Old Communists have new tricks to repress citizens

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 24, 1997 | by David Wagner

Forced-labor camps have been government policy since the Cultural Revolution. The People's Republic continues to use a population-control program and religious repression to subjugate its masses.

As China spreads its financial influence deeper into the U.S. economy, voices are assuring us that the human-rights situation in that country is improving. After all, doesn't a rise in human-rights standards always accompany westernization of an economy?

Actually, according to many experts on the internal situation in China, that is one of the hoariest myths in the propaganda book.

"Capitalism must never be equated with democracy," writes Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in China's dreaded Laogai ("reform through labor") camps, in his new book Troublemaker: One Man's Crusade Against China's Cruelty. "This is a very American belief--that making money produces freedom and justice and equality. Don't believe it about China. My homeland is mired in thousands of years of rule by one bully at a time, whether you call him emperor or chairman. Don't be fooled by electronics or air-conditioning."

Now an American citizen, Wu repeatedly has returned to China incognito to gather documentation on the camps, where unpaid prisoners make goods for export, including some of those inexpensive household appliances that seem omnipresent in U.S. stores. Wu estimates that 50 million people have been sent to the Laogai camps since 1949.

The Chinese government continues to impose a draconian population-control program on its citizens, limiting them to one child per couple. This policy is backed up by mandatory abortions or sterilization in case of subsequent pregnancies. The Chinese government attributes forced abortion to "overzealous" local cadres, but observers such as Steven Mosher, who lived in China as an anthropology graduate student from Stanford, says the cadres become "overzealous" because they are under pressure from higher levels of government to show "progress" in reaching population "goals."

Mosher's research in China led to his book,A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against One-Child China. Journalists later confirmed his reports. In July 1995, three women and a man who had fled China and were seeking admission to the United States as refugees testified before the House subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, telling of being harassed by government agents until they submitted to abortion or sterilization. The chairman of the subcommittee, New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, has called attention to China's inhumane policies in every possible forum, noting that forced abortion was branded a "crime against humanity" at the Nuremberg trials.

The one-child policy, underscored by the widespread preference of couples for sons to provide support in their old age, has led to a crisis in abandonment of female children. In January 1996, Human Right Watch/Asia released a report on Chinese orphanages, charging that man, of these abandoned girls are tied to beds or strapped to toddler chairs in freezing rooms. According to the report, attendants leave bottles of milk beside babies too young to feed themselves. "Authorities [in China are eliminating China's most defenseless citizens -- infants and children abandoned by their parents -- through intentional starvation and neglect."

The Chinese government vigorously denied the "so-called report" and quickly escorted journalists through a cheery and well-maintained orphanage in Beijing. But, according to Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia, the regime refused to cooperate with representatives from UNICEF on this issue.

Even apart from the orphanages, Jendrzejczyk (pronounced Jen-DREE-zik) disputes the wide-spread view that China's human-rights record is improving. He says, "There's been an overall decline in human rights in China and Tibet. Last April, China launched its `Operation Strike Hard' campaign in Tibet, which led to tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests and thousands of summary executions. There has also been increased repression of religious activists. The government knows there's a moral vacuum caused by the collapse in the credibility of communism, and that many people are turning to religious answers. The government now wants all religious groups to register, and those that don't have seen their houses of worship bulldozed."

Jendrzejczyk also notes that the Chinese government has blocked about 100 Internet sites, and President Jiang Zemin has been speaking about denouncing cultural freedom and warning of "spiritual pollution."

A recent report from the State Department -- which is not given to overstating human-rights abuses in China-noted that the Chinese government has arrested or exiled all the active members of the pro-democracy movement. "That's an amazing repressive accomplishment," says Jendrzejczyk, "not because there were so many democracy activists but because it's such a big country."

If there is hope, according to Jendrzejczyk, it comes from slow and incremental legal reforms that are being demanded by the business community. "The National People's Congress [or NPC] recently passed better laws on access to counsel and limits to arbitrary detention. The NPC may abolish [the] crime of `counterrevolution,' which is a major tool for imprisoning dissidents, but there would still be crimes such as `subverting the government.'"