The traders had originally been given carts by the government and had gradually bought them as part of a poverty alleviation scheme.
"We want to request that the Lhasa municipal government allow us to continue in the same place," one Tibetan trader said.
"If we move to the other building on the third floor of the new complex, there will be no business. We rely on these small businesses for our livelihood. and if we are relocated, our business will suffer," he said.
"China's Communist Party is all--powerful, and many dare not raise their voice. We are actually bringing our concerns about our daily livelihood to the authorities and we are not talking of politics. But many Tibetans dare not speak up for fear of reprisals."
"The fact is that all good business locations in Lhasa area are going to Chinese and the Tibetans are losing them," he added.
An official who answered the phone at the Lhasa municipal government confirmed the dispute had taken place, but declined to give further details.
By Peter Ford - The Christian Science Monitor | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 12, 2007
As China prepares to celebrate its emergence as a global power at next year's Olympic Games, a rash of recent American and international opinion polls suggest that the Asian giant faces an uphill battle to convince the world it is worthy of its new status.
And it is more than just a question of food or toys.
Beijing's task is made harder, say Chinese and foreign analysts, because the ruling Communist Party has so far failed to learn the new ropes of international public diplomacy.
Chinese officials are accustomed to traditional links with their diplomatic counterparts abroad. They have little experience coping with the single-issue advocacy groups that have sprung from civil society in the West to shape the international agenda and influence public opinion on questions ranging from climate change to Darfur.
"It is a great problem," says Shi Yinhong, a prominent foreign-affairs expert at Beijing's Renmin University. "China has no experience with this. We are weak at dealing with diverse nongovernmental entities. The government machine is not capable of dealing with such groups."
Nor has it proved very successful in dealing with the sort of novel challenge that this summer's food and toy safety scandals have posed to China's international image, according to the polls.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in July found that 65 percent of Americans had very little or no confidence in Chinese food products. Zogby International reported last month that 72 percent of Americans did not believe Chinese claims that the US is exaggerating the risks.
But China's image problem is deeper than the issue of product safety. Even before the recent scandals broke, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that a downturn in Americans' attitudes toward China was mirrored in Europe and elsewhere.
Only 42 percent of Americans had a favorable attitude to China in May 2007, Pew found, down sharply from 52 percent at the same time last year. 49 percent of the British public was favorable, against 65 percent in 2006, while favorable French and German majorities in 2006 had shrunk to minorities this year.
Indeed, mistrust of China is one of the few international issues on which Europeans and Americans concur, according to a German Marshall Fund poll released last week: 54 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Europeans said they saw China as more of a threat to their jobs and economic security than an opportunity for new markets and investment.
by Dakshana Bascaramurty | The Charlatan
September 05, 2007
Lhadon Tethong was deported from China due to her political and social views of Tibet and China relations
Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), visited China for the first time after years of protests and campaigns against what she views as an invasion of a free people and state.
She blogged her way through Beijing with her colleague Paul Golding, documenting her views on beijingwideopen.org and China's "illegal occupation of Tibet," she says. She strategically timed her travels to take place exactly one year before the 2008 Olympic Games.
Though not a member of the group that unfurled a 450-square foot banner over the Great Wall of China that read: 'One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008', Tethong says her blog entries led to her deportation.
Arrested on Aug. 8 and detained in a downtown Beijing police station, she was questioned for six hours by the metropolitan and plain-clothes police.
"[They] were interested in what we were doing, why were in China [and if] were we trying to recruit for our cause," she says.
Tethong was detained for less than 12 hours before being deported to Hong Kong.
"In the end, I was deported from China because I was, [according to the police], undermining the stability of the Chinese government," she says.
Tethong grew up hearing about Tibetan issues and its standing on the international stage, especially from her Tibetan father.
Yet it was only at a Free Tibet concert in San Francisco in 1996, that she became actively involved in the cause.
That same year, the history student at Nova Scotia's King's College started a chapter of the organization in Halifax.
After graduating Tethong worked at the Toronto Stock Exchange. But she packed her bags and left Toronto after applying and receiving the program co-ordinator post at the SFT's New York City location.
As one of three staff members, Tethong says she was in charge of many things including seminars, public speaking and campaigns.
Now, with four years as executive director under her belt, the organization has chapters in countries worldwide, including Australia, Cameroon and the Czech Republic.
While Tethong has dealt first-hand with how information on freedom for Tibetans is heavily restricted by Chinese authorities, she uses the Internet as an activist tool.
"It's illegal to discuss the issue [of Tibet] if you are over there [in China]," she says while waiting in an airport for a flight to Canada after her tumultuous trip.
She says this interview and story would have been impossible to complete if she were back in the communist state.
By Radio Free Asia
September 04, 2007
Christianity is gaining new converts in Chinese cities and towns, especially among the newly emerging and assertive professional class, and the trend is causing the ruling Communist Party some concern, experts say.
A prominent example of this phenomenon is rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been detained, kept under surveillance and sentenced to a jail term after he represented the underdogs in sensitive political cases. Gao is also a committed Christian, whose Beijing-based church has been raided by police on more than one occasion.
Gao's commitment to using the nascent Chinese legal system to fight unpopular civil rights cases--such as representing villagers who wish to indict local officials for graft, or representing members of the banned Falun Gong movement--are underpinned by his strong emphasis on morality and compassion, and bound up with the lawyer's Christian identity.
"The people who are taking the lead now in proposing not just political change in China, but moral change, are the Christian intellectuals--the lawyers, the professors, the writers," author David Aikman recently told an audience at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
Religion connected to rebellion
China's leadership, which always keeps a weather eye on the nation's history, appears to remember only too keenly that many anti-government movements--the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) against the highly corrupt Qing Dynasty, for example--have been inspired by religious teachings.
Such movements typically emerge at times of stark social division, which in today's China is evidenced by the thousands of protests and demonstrations across the country in any given year, frequently with land-rights disputes and allegations of official corruption at their core.
Thousands of petitioners try to get into the capital, Beijing, every year, to lodge complaints against official wrongdoing. Almost none win redress in return for years of queuing, form-filling, and further abuse from officials who object to their complaints.
August 31, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom voices its strong concern over the People's Republic of China's new regulations requiring government approval of "Living Buddhas," which goes into effect on Saturday, Sept. 1. The regulations are clearly designed to undermine the influence of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans' preeminent spiritual leader, and constitute continuing state violation of internationally guaranteed religious freedom rights in China.
The measures elaborate on Article 27 of China's National Regulations on Religious Affairs issued in March 2005. The new regulations instruct all reincarnate Tibetan lamas to "respect and protect the principles of unification of the state" and declare that no "foreign organization or individual" shall "interfere" in the process of recognizing or enthroning Living Buddhas. In cases where reincarnate lamas have "a relatively large impact," "a great impact," or "a particularly great impact," the regulations state, it is necessary to obtain approval from the provincial or regional governments, the national State Administration of Religious Affairs, or from the State Council, the highest government body in China.
"The Chinese government's policy of suppressing religious freedom in Tibet, including its denial of the right of Tibetan Buddhists to select their own religious leaders, again demonstrates Beijing's violation of international covenants recognizing the basic right of religious communities to choose their religious leaders and teachers," said Commission Chair Michael Cromartie. "China continues to pursue unacceptable policies repressing Tibetan Buddhists."
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