China and universal human rights standards
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Note: Footnotes Omitted
Part
II. China and the International Human Rights Regime
Because of its distinctive
social value, its mixtural economic and political system,
its ascribed superpower status, its economic and strategic
muscle, and its position as a Permanent Member of the Security
Council, China turns out to be a very special case to the
international community. In terms of human rights protection, it is offen pointed out
that Chinese government is not the worst rights violator
in the world, nonetheless it is a major violator.
China is not completely ignorant of international
pressure but the latter by no means has made any significant
progress in changing Chinese government¡¯s attitudes toward
human right in recent decades. Serious misunderstanding always arise
when Americans led Western society and Chinese sit down
to talk about human rights.
This part attempts to present the rights picture
in China.
A. PRC¡¯s Participation in International Human Rights Regime before 1989
From its earlist days the People¡¯s
Republic of China implied human rights proactively as part
of its domestic and foreign policy. In the 1950s and 1960s the PRC supported
sovereignty and self-determination claims of the third world
emerging states and argued these claims as human rights,
and charged as violators the United States, France, South
Africa and Israel, among others. However, prior to 1971, China did not
make human rights a stated and formal policy.
After its admission to the United
Nations in 1971, China became in theory a party to the basic
human rights principles embodied in the U.N. Charter, and
subject to the International Bill of Human Rights as well. But China did not express interest in
international human rights activities until 1979, when it
began to attend meetings of the U.N. Human Rights Commission
as an observer. In 1982 China was elected to be a formal
member of the commission.
Since then China participated in the Subcommssion
on Preventionof Discrimination and Protection of Minorities
and in working groups concerned with the rights of indigenous
populations, freedom of communications, the rights of children,
the rights of migrant workers, and the issue of torture. China promoted the idea of a ¡°right to
development¡± with other Third World countries, which the
U.N. General Assembly enacted by resolution in 1986.
China expressed its flexibility by voting in favor
of U.N. investigations into human rights violations in Afghanistan,
and other governments on human rights grounds.
During this time China¡¯s human
rights condition largely lost international attention, thanks
to the U.S.-China partnership-like relationship in dealing
with the Soviet Union.
Ever since Richard Nixon¡¯s vist to China in 1972,
Americans and its western alliances seemed suspend judgment
on the subject of Chinese politics and many directed their
attention to the violations of human rights in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe.
China¡¯s opening and refome policy since 1979 and
its great and quick achievement in economic welfare also
add it some credits.
B. International Pressure and China¡¯s Response after 1989
The events in Tiananmen Square
on June 1989 brought about a radical shift in American as
well as international public opinion about China. Since then China become the No.1 target
for other countries¡¯ human rights diplomacy. Sanctions were imposed, including diplomatic cold shoulders
of one kind or another, candellation of economic, military
and cultural exchanges, freezes on bilateral aid and loans. Condemnations were publicly released by officers from Prime
Ministers to department directors.
Debates were raised in the United States on China¡¯s
eligibility to enjoy Normal Trade Relation status, and in
the U.N. Human Rights Commission on passing a resolution
to condem China in every year. Industrialized nations gave sanctuary to refugee dissidents,
and some, like the United States, gave permanent residency
to Chinese visiting scholars and students.
After 1989 China suffered a two-year decline in its
credit rating, foreign investment, export oeders and tourism.
From 1991 nearly every Western leader visiting China
(probably none of them intended to go to China before 1991)
made public and private representations concerning human
rights before their Chinese host.
A number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs),
including the International Labour Organization (ILO), the
Amnesty International, International Commission of Health
Professionals for Health and Human Rights, and the International
League for Human Rights, began to release Chinese human
rights situations related reports annually. These activities paint negatively to China¡¯s international
image and damaged its relations with Western world seriously. Moreover, anti-China atmosphere thereafter
defeated China¡¯s 1993 bid to host the 2000 Olympic, and
weakened Beijing¡¯s negotiating position in talks over intellectual
property rights and entry into GATT/WTO.
The Chinese response to all these pressures
took a number of forms.
External pressures arguably secured a number of much
publicized releases of prisoners of conscience detained
after June 1989,
and lighter sentencing for those undergoing trial in 1991. They also gave rise to invitations to
foreign human rights delegations.
More obviously, the Chinese government began to release
White Papers concerning human rights on every one or two
years. From 1991, the State Council, China¡¯s central government,
released ten White Papers concerning human rights, including:
The 1991 paper Human Rights in China, the 1992 paper
Tibet - Its Ownership and Human Rights Situation,
the 1994 paper The Situation of Chinese Women, the
1995 paper Family Planning in China, the 1995 paper
The Progress of Human Rights in China, the 1996 paper
The Situation of Children in China, The 1997 paper
Progress in China's Human Rights Cause in 1996, The
1997 paper Freedom of Religious Belief in China,
the 1998 paper New Progress in Human Rights in the Tibet
Autonomous Region, and the 2000 paper Fifty Years
of Progress in China's Human Rights. In these papers, China composed and employed
a variety of theories and counterattacks in defending its
human rights records, as I shall discuss later in this article.
Beijing also initiated or participated in some international human
rights activities. In 1992 and again in 1994 China signed
a memorandum of understanding with the United States to
restrict export of prison labor products to this country.
Since 1993, Beijing began to, by and then, provide
information to American diplomats on political prisoners
and held inconclusive talks with prison visits with the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Beijing also moved further toward accepting
human rights as a valid subject of international dialogue,
sending some human rights delegations to the West.
At the multilateral level, China moved forward its most significant
steps at the second half of 1990s.
On October 27, 1997, China signed the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR),
and on October 5, 1998, it signed the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Though not ratified by the National People¡¯s Congress,
signatures represented China¡¯s acceptance in principle
of the international community¡¯s right to monitor the overall
condition of its human rights. Partly due to its signatures in the two
covenants, for the first time since 1990 the United States
and other western countries decided to take no action on
China in the annual conference of the U.N. Human Rights
Commission in 1999.
Immediately after that, the sudden rise of Falun Gong, a mixture
of qigong and religious belief, interrupted China¡¯s short-lived
harmonious relationship with the West. After more than 10, 000 Falun Gong followers
surrounded the central government¡¯s office Zhong Nan Hai
on April 26, 1999, Beijing began to take radical measures
to crack down the what it labeled ¡°evil cult.¡±
Needless to say, this incurred radical reactions
from the West, which viewed ¡°free religious belief¡± as
one of the most fundamental human rights. As of this writing, the verbal fighting regarding Falun Gong
between PRC and the West is continuing.
C. China¡¯s Arguments and Theories on the International Protection of
Human Rights
To defend its human rights records and counterattack on its critics,
China mounted a couple of arguments and employed some established
theories in international law, embodied in its human rights
white papers and official statements. It argued that those critics use double standards in charging
China; that China drew condemnation while other countries
in which violations were in some sense worse; that prosperous
Westerners insisted on immediate implementation of modern
standards in a developing China; that the west itself had
committed human rights violations at least as deplorable
as those it was criticizing; that China had achieved great
improvement in human rights while China¡¯s record was essentially
no poorer than that of western countries.
Among those defenses China proclaimed the following
theories:
1. China asserts social and economic rights are more important human
rights.
It is Chinese government¡¯s firm
position to put ¡°people¡¯s rights to subsistence and development¡±
over any other aspects of human rights. This policy has been reiterated by official
spokespersons and repeated in nearly every human rights
white paper. In
the 1991 paper Human Rights in China, this policy
was elaborated as follows: ¡°It is a simple truth that,
for any country or nation, the right to subsistence is the
most important of all human rights, without which the other
rights are out of the question. The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to life,
liberty and the security of person. In old China, aggression
by imperialism and oppression by feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism
deprived the people of all guarantee for their lives, and
an uncountable number of them perished in war and famine.
To solve their human rights problems, the first thing for
the Chinese people to do is, for historical reasons, to
secure the right to subsistence.¡± In the 2000 paper 50 Years of Progress
in China¡¯s Human Rights, under the sub-title of ¡°The
Rights To Subsistence And Development, And Economic, Social
And Cultural Rights,¡± the same theory was reaffirmed: ¡°the
Chinese government has always put the people's rights to
subsistence and development first, focused on economic construction,
and made efforts to develop social productivity.¡± Numorous statistics were presented in
the papers as evidence of ¡°great improvements¡± in social
and economic rights, e.g., it was stated that from 1952
to 1998, China¡¯s industrial added value increased by 159
times with an average annual growth rate of 11.6 percent. Also, the livelihoods of both urban and
rural people have leaped several stages in succession, and
the consumption level has improved remarkably. Also, in the past twenty years, while
the poverty-stricken population worldwide has risen year
by year (according to 1999 World Band report), China has
secured 200 million people out of this group.
With respect to social rights, security and health systems
have been established, the working time has been shortened,
and culture and education is guaranteed nationwide.
China not only asserts social and
economic rights domestically, but also proclaims those rights
in international forum. In 1997, Chinese alternate representative spoke before the
United Nations Human Rights Commission:
¡°The Commission has not been able to give full play to its due role
in facilitationg the realization of economic, social and
cultural rights and these rights have long been neglected
in the commission ¡¡ the Chinese delegation maintains
that the full realization of the economic, social and cultural
rights and the right to development is the urgent task with
practical significance for the developing countries.¡±
2. China stresses state sovereignty supersedes human rights
For a number of reasons the concept
of state sovereignty was at the core of China¡¯s concerns
in its involvement in all issues of international law. At the early stage of the People¡¯s Republic,
China asserted the supremecy of state sovereignty in order
to prevent the Soviet Union from interfering with its internal
affairs on the pretext of keeping ability of ¡°socialist
family.¡± Later,
China was also concerned with Western intervention of its
internal affairs on the pretext of human rights. This position became a little loosen upon the implementation
of ¡°Reform And Opening Door¡± policy in 1979. In the 1981 Wang Tieya & Wei Min international law text
book, the preservation of the right to self-determination,
the prevention of discrimination, the prevention and punishment
of geonocide, the prohibition against slavery and similar
systems and customs, and the prevention and punishment of
terrorism were listed as international obligations. This book also pointed out that ¡°necessary
measures taken by all states and international organization
to suppress these behaviours were consistent with generally
recognized principles of international law and should not
be considered as intervening in the internal affairs of
a state.¡±
But after the Tiananmen event,
this more liberal interpretation reverted back in offical
policy to the collective rights and nearly abosolute state
sovereignty doctrine.
China continued to maintain that the international
community had a ligitimate role to play in upholding the
protection of those collective human rights, but not in
supporting individual rights.
The 1991 human rights White Paper stated:
¡°China has firmly opposed to any country making use of the issue
of human rights to sell its own values, ideology, political
standards and mode of development, and to any country interfering
in the internal affairs of other countries on the pretext
of human rights, the internal affairs of developing countries
in particular, and so hurting the sovereignty and dignity
of many developing countries¡¡China has always maintained
that human rights are essentially matters within the domestic
jurisdiction of a country. Respect for each country's sovereignty
and non-interference in internal affairs are universally
recognized principles of international law, which are applicable
to all fields of international relations, and of course
applicable to the field of human rights as well.¡±
Meanwhile, in the same white paper,
China left a small room for interntional aspect of human
rights protection:
¡°the international community should interfere with and stop acts
that endanger world peace and security, such as gross human
rights violations caused by colonialism, racism, foreign
aggression and occupation, as well as apartheid, racial
discrimination, genocide, slave trade and serious violation
of human rights by international terrorist organizations.¡±
The U.S. bombing of Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia on May 8, 1999
seriously damaged U.S. image in Chinese people, and called
Chinese scholars to revisit the human rights v. state sovereignty
doctrine. After
that event Chinese official policy in this regard became
harder. On May 26, 1999, a Xinhua News article
stated that ¡°it is time now to the fallacy that human rights
are above state sovereignty cooked up by the United States
and its major allies.¡± It said, by mistakenly killing innocents
and destroy civilian infrastructures, the United States
and its major allies had used this fallacy as a ¡°justification
for their extremely cruel acts of aggression.¡± This comment might be emotional and could
not represent China¡¯s official position; nonetheless it
at least indicated that, it would be more difficult to change
China¡¯s sovereignty policy.
3. China also argues cultural relativism and
Chinese values
In line with its proposition of establishing a multi-polar world
after the Cold War, Chinese officials repeatedly argued
that cultural standards differ in terms of human rights
protection. No culture¡¯s concept of human rights
has greater claim to be accepted than any others, therefore
the foreigner has no moral right to judge.
Rather than putting universality of human rights
over any particular cultural value, ¡°Consideration should
be given to the differing views on human rights held by
countries with different political, economic and social
systems, as well as different historical, religious and
cultural backgrounds. International human rights activities
should be carried on in the spirit of seeking common ground
while reserving differences, mutual respect, and the promotion
of understanding and cooperation.¡±
