Human Rights: February 2010 Archives
By Edward Wong | The New York Times
February 20, 2010
When President Obama met with the Dalai Lama in the White House on Thursday, he was following a tradition that all recent American presidents had dutifully honored.
Yet, to some Chinese Mr. Obama's support of the Dalai Lama represents something more troubling and disrespectful. The meeting, while low-profile, and the routine announcement last month of American arms sales to Taiwan, were taken as the latest signs that despite China's rapid ascent, the American government still refused to compromise on issues that China considered sacrosanct: matters of sovereignty and territorial integrity.
On Friday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called in Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the American ambassador here, to lecture him on the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, whom China considers a separatist.
"At this time, China and the U.S. cannot find any agreement on strategic issues," said Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University.
Few American officials would disagree. The rift in United States-China relations has arisen in part because the two countries have completely different items at the top of their foreign policy agendas and are talking past each other, American officials say.
They say that China emphasizes sovereignty issues while refusing to give any weight to the Obama administration's two top priorities in the relationship: containing Iran's nuclear ambitions and rebalancing currencies and trade. The Americans have also highlighted issues of Internet censorship and security.
"There's not a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram," an American official involved in China policy said on the condition of anonymity, following diplomatic protocol. "What's really the most worrisome is the degree to which we have that disconnect."
Those tensions are likely to worsen in coming months as domestic pressures in each country push the governments to assert their agendas more boldly, and as China's confidence in its economic system continues to grow.
On the American side, a struggling economy is forcing the Obama administration to make currency valuation and market liberalization top priorities. With an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent and midterm elections coming up, American officials are aware that pushing China to raise the value of its currency, the renminbi, and allowing American companies greater access to some Chinese markets could be important political victories for Mr. Obama and his party.
"We've got to look at the risk of a more populist American public and the U.S. Congress deciding that China is the reason our economy isn't growing enough," the American official said.
Economists say the renminbi is undervalued by 25 to 40 percent, a wider gap than at any other time since 2005, when, under pressure from the Bush administration, China decided to allow the renminbi to float in a narrow band against the dollar and other currencies. The renminbi appreciated 21 percent, but has not moved at all since July 2008. This month, Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, rejected an unusually public call by Mr. Obama for China to revalue its currency, saying that "the value of the renminbi is getting to a reasonable and balanced level."
By Radio Free Asia
February 12, 2010
North Korean children left to fend for themselves in China are afforded no protection under the country's laws.
A warning sign is shown on a barbed-wire fence separating China and North Korea, May 27, 2009.
A freezing December wind rakes across northeast China, as a group of seven children sit in a circle in the living room of a missionary's Dandong apartment, a stone's throw from the border with Stalinist North Korea.
The seven boys and girls of elementary school age are playing a game with the foster mother who cares for them in spite of Chinese laws which forbid taking in a stranger's child as if it were one's own.
According to the foster father, who preferred to remain anonymous, "It is illegal [so] we are not allowed to receive any foreign aid."
"I tell others that I am taking care of my relatives' children...It is obvious that none of their relatives can take care of these children," he said.
Many of the children in his care were left stranded after their North Korean mothers were forcibly repatriated by Chinese authorities.
Others were abandoned as their mothers fled hunger and oppression for a new life in South Korea.
"First, they called me 'auntie,"' said Lee Eun Hye, a Chinese national of Korean ethnicity who helps care for the children.
"They said, 'Auntie, I feel like crying...because the song you were singing speaks of longing for one's mother.'"
According to 10-year-old Yeon Ah, who draws repeated rainbow scenes of happy children running around, her favorite story is Cinderella.
"I like it, because Cinderella's mother passed away, but still loves her from where she is, in heaven," she said.
Asked why her drawings showed so many balloons, Yeon Ah replied: "Because balloons fly up to the sky. I wish we could fly, too, and that is why I draw balloons."
Stateless children
Run by a missionary foster couple, the home where Yeon Ah lives takes in ethnic Korean children or those from mixed Chinese-Korean background, some of whom are the stateless offspring of North Korean defector women and local Chinese men.
Others are the children of defectors who were born in North Korea and crossed the border with their parents, only to lose touch with them in China.
"This five-year-old child says, 'Thank you, father; thank you, mother,'" the foster father, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
"We wash her hair once every two days because it is very difficult for her to wash her own hair...She says, 'Thank you for your trouble'."
Missionary Kim Hye-Young said some of the children are in a terrible state of neglect and malnutrition when they first arrive at the home.
"When I first met her, her hair was all tangled with sweat and dust, like one big chunk of wig because she did not wash her hair," Kim said.
"I could not even touch her hair. Also, she was in her worn-out underwear covered in dirt. She did not have shoes on."
According to the home's foster father, "They tend to cough a lot and often have a fever."
"The children seem to be underdeveloped. Perhaps they might have taken a lot of medicine," he said. "They still have evidence of slow physical growth...There are no shoes in their sizes because their feet are too small."
Some children have been the victims of abuse in their own homes, like Hae In, whose North Korean mother was taken away by the authorities when she was seven, and who was tortured by her alcoholic Korean-Chinese father.
Lacking official papers
Aid workers estimate that there are about 2,000 "defector orphans" in China, with a possible total of 30,000 North Korean defectors living in hiding, mostly driven over the border to look for food and work.
"Stateless orphans," on the other hand, are born out of relationships between North Korean women and Chinese men, with their mothers subsequently deported to North Korea.
"Stateless orphans" are currently believed to number 10,000-20,000, and are unable to get an education because they lack official Chinese papers. Late registration of children without papers costs 5,000 yuan (U.S. $750), around three times the monthly salary of the average Chinese person, aid workers said.
Aid groups from the United States, South Korea, and other countries pay for some children to be registered and attend kindergarten and schools for ethnic Korean-Chinese children.
But the average monthly kindergarten tuition fees are 250 yuan (U.S. $35), with elementary school students needing a further 280 yuan a month for food, transportation, and books.
Many of the children's fathers are still in touch, but are Chinese farmers living in extreme poverty. So the missionaries educate them in Chinese, Korean, and even English.
"When we began, there was no one to teach them English," one foster parent explains. "The children are doing well. Even in China, it is now unacceptable not to know English."
Mothers absent
Just before break-time and a meal of fried chicken and hamburgers, Hae In reads from her favorite book, which tells the story of a child whose mother was unable to visit her on a parent's day at school, and sent a letter instead.
"Our pretty daughter, I am sorry that I let you down," she reads. "I am sorry, but will you understand that I had no choice?"
"Eat the rice cake I sent you and, until I return, please just stay home and wait for me."
Young Hoon, 10, said he wants more than anything to visit his father, who lives a poverty stricken life in the mountains, making visiting difficult.
"I don't know where my mother has gone," he said. "She went somewhere when I was four or five years old."
His classmate, 11-year-old Kyong-Hee, said she feels happiest at the park. "I can play at the playground, and I can play as I wish," she said.
"I want to be a doctor when I grow up...I want wisdom."
Punishment for defectors
Under a U.N. refugee convention, China is obliged to not force defectors back to North Korea, where they face punishment, torture, and humiliation, according to human rights observers. The punishment for defecting is three years in a labor camp and can lead to torture and execution, both for the defectors and their families.
Thousands of North Korean women who fled famine in their homeland in recent years are believed to have been sold as "brides" to Chinese men, who often put them to backbreaking labor and subject them to constant fear, physical assault, and sexual abuse.
North Korean women in China are "victims of trafficking in the way that term has come to be defined by international law," according to the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which conducted in-depth interviews with trafficked North Korean defector women in China.
"Contrary to stereotypes, however, most of the North Korean women in China are not trafficked into sexual slavery. More often they are trafficked into forced marriages," the group said in its 64-page 2009 report, Lives for Sale: Personal Accounts of Women Fleeing North Korea to China.
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea also called on Beijing to prosecute human traffickers and allow thousands of North Koreans access to asylum screenings by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The report said China should ensure that marriages between North Korean women and residents of China are consensual rather than coerced, and legalize as Chinese nationals children born to North Korean women married in China.
Human rights abuses in North Korea, widely seen as one of the world's most repressive countries, "do not stay in the confines of North Korea but spill over into neighboring countries, and inflict pain on the lives of North Korean citizens outside their borders," the report said.
The thousands of North Korean women in China, along with their children, "remain trapped in this maze of inhumanity," the report said, adding, "As troubling as the testimony of these eyewitnesses is, it is important to note that these interviewees are, in many respects, among the fortunate women of North Korea."
Since famine struck North Korea in the 1990s, large numbers of women--mainly from northeastern North Korea--have fled across the border into China, where ethnic Korean Chinese constitute a large proportion of the population, and where men outnumber women by almost 14 to one in some regions.
Original reporting in Korean by Jin-seo Lee. Korean service director: Bong Park. Translated by Grigore Scarlatoiu. Written for the web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
By Radio Free Asia
February 09, 2010
A victim of China's 1989 crackdown says he's looking forward to his new life.
WASHINGTON--A promising Chinese athlete whose legs were crushed by a tank during the military crackdown on the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement has been granted political asylum after traveling to the United States for new prosthetic limbs.
Fang Zheng, 42, who danced a waltz at an event honoring him on Capitol Hill, which was carried on national television, said he had given two reasons to U.S. officials considering his application.
"One reason was that the Chinese government has already inflicted a great deal of physical and emotional suffering on me because I was injured in the June 4, 1989 crackdown," Fang said.
"They have refused to this day to pay me any compensation, and suppress me instead."
Fang said that just before he left China last year, he was warned by public security officials that he could face problems getting back in again.
"The second reason was that [they] threatened that if I did or said anything on this overseas trip that they didn't like, that they would prevent me from coming back to China," Fang said.
Duty to speak out
"I left the country right on the 20th anniversary of the June 4 crackdown, so I thought it was my duty and responsibility to tell the truth about what happened," said Fang, who was partially crushed and dragged on a Beijing boulevard as crowds fled the scene in panic.
Fang, whose wife and daughter are also now in the United States, said he had been welcomed and taken care of by exiled 1989 student veterans Zhou Fengsuo and Feng Congde, and was looking forward to beginning a new, happier, and healthier life.
In his senior college year when he joined thousands of students in calls for democracy and rule of law on Tiananmen Square in the early summer of 1989, Fang was an accomplished sprinter with Olympic ambitions.
Later, he went on to participate in the third All-China Disabled Athletic Games in Guangzhou in 1992, where he won two gold medals in discus throwing.
But his career was blocked from further development by Chinese leaders, who regarded him as a troublemaker, and he underwent two decades of close surveillance and harassment by police.
Original reporting in Mandarin by CK. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
February 03, 2010
A year ago this week, Chinese security agents made a midnight visit to the home of Gao Zhisheng, one of China's most high-profile human rights lawyers, and led him away. They told his family he was wanted for a brief chat.
In the months that followed, his whereabouts have become a mystery and a growing source of concern for relatives, colleagues and human rights advocates, who fear that he has been badly tortured or worse.
His case is highly unusual, even by the standards of China's opaque justice system. After a previous detention in 2006, Mr. Gao was allowed to return home after publicly confessing to a number of transgressions. Once out of custody, however, Mr. Gao recanted his confession and described abuse he said he had suffered. He also said his torturers told him he would be killed if he spoke publicly about the matter.
Diplomatic entreaties to the Chinese government have been brushed aside. Foreign reporters who ask about his plight have been treated to glib retorts. Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, compounded the mystery two weeks ago by saying that Mr. Gao "is where he should be." When prodded again at a regular press briefing last Tuesday, he offered a smile and said: "Honestly speaking, I don't know where he is. China has 1.3 billion people and I can't know all of their whereabouts."
Legal experts say the disappearance of Mr. Gao, whose case has been championed by American lawmakers, several European leaders and the United Nations, represents a disturbing milestone. Even in the most politicized cases, the Chinese authorities generally claim to be complying with their own criminal procedure laws. Mr. Gao has vanished with no official accounting or legal explanation.
Emboldened by China's newfound economic prowess but insecure about its standing at home, the Chinese Communist Party has been tightening Internet censorship, cracking down on legal rights defenders and brushing aside foreign leaders who seek to influence the outcome of individual cases.
In December, the authorities executed Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen, on drug trafficking charges despite Prime Minister Gordon Brown's personal plea to President Hu Jintao that Mr. Shaikh was mentally ill.
During President Obama's state visit to China in November, the plight of a pro-democracy advocate, Liu Xiaobo, was reportedly at the top of his list of concerns. A few weeks later, on Dec. 25, Mr. Liu was given an unexpectedly harsh 11-year sentence for publishing an online petition that sought expanded liberties.
John Kamm, a veteran American human rights campaigner, said that during three decades working in China he had rarely seen such a hard line toward dissidents -- and unbridled defiance against pressure from abroad. "China right now doesn't feel like it owes anyone anything on human rights," said Mr. Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which seeks clemency for political prisoners through quiet diplomacy. "I've never seen a downward spiral like this."
In the 31 years since the People's Republic of China and the United States established diplomatic relations, Chinese officials have often resisted American intervention on human rights, calling the issue a domestic matter. But there has generally been some give and take, largely behind the scenes, especially in the years after the violent suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square, when China was eager to shed its pariah status abroad.
That leverage began dissipating in 2001 after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, and Congress surrendered the right to review China's human rights record before granting it favorable trade status.
There is little space in Chinese society for unyielding dissidents like Mr. Gao. But until recently, the authorities often allowed them to stay at home under close surveillance. If they crossed certain unwritten lines, they might be prosecuted, often for the crime of inciting subversion or leaking state secrets. Even if stymied in their defense, lawyers can expect a modicum of information about their clients. Family jailhouse visits are not uncommon.
But Mr. Gao's case has defied these norms.
In September, a security agent who took Mr. Gao into custody told one of his brothers that he had simply disappeared during a walk. The brother, Gao Zhiyi, said he suspected the worst. "If he were alive, they would have allowed me to visit him," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Shaanxi Province. "Either that or he's in such bad shape, it would be too horrible for anyone to see him."
Rights advocates say Mr. Gao's predicament can be partly traced to his persistent and caustic criticism of the ruling Communist Party. A self-educated lawyer, Mr. Gao, 46, was named one of China's top 10 lawyers by the Ministry of Justice in 2001 for his work defending victims of medical malpractice and farmers whose land had been seized for redevelopment.
But Mr. Gao quickly ran afoul of the authorities when he began representing members of unofficial Christian churches and adherents of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. In 2005, the Beijing judicial bureau closed his firm and suspended the licenses of its 20 lawyers. Mr. Gao countered by publicly renouncing his Communist Party membership and writing a series of open letters to senior leaders that demanded an end to the persecution of Falun Gong believers.
A week later, Mr. Gao was arrested. In a letter published just before his latest disappearance, he documented what he said happened to him during his 54 days in custody. He was shocked and beaten almost continuously, he wrote, or forced to sit motionless, enveloped by blinding lights. By the end, he said, "the skin all over my body had turned black." He was released only after he confessed to various crimes; he retracted his confession as soon as he was let go.
A month before he vanished last February, Mr. Gao's wife and children slipped away from their minders and, with the help of Christian activists, left China. Ten days later, they were granted asylum in the United States.
Renee Xia, the international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said the family's escape, coupled with the revelations of Mr. Gao's torture, probably infuriated those charged with reining in his activities.
Given the increasingly strained relations between China and the United States, it is unclear whether Mr. Gao's supporters abroad can have any impact on his fate. But some, like Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that Chinese leaders were still sensitive to international criticism and that a spike in global protests over Mr. Gao's mistreatment would not go unnoticed.
"Beijing doesn't care about releasing a prisoner or two," he said. "It's not going to bring about the collapse of the Communist Party but if they don't have to do it, they won't."
Zhang Jing and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.
Search
The purpose of the website is to publish articles by journalists about a variety of topics concerning the People’s Republic of China. All journalists and the publications that publish their writings are clearly identified. All copyrights belong exclusively to the identified sources of these articles. | Powered by
Information + More