Countries at the Crossroads 2007

Even though political institutions in China have not undergone major change, the degree to which Chinese can manage their own lives has increased substantially in the reform era. This is a very significant development, but it should be emphasized that not all Chinese are pleased with the reforms, which have also produced great economic inequality and made the fulfillment of basic needs less secure. And, as with so many things in China, the boundaries of what is permissible are arbitrary and constantly shifting.

It is worth noting that the 1982 constitution (amended several times) stresses the fundamental agency of the state rather than the individual, and the rights of citizens are listed along with their numerous duties and obligations. Article 33 was amended in 2004 to proclaim that “the state respects and preserves human rights.” However, the preponderance of the evidence, much of it from Chinese official sources, clearly indicates that these rights are commonly ignored in practice. Citizens have begun to demand that the organs of authority respect and enforce their constitutional rights. This includes not only the sophisticated urban middle class but, even more significantly, vast numbers of farmers. The call for the enforcement of rights already on the books, rather than any demand for electoral democracy, constitutes the core of popular political struggle in China.

In spite of obstructions, restrictions, surveillance, and intimidation, the UN Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment effectively corroborated long-standing allegations of these practices during a visit to China in late 2005.³⁶ A number of international organizations regularly publish information about the brutal treatment of detainees and deplorable prison conditions in China. Even internationally known activists, such as the lawyers Gao Zhisheng and Chen Guancheng (who is blind), have been beaten.³⁷ Central authorities have also recognized some of these practices and announced measures to curb them. These include prohibiting the use of evidence obtained through coerced confessions, punishing officials who use or sanction torture, and passing laws on criminal procedure.³⁸ In 1998, China signed—but has yet to ratify—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It did ratify the UN Convention Against Torture in 1988. The absence of an independent judiciary is one major obstacle to implementing these covenants, as is the general problem of local authorities ignoring orders from the center, misreporting the situation in their jurisdictions, and receiving protection from patrons at higher levels.

In 2005, officials acknowledged an upsurge in protests of various kinds, some of which attracted the attention of the domestic and international media. One traditional form of protest that remains popular is the petition, by which individuals bring complaints against local officials to higher levels in the administrative hierarchy in a bid to resolve grievances such as corruption, forced resettlement, land grabs, and miscarriage of justice.³⁹ This use of the law by petitioners is referred to as “rightful resistance.”⁴⁰ Petitioners believe that higher-level officials, including the top leaders in Beijing, will support them and punish miscreant subordinates once their misdeeds are exposed. In reality, petitioners are commonly sent back home, where humiliated and furious local officials exact revenge both through the formal legal system and the use of thugs.⁴¹

Other protests are defined as “mass incidents,” which include “riots, protests, demonstrations, and mass petitions.”⁴² The Ministry of Public Security stated that there were 58,000 such incidents in 2003, 74,000 in 2004, and 87,000 in 2005, with a decline in 2006, although the criteria for categorizing various types of disturbance remain confusing.⁴³ One major protest took place in early December 2005 in Dongzhou, a farming and fishing town in Guangdong, 125 miles northeast of Hong Kong. The proximate cause was inadequate compensation for land confiscated to build a power plant; villagers had failed in their efforts to utilize the petition system. Ordinary police and members of the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) suppressed them violently, killing between ten and twenty.⁴⁴ The use of police, the PAP, and hired thugs to deal with such protests reveals a distinct lack of respect for the civil liberties of the participants, who generally begin their pursuit of justice with nonviolent petitions. The crackdowns result in arbitrary arrests, torture, and an atmosphere of terror.

The regime in 2007 missed a chance to dismantle the reeducation through labor (RTL) system (laojiao), adopted in 1957. The system permits police to sentence people to a maximum of four years’ incarceration for petty crimes, although it originally targeted counterrevolutionaries. A Chinese legal expert acknowledged in early 2007 that the practice violated the state constitution, the Criminal Procedure Law, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.⁴⁵ Sentences under RTL may be stiffer than those under the criminal law, and detainees in RTL facilities face torture and harsh conditions. Although a proposal to abolish RTL was on the agenda for the 2007 meeting of the National People’s Congress, it did not pass, largely due to opposition from the Ministry of Public Security.⁴⁶

The CCP made the liberation of Chinese women a top priority from its earliest days, and it achieved a great deal, particularly in freeing many women from arranged marriages and getting them into the wage-earning workforce. Nearly all girls receive some primary education. Article 48 of the constitution grants women “equal rights with men in all spheres of life,” and they are supposed to receive “equal pay for equal work,” but as in most societies, gender inequality in China is entrenched and very resistant to change.⁴⁷

Since the late 1970s, the state has implemented a draconian family-planning policy, generally limiting urban families to one child and rural families to two. Given China’s traditional preference for males, which no legislation can eradicate, an unintended consequence of the single-child policy has been the selective abortion of female fetuses and even the revival of female infanticide. Ninety-nine cities have more than 125 boys for every 100 girls, and there are already “18 million more men than women of marriageable age.”⁴⁸ Ironically, this has in turn resulted in an upsurge in trafficking in women to supply the market for brides and female labor, including sex work. NGOs have been active in addressing this problem, and the government has severely punished traffickers, tried to reunite victims with their families, and cooperated on the issue with other countries in the region.⁴⁹

The Chinese government is a latecomer in paying attention to the special needs of people with disabilities, estimated at eighty-three million in the country. China still lacks many facilities and programs to ensure their full participation in society, and poverty and unemployment rates among the disabled are high,⁵⁰ despite increased activity by NGOs.

The constitution declares that “all nationalities in the People’s Republic of China are equal” and protects their “lawful rights and interests.” There are officially fifty-five minority nationalities, with populations ranging from 15.5 million (Zhuang) to 2,300 (Lhoba) people. Some maintain distinct cultures, including folk religions, while others have assimilated to the culture of the majority Han, who make up 92 percent of the population. Minorities are exempt from the single-child family policy in their regions, which has bred resentment among some Han.

The minority nationalities that have attracted the most foreign attention are the Tibetans and the Uyghurs; the latter, along with several other Muslim peoples, populate the far western region of Xinjiang. The Tibetans and Uyghurs both have elaborate religion-based cultures that are quite distinct from the Han culture; these are not suppressed per se. In fact, the state in recent decades has rebuilt temples and mosques, many of which were destroyed under Mao, though such restorations stem from a desire to co-opt the people and earn tourist income as much as from any respect for the cultures themselves.

The state is most concerned with Tibetan and Uyghur separatist movements, which receive various forms of support from abroad. The authorities take a rigid and punitive position on these movements, vilifying Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, and characterizing dissident Uyghurs as Islamist terrorists. The Dalai Lama has in fact renounced independence as a goal for Tibet, saying he seeks only to broker more autonomy for the people who still venerate him. Within his movement, however, there are restless members who do advocate a more extreme, even violent approach.

Under a policy of developing the western regions of the country, Han Chinese are flooding into Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, where they now dominate the economy as well as political and cultural life. Some foreign critics have condemned this as a thinly veiled form of cultural genocide. The opening of the last link of the Beijing–Lhasa railway in mid-2006 has been both hailed as a pipeline for the development of the Tibetan region and condemned as a funnel for outside influence.⁵¹

The state operates affirmative-action programs for minorities, recruiting many to top schools so that they can return to their home regions as loyal officials. Communist Party members cannot be religious believers, as communist ideology regards religion as nonscientific and a tool of the old exploiting classes and foreign imperialists. However, many CCP members do practice religions, mainly Buddhism, and some were open followers of Falun Gong until it was suppressed in 1999. Open believers cannot rise to the top of the political system, although they occupy important lower posts in the bureaucracy.

One disadvantaged group that has drawn attention in recent years is the so-called migrant or floating population. Until the 1990s, Chinese without official urban residence permits (hukou), typically farmers, could not live in the cities. Movement from city to city was also quite difficult. With the dismantling of collective agriculture and the rise of the market economy, rural people began migrating to cities to seek employment. However, the migrants, estimated to number over 130 million, still live in a sort of legal limbo. They are regularly cheated out of their wages, and have little recourse to claim them. Many work in very difficult and dangerous fields, such as construction, suffering high accident rates without insurance. They often live in appalling conditions, and if their families join them, the children are not eligible for schooling.⁵² The recent brick-kiln enslavement scandal in Shanxi province—and the collusion of local officials and police in this brutality—focused attention at least briefly on the exploitation of migrant labor. The case also revealed the weakness of the legal system.⁵³

Article 36 of the constitution protects “freedom of religious belief.” There are five officially recognized religions: Daoism (Taoism), Buddhism, Islam, nondenominational Christianity, and Catholicism. Each has a state-run association to manage and monitor its affairs. According to the constitution, the state cannot “compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion” and cannot discriminate against believers. The state protects “normal religious activities,” which it defines and manages through the Religious Affairs Bureau. In March 2005, the government passed regulations on religious affairs; the official goal was to better protect religious freedom, but critics claim that the vagueness and arbitrariness of the term “normal,” as well as strictures against using religion to “disrupt public order,” give the authorities wide scope to suppress any behavior that raises their suspicions.⁵⁴

Officials have fueled resentment by demolishing so-called house churches, buildings where Catholics and other Christians choose to worship outside the state-managed congregations for various reasons. Some Catholics remain loyal to the pope instead of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, provoking government friction with the Vatican, which insists it has ultimate authority over doctrine and the appointment of church officials (and which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan). The state sees this as interference in China’s internal affairs. In truth, many foreign religious groups do support Catholic and other Christian “underground” congregations. Their activities sometimes go beyond the defense of human rights and civil liberties and aim at religious conversion. Many Chinese outside the government resent this and associate missionary work with past imperialist aggression against China.

In February 2006, Pope Benedict XVI provocatively made Bishop Joseph Zen of Hong Kong a cardinal. Zen, a Shanghai native, has frequently criticized the CCP. But in July 2007, the pope issued a letter to Chinese Catholics trying to reconcile the official and underground churches, without relinquishing the Vatican’s right to appoint bishops. As older bishops die off, this may become a greater source of conflict.⁵⁵

While Buddhism as a whole is not terribly problematic from the regime’s point of view, Tibetan Buddhism is extremely sensitive. A particularly contentious case of state involvement in the appointment of religious leaders involves the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second-highest ranking religious figure. The 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, and a competition began between the CCP and independent believers to find his reincarnation. In May 1995, the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year old boy as the reincarnation, but in November the state named another. The first boy disappeared, and his whereabouts remain unknown.⁵⁶ In 2006 the state-approved Panchen Lama made his first major public appearance at an international Buddhist convocation in China.⁵⁷ In August 2007, in a patently bizarre move analogous to the policy on naming Catholic bishops, the atheistic state’s Religious Affairs Bureau issued a set of 14 regulations requiring that all reincarnated lamas receive government approval through the official Chinese Buddhist Association. Beijing is clearly positioning itself to assert authority over Tibetan Buddhism as the Dalai Lama ages.⁵⁸

While Christianity is associated with imperialist aggression and Tibetan Buddhism with separatism, China’s leaders link Islam to both separatism and terrorism. As noted above, the state has built new mosques and restored older ones that had been confiscated and used for other purposes. There is state-sponsored and private Islamic education, and many Chinese Muslims study abroad in such countries as Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, sometimes bringing back intolerance toward local practices. Nonetheless, women play an active role in Islamic education in China.⁵⁹

The numbers of religious believers have increased steadily, although reliable figures are hard to come by. This is true of Christians in particular. Officially, there are about 5 million Catholics and 15 million other Christians, but some estimates suggest 10 million Catholics and anywhere from 30 to 90 million Protestants.⁶⁰ Muslims are “conservatively estimated” to number 20 million.⁶¹

Article 35 of the constitution grants citizens “freedom of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.” Again, Article 51 trumps these freedoms, stating that their exercise “may not infringe upon the interests of the state,” without clearly specifying what that means. The limited channels for expression of discontent and the redress of grievances tends to lead to protests, which the state often violently disperses.

The state does not permit free and independent trade unions, and it suppresses attempts to organize them.⁶² All unions are arms of the CCP and function as much to control workers as to represent their interests. Such is the attraction of China’s market and plentiful, cheap labor supply that two staunchly antiunion U.S. companies, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, acceded to the government’s pressure to unionize their stores in 2006 and 2007, respectively. In 2006, the state began to draft a Labor Contract Law to crack down on sweatshops, protect workers, and empower unions; while these steps provoked opposition from foreign investors, U.S. unions organized a campaign of support.⁶³The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the measure in June 2007, and it is due to take effect January 1, 2008.⁶⁴

The days of China’s strict organization into mass associations or rural collectives are over. Membership in the Communist Youth League and the CCP still conveys certain benefits, whether it is a direct career boost or the establishment of more subtle guanxi (connections). But more and more Chinese are participating in civic life on their own, such as in NGOs or via internet chat rooms and blogs. Chambers of Commerce, with local and foreign members, have also begun to assume an important role in Chinese life.

Recommendations

• The government should increase planning and resources devoted to enforcing constitutional provisions and existing laws guaranteeing civil liberties, and punish officers of the state who violate those rights.
• The authorities should open channels such as town-hall meetings and expand current experiments with “consultative democracy,” which allow citizens to both express grievances and offer constructive opinions. The leadership should also prevent officials from interfering with this process or exacting revenge on those who participate.
• The government should work more actively and directly with religious groups in China to enrich spiritual life for believers and nonbelievers alike.
• Additional efforts should be made to protect girls and women from trafficking, and to address the gender imbalance that helps fuel the practice.