China cannot go its own way on rights: UN

AFP AND AP , BEIJING

The UN top rights envoy told Beijing yesterday she expected more progress on human rights in China, saying individual countries could not ignore international standards in dealing with the issue.

High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour expressed concern about the possible use of the death penalty against ethnic minorities and the mentally ill, saying data from other countries showed they often were executed in disproportionately large numbers.

Arbour also said she expressed her concern over China's execution of people for offenses "that do not meet the international standard of `most serious crimes.'"

China executes thousands of prisoners every year for crimes ranging from murder to nonviolent offenses such as tax evasion.

"There is a framework of international standards that must be respected. It's not appropriate to say we're doing it in our own way," she told a briefing as she ended a five-day visit.

Her remarks came just days after Tang Jiaxuan, a state councilor and former foreign minister, told a symposium attended by Arbour that every country should be allowed to adopt its own approach to dealing with human rights.

"Every country should choose its own way to promote and protect human rights in line with its national conditions," Tang said on Tuesday.

Arbour, in China on her first visit as UN high commissioner, told yesterday's briefing she expected progress on rights in China in the coming years given the country's development in other areas.

"During my discussions with Chinese officials it was often said to me that change had to be gradual," she said.

"While I do not disagree, I believe the stage is set for expecting more than modest progress in the coming years," she said.

"China has declared its commitment to human rights and has raised expectations for the country to match its growing prosperity with a firm commitment to advancing human rights, at home and abroad," she said.

She said her visit had shown that China is "seriously" approaching the issue of ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Officials had told her China wants to use the time before ratification to bring legislation and practice in line with the covenant's requirements so that the treaty can be ratified with as few reservations as possible, she said.

"If China were to ratify the covenant today, certainly on the basis of my discussions here, it's pretty clear that the government understands that it would be in non-compliance in many areas," she said.

At the start of her visit, she raised about 10 individual cases of particular concern to the UN, including cases of detained journalists, labor activists, two Tibetans, a member of the Uighur minority group and an ethnic Mongolian.

Rights groups urge EU to press Beijing over human rights

REUTERS, BEIJING

EU leaders should press China to deal directly with the Dalai Lama and to improve its widely criticized human rights record when they visit Beijing next week, international rights groups said yesterday.

A day after China celebrated the 40th anniversary of Tibetan "autonomy" with a parade in Lhasa, the London based Free Tibet Campaign called on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, leading the EU delegation to next week's summit, to press Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader branded a “splittist.”

"Free Tibet Campaign has warned Mr. Blair not to participate in any event which commemorates this anniversary and has further asked him to make a public statement of concern about Tibet whilst he is China," the group said in a statement.

The Dalai Lama fled to India after a. failed uprising in 1959, nine years after China's People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet to establish Beijing's rule.

The Buddhist leader maintains he wants more autonomy, not independence, for Tibet and says China's image has been tarnished by its human rights record in Tibet.

Beijing charges him with continuing to provoke separatism and refuses to let him back into the Himalayan region.

In a pointed commentary published late on Thursday, the state-run Xinhua news agency questioned the Dalai Lama's assertion he wants greater autonomy and criticised him for bringing foreign influence into "an internal affair."

"It might not be respectful to doubt the wisdom of `His Holiness' for not waking up to reality, but we have to wonder what on earth the Dalai Lama wants for the claim of 'greater autonomy, the commentary said.

On Friday, Amnesty International called on European leaders to use their summit to press their Chinese counterparts on other aspects of human rights, including China's tight controls over the press and detention of dissidents.

Concerns over human rights abuses were a major reason EU leaders decided not to lift an arms embargo on China imposed after the army crushed the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, killing hundreds.

China lacks Taiwan's democracy

By Chen Ching-chih

`Chinese Communist leaders have ignored popular will only because they are not truly elected and are not likely to be elected in the foreseeable future.'

Taiwan's liberal democratic political culture has set it far apart from the autocratic, authoritarian political culture of China.

Let's first look at China's political culture. Even though many Chinese may perceive the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a modern state, historians such as Philip Kuhn of Harvard and Ross Terrill of the University of Texas see the PRC as an empire rather than a modern state. As a matter of fact, Terrill's 2003 book is appropriately titled The New Chinese Empire.

Kuhn, who published his Origins of the Modern Chinese State in 2002, pointed out in his recent talk on China's historical experience of "Empire and Nation," that in China "empire is still alive in some guise or other in the Chinese body politic and probably in the minds of many Chinese."

Beijing clearly has not relinquished all the modes of empire. The relationship between the rulers and the ruled in China today is indeed little different from that during China's imperial times. In spite of Mencius' view that only a government that respects the people is a just government, political legitimacy in China has never stemmed from the sovereignty of the people. Not unlike their imperial predecessors, the Chinese Communist rulers today look down upon the people.

Mao Zedong, for example, famously regarded the people as "poor and blank," and thus considered them easy to mold in the way that the Chinese leaders would see fit.

Likewise, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin has justified the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rejection of democracy on the pretext that the Chinese people are poorly educated and thus far from being ready for it.

Jiang had conveniently ignored the fact that democracy prevails in places where its people are not necessarily better educated than the Chinese. Thus regardless of its official name of the "People's Republic," the Republic is not "of" the people, it is more "by" and "for" the CCP than "by and for" the people. More than a century after Sun Yat-sen borrowed Lincoln's concept of government "of the people, by the people and for the people," the Chinese leaders still have no intention of embracing popular sovereignty.

The words "freedom" and "equality" are virtually absent from Chinese political writings that have instead stressed "duties," "status" and "hierarchy" since the time of Confucius. It is no wonder that the Chinese government not only has rules and regulations for censoring Chinese publications and electronic networks, but has also compelled foreign IT networks to remove from their Web sites such western terms and concepts as "freedom" and "democracy." These terms are perceived as subversive to China's socio-political stability and order.

This was the reason why the Beijing government moved to brutally crush the student protesters demanding democratic reforms at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. For the same reason, Jiang and his successor are persecuting Falun Gong followers in China and spying on those abroad. International human rights organizations are particularly critical of Beijing's violation of human rights against Tibetans and Uighurs, as well. In short, Chinese Communist leaders have ignored popular will only because they are not truly elected and are not likely to be elected in the foreseeable future.

In contrast, Taiwan's political culture has evolved over the years to become liberal democratic, ie, more western than Chinese. True, for decades in the post-World War II era Taiwan was under Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial rule. Chiang was as much imbued with the perception of China's past imperial glory as Mao was. His Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was as Leninist as the CCP has been.

Chiang had won power through the barrel of a gun in the late 1920s even though the territory under his rule was only about a quarter of what China is today. Not having come to power by the will of the people, the KMT party state was thus unable to move away form the Chinese authoritarian tradition.

Having lost the Chinese civil war to the Mao-led CCP in 1949, Chiang and his followers ended up in exile in Taiwan. The people of Taiwan elected neither Chiang nor his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo. The two Chiangs had paid lip service to popular sovereignty. Both of them, however, were nominated by the KMT, the ruling and only meaningful political party in Taiwan, and consequently their elections by the rubber-stamp National Assembly were automatic.

It was only due to changing political situations in the 1980s, particularly by the efforts of Taiwanese pro-democracy activists and US pressures, that the KMT ultimately had to yield power in the late 1980s. Chiang Ching-kuo wisely tolerated the formation of an opposition party in 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and in 1987 lifted the Martial Law that had been in existence since the early 1950s.

Today in Taiwan, the people directly elect all representative officials from township heads to the president. Two presidents have been elected this way. The election of Chen Shui-bian in 2000 and then again last year are of particular significance because voters rejected the KMT candidates that made up the ruling party of Taiwan for over half a century.

That popular sovereignty is embraced in Taiwan cannot be questioned. According to New York University law professor Chen Lung-chih, with the direct election of the president since 1996, Taiwan is now a new sovereign and independent nation. Chen Lung-chih referred to the institution of direct election of the president in Taiwan as "effective self-determination" at the annual meeting of the North American Taiwanese Professors' Association at Salt Lake City late last July.

In this new nation Taiwan, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly and more are guaranteed. Taiwan is no longer the party-state it was under the two Chiangs. The island nation has a multiparty political system institutionalized in a pluralistic society. Unison in thought is not encouraged like it was during the KMT era; Taiwanese spoken languages other than Mandarin are now also offered at school. Human rights and human dignity are generally respected.

As a result, for the last decade or so the US-based Freedom House has ranked Taiwan as one of the three freest nations in Asia, while China is ranked as one of the least free. Taiwan's successful democracy is seen by China as "a monster," Kuhn said.

It is crystal clear that the difference between Taiwan's political culture and that in China is like day and night. Not only do the people of Taiwan value their freedom and democracy, but they should also be able to expect the freedom-loving people of the world to support their aspiration to remain free and independent.

This is not to say that Taiwan does not need a military defense. On the contrary, as a sovereign, independent nation, Taiwan's defense is on the shoulders of its people. Friendly nations such as the US and Japan will come to its aid only if they are convinced that the people of Taiwan are determined to defend what they have struggled to secure over the past half century.

Chen Ching-chih is a researcher with the Los Angeles-based Institute for Taiwanese Studies.