Decades After the Cultural Revolution, a Rare Letter of Remorse

By JANE PERLEZ

In an apology for his actions as a student during the Cultural Revolution, Chen Xiaolu, the son of China’s famed Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, published a notice in his school alumni blog in August. 

A profile based on interviews with Mr. Chen in the Saturday editions of the New York Times and the International New York Times refers to the apology, a rare expression of remorse from someone involved in carrying out Mao’s orders. 

Mr. Chen explains the apology was too long in coming, and says reflections on the past are necessary in order for China to move forward.
The apology attracted wide interest online, and also from colleagues who attended Middle School Number Eight, a prestigious school in the center of Beijing that catered to the children of the elite. 

Some of Mr. Chen’s teachers are still alive, including Wen Hanjiang, the school principal, now 89. 

Mr. Chen recently visited Mr. Wen, who was badly beaten during the dark days of the Cultural Revolution at the school. 

The elderly man accepted his personal apology, as did the other teachers who still live in Beijing and whom he visited, Mr. Chen said. 

In early October, Mr. Chen organized a dinner with former teachers and students, a convivial affair, he said, where the past was discussed in a friendly and forgiving way.
At the start of the apology, he refers to grainy black and white photographs from the summer of 1966 when the school was in turmoil, and the students, ordered by Mao to crush the old structures of power, were in charge. 

The photos show teachers being forced to do menial labor — digging a ditch, carrying heavy loads — while cocky students look on.
On a personal note, I met Chen Yi, the father of Chen Xiaolu, when he was foreign minister. 

I was in China at the time as a university undergraduate from Australia on a summer vacation in January 1967, and my fellow students and I were surprised, when we arrived, to find the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. 

We traveled by train up the eastern seaboard to Beijing with stops in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing. 

At our meeting at the Great Hall of the People Chen Yi was jovial, offering cigarettes and bantering about our trip. 

He was dressed in a rumpled Mao suit as he talked the language of the Cultural Revolution. 

There was little hint that the next month he would speak out against what Mao had wrought. 

Forty six years later his son decided to follow his example.
The following is a complete translation of Chen Xiaolu’s message of apology.

I want to thank our classmate for preserving these precious photographs, and to thank Huang Jian for making them public on August 18th. 

That period of time is unbearable to look back upon, but those are days that we’ll have to face our whole lives. 

As a student leader at Middle School Number Eight and the director of the school’s Revolutionary Committee, I bear direct responsibility for the denouncing, criticism and forced labor re-education of school leaders, some teachers and students. 

In the early stages of the movement, I actively rebelled and organized the denunciations of school leaders. 

When I later served as the director of the school’s Revolutionary Committee, I wasn’t brave enough to stop the inhumane persecutions, because I feared I would be accused of protecting the old ways and being a counter-revolutionary. 

It was a terrifying time.
Today I want to use the Internet to express my sincere apology to these people. 

Middle School Number Eight’s Old-Three-Classes student union is currently organizing a get-together with school leaders and teachers. 

I hope I can represent those Old-Three-Classes classmates who have hurt these school leaders, teachers and students in expressing our deepest apologies to them. 

I want to ask, will our classmates authorize me to make this kind of apology?
Recently you’ve seen in society a trend of trying to reverse the verdict on the Cultural Revolution. 

I believe that how one interprets the Cultural Revolution is matter of individual freedom, but unconstitutional and inhumane violations of human rights shouldn’t be repeated in any form in China! 

If it is repeated, we can’t even begin to speak of the happiness of the people, the wealth and power of the nation, or the Chinese Dream! 

My official apology comes too late, but for the purification of the soul, the progress of society, the future of the nation, one must make this kind of apology. 

Without reflection, how can we speak of progress!
Chen Xiaolu

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The Long Shadow of Chinese Blacklists on American Academe

Giving clear punishment for unclear reasons will cause any person to be cautious and to censor what one says on politically sensitive topics. 

By Perry Link

Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

A blacklist somewhere in the Ministry of State Security in Beijing bears my name. 

I study Chinese language and literature, and since 1996 have been denied visas to the People’s Republic.
The news media have recently reported on China’s decision to deny visas to American journalists and put pressure on companies like Bloomberg and The New York Times because of their reporters’ critical coverage of China. 

Such efforts have raised the question of whether the Chinese government is engineering American perceptions of China. 

The problem exists—and has far-reaching implications—in academe as well.
I do not know why I am barred from entering China. 

There are many possible reasons; I speak and write often in support of human rights in China and in criticism of the Chinese government. 

But no one in the government will say exactly where or when I crossed a line.
Giving clear punishment for unclear reasons will cause any person, whether directly involved or merely an observer, to be cautious and to censor what one says on politically sensitive topics. 

The Chinese Communist Party has used this technique on its own people for decades. 

I wrote about the problem in a 2002 essay in The New York Review of Books that I called “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.”
I miss going to China. 

My latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), draws examples from many kinds of language, including alleyway brogue and graffiti at tourist sites—things that not even Google, but only on-site observation, can yield. (My on-site data are all from 1996 or earlier.)
But—by a wide margin—this is not the most painful part of being on a blacklist. 

The worst part is that I become a tool of the Chinese government and there is nothing I can do about it. Long-term blacklistees, like me and my friend Andrew J. Nathan, a political-science professor at Columbia University, have become known in China studies as examples of what happens to you if you cross a line. Since my blacklisting I have had countless inquiries, especially from younger scholars, who are invariably polite but always want to ask, one way or another, “How do I not end up where you are?”
Here are some examples:

• Two assistant professors who were blacklisted a few years ago, apparently for having attended a conference on the Chinese region of Xinjiang (for the Chinese government, a politically sensitive “minority peoples” area), approached me for advice. Both were preparing to travel to Chinese consulates (in New York and Chicago) for interviews with Chinese officials about their visas. In the interviews the officials advised both, in general terms, to be more careful in what they said and wrote. “Do not hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” Both young scholars felt humiliated and outraged, but neither would say anything in public, and both asked that I keep their names confidential. Both soon faced tenure decisions and felt that their careers could be at stake. One of them later did get a visa to go to China.
• In the late 1990s, a graduate student at Princeton (where I taught most of my career) asked me for advice on his dissertation topic. He wanted to write about Chinese democracy, but his advisers in the politics department were cautioning him that this might not be a wise career move. What if it cost him his access to China? The young man decided to write on something else. I wanted to nudge him back toward his first love, but could not in good conscience do it.
• A bright undergraduate at Princeton, who had studied Chinese language with me, was delighted when she told me she had secured a summer internship with Human Rights Watch. A few days later she heard about the blacklist and came back to me. “Do you think I should still do it?” she asked. “Of course you should,” I said. In this case, the student was being far too fearful. The anaconda in the chandelier was looming too large. A stint with Human Rights Watch would not ruin her future, I said. In the end, she declined the internship.
• Another smart Princeton undergraduate, then president of the student body, came to me for advice because the Chinese government had invited the student-body presidents of all the Ivy League schools for a three-week junket in China. He wanted to go, and I encouraged him, but he was extremely worried about how to behave. Can I mention the Tiananmen massacre? Can I even say the words “Dalai Lama”? Can I talk about my friends from Taiwan? Here, too, the anaconda loomed, and was causing much deeper self-censorship than was necessary.

As these examples show, blacklists induce self-censorship not just in people who are blacklisted but, far more broadly, in people who merely fear that they might be. (Actually, for people like me on long-term blacklists, fear gradually subsides. A knife fallen loses the deterrent power of threatening a fall—or, in the Chinese farmers’ proverb, “Dead pigs aren’t afraid of hot water.”)
But if the circle of affected scholars extends beyond those who are blacklisted, another affected circle, wider still, is the general public. 

I have a dear friend, a distinguished historian, who declined a few years ago to go on the PBS NewsHour to talk about the Falun Gong religious movement (another topic super-sensitive to the Chinese government). She wanted to preserve her research access to China, so for that evening, anyway, PBS viewers did not get the best commentary they could have had.
This might be called a “direct cost” to the public, and such costs are real; but they are far smaller than the indirect costs that are embedded in the ways China scholars, wary of the anaconda in the chandelier, shape their speech on sensitive topics. 

One avoids a term like “Taiwan independence”; one speaks instead of “cross-strait relations.” 

The word “liberation” appears as shorthand for the Communist victory in 1949. 

One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison, at all.
It would be unfair to say that Sinologists are naïve about their verbal accommodations. 

Most of them are not. 

Their ways of speaking are a sort of professional code that insiders understand and that, with time, comes to seem utterly normal. 

But when scholars use their code to write and speak to students and to the public, which they often do, wrong impressions are communicated. 

Listeners understand that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, and that a Nobel Prize winner in prison is really not worth mentioning.
American universities—NYU, Duke, and others—have begun to build campuses in China or offer courses and degrees on Chinese campuses, and many others have set up exchange programs and offices. 

American administrators uniformly vow loyalty to academic freedom but on the whole have very poor understandings of the cultural and political contexts they are entering.
I have personally spent many hours on study-in-China programs for Americans and am a strong supporter of more and better exchange. 

On the question of protecting academic freedom, I am not optimistic that American university administrators will dare to take my advice, but will offer it here anyway.
The American side should be explicit and concrete in raising the very most sensitive of topics. 

Hold seminars on the thought of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo. 

Establish a speaker series on Tibet that honors the Dalai Lama. 

Offer a regular course on the pros and cons of one-party dictatorship. 

The point here is nothing so small-minded as to “stick a finger in an eye.” 

The point is that only by planting flags at the outer boundaries can you insure the integrity of the entire field. 

Without the flags, the wordless anaconda will take over, the boundaries will creep in, and academic freedom will be strangled. 

It is also crucial to bear in mind that, when you raise sensitive topics, you will not be affronting “China.” Communist authorities will not like what you do, but most students and intellectuals will welcome it, and many will be secretly cheering for you.
In the end, administrators at American universities should understand the fact that a dozen or so China scholars who cannot work in China is only a very small part of the cost of Chinese-government blacklists. The much larger problem is the subtle but pervasive self-censorship that blacklists help to induce.

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Spain Has Indicted Hu Jintao Over Tibet

Hu Jintao was indicted by Spain's national court.

By Justin McDonnell

Last month, Spain’s National Court indicted China’s ex-president, Hu Jintao for grave crimes against humanity, South China Morning Post and other publications reported.

The Madrid-based Tibetan Support Committee originally filed a lawsuit against then-President Hu in 2006, alleging that the Chinese Communist Party leader was responsible for the torture and repression of the Tibetan people.  The lawsuit also names six other former leaders of the CCP, including Mr. Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

Hu Jintao was party chief in the Himalayan region from 1988 to 1992. In the wake of Tiananmen Square, he declared military rule to suppress anti-government protests in the Tibet autonomous region. The indictment also cites his actions as general secretary of the CCP.

China has denounced the indictment as trying to interfere with China’s domestic affairs. 

“We firmly oppose any country or person attempting to use this issue to interfere with China's internal affairs,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said after the indictment was handed down.

Beijing claims sovereignty over Tibet and gained control of the region in 1950. Yet, many Tibetans remain loyal to the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

The Spanish court’s ruling comes at a time when tensions are running high over Tibet.  Last month it was reported that Chinese police fired upon Tibetan protestors, wounding 60 people.  Since 2009, more than 120 Tibetans have set themselves on fire as protest against Chinese rule.  

Spain has given its National Court universal jurisdiction for cases involving war crimes and other serious violations of international law like crimes against humanity and genocide. Established in 1977, the National Court has pursued cases under universal jurisdiction ever since it issued an international warrant for former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Salvador Allende. Pinochet was detained in London for almost two years until UK home secretary Jack Straw ordered his release on medical grounds, allowing him to travel back home to Chile.

Since then, Madrid has investigated mass killings by the Francoist dictatorship, and indicted Rwandan officials linked to the 1994 genocide, former Nazi guards, Israelis involved in Gaza bombings, and Salvadoran ex-soldiers for the murder of Jesuit priests during the civil war. Once considered to have the broadest universal jurisdiction in the world, in 2009 the government restricted the courts to cases where the victims were Spanish citizens. The Spanish legal system allowed the suit against Mr. Hu to be heard because one of the plaintiffs, Buddhist monk Thubten Wangchen is a Spanish citizen.

The majority of jurisdiction cases have not resulted in convictions and it is virtually unthinkable China’s indicted leaders will be extradited and forced to defend themselves before a Spanish court.

A New Precedent for Today’s Europe or A Continuation of Quiet Diplomacy?

Many EU countries, especially indebted ones, have kept quiet about Tibet.  Most EU member states have left China’s human rights issues to EU institutions.  That could largely be because Beijing has been known to punish other countries for perceived offenses.  For example, Norway continues to incur China’s ire for awarding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.  High-level meetings have been frozen and deals blocked between China and EU member states for meeting with the Dalai Lama, a highly sensitive issue for the Chinese. 

Much of Europe has greatly toned down its public criticism of China’s human rights violations but Spain is aspiring toward truth and justice.  Will China "punish" Spain over the National Court’s investigation, ban high-level meetings, and implement soft sanctions that affect trade and investment?  While it’s still uncertain what kind of diplomatic reaction there will be, investors seem concerned that the incitement could hurt Spanish brands, especially as they look to access China’s markets to help rejuvenate and stabilize the economy.

Instead of caving in to Chinese demands, this could encourage Europe to move away from its quiet diplomacy and toward a cohesive European policy on human rights that strengthens the EU’s ability to put greater pressure on Beijing and far-flung places, where its citizens are not properly protected by the rule of law. Still, it’s debatable whether or not European countries should intervene in criminal cases elsewhere and empower their domestic courts to hear international criminal justice cases.

Beyond a State of Impunity

Universal jurisdiction is not without its criticisms, and many failures.  But at a time when the international system of justice is in shambles, and moving toward complacency, there needs to be a force willing to expose and confront abusive regimes. Why not Europe’s domestic courts?  Spain’s recent indictment of a former head of state opens up an old, polarizing debate at an interesting point in time when leadership is running amok.

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Chinese Citizens Join Call for Excluding China From UN Rights Council

“To allow China to become a member of the UNHRC is to allow a wolf to take care of the sheep,” said Rebiya Kadeer.

By Matthew Robertson

Tibetan activists hold a demonstration on Oct. 22, 2013 outside of the United Nations offices in Geneva. Overseas Tibetans, along with Chinese inside China, have protested the human rights abuses of the Chinese regime in the context of its United Nations membership, and attempts to be a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

A loose community of activists inside China has repeated the demands made by those outside: That the People’s Republic of China is in no way suited to be part of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.
The sentiment seems counterintuitive for a people that are supposed to be patriotic supporters of the Chinese state, but these activists, whose efforts were recently publicized by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders website, point to human rights abuses inside and outside of China that they argue should disqualify the Chinese regime from any official standing in the international human rights community.
Members of the Human Rights Council of the UN are expected to uphold the council’s standards on human rights, according to its website. 

According to the petition, during the last time the PRC was a member of the council, from 2006 to 2012, “it supported the military government of Burma to suppress democratic movements and human rights defenders. It assisted Zimbabwe’s authoritarian government and obstructed the development of democracy, and it aided Syria’s Assad regime in massacring its own people.”
The petition—a bold gesture in a country whose communist regime maintains one of the most proactive and well-oiled machineries of state repression—was signed by hundreds of residents in Shanghai, and then given a boost by activists in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, and 10 other provinces.
Initiatives For China, an overseas activist group that works for democracy in China, says that it has collected over 10,000 signatures from Chinese inside and outside the country opposing the PRC’s candidacy. 

They recently staged a protest outside the United Nations building in New York.
“To allow China to become a member [of the UNHRC] is to allow a wolf to take care of the sheep,” said Rebiya Kadeer, a leader of the Uyghur muslims, a people of western China’s Xinjiang Province who regularly report repression by the Chinese authorities.
The activists’ chances of success may be dubious. 

The vote for the PRC’s UN Human Rights Council seat takes place on Nov. 12. 

There are five seats being vacated, with four countries to fill them. 

Likely the only reason that China has been off the council is because it was ineligible last time, after having already served two consecutive terms.

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China hasn’t earned a spot on Human Rights Council

Putting China on the U.N. Human Rights Council would be like picking the fox to guard the henhouse — while it was still wiping feathers off its mouth. 

By Yang Jianli

While it is debatable whether the United States should intervene in criminal cases in China, such as that of the recently executed street vendor Xia Junfeng, it is unacceptable for Washington to ignore China’s human rights record when it can raise the issue without being accused of “interfering in internal affairs.” 

Washington will have such an opportunity when the U.N. General Assembly chooses new members of its Human Rights Council this month.
China, after a year of leave, is seeking a three-year term on the council.

It is critical for the United States to show Beijing’s new leaders that their horrific treatment of citizens matters. 

U.S. government agencies, Congress, U.N. human rights monitors and human rights organizations show the atrocious extent of Chinese repression. 

Putting China on the U.N. Human Rights Council would be like picking the fox to guard the henhouse — while it was still wiping feathers off its mouth. 

Yet the Obama administration appears to approve of doing so.
For many reasons, China is unfit to sit on a council charged with protecting human rights: As the Congressional-Executive Commission noted in its 2012 annual report, forced abortions and sterilizations are still common in China. 

The State Department’s 2012 report on human rights said that the denial of religious freedom in China remains pervasive and was particularly severe against Tibetan Buddhists, Muslim Uighurs, Falun Gong practitioners and members of house churches.
China tortures its citizens. This is a violation of the Convention Against Torture, to which Beijing is a party. 

Beijing also returns refugees to North Korea, where they will be imprisoned and tortured. This is a violation of the Convention on the Status of Refugees, which China has signed.

Dungeons across China hold tens of thousands of Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong and Han Chinese who bravely seek to defend the human rights of those persecuted for their faith or ethnicity or for seeking the rule of law. 

China is the only country in the world that detains a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. 

Tibetans are driven to self-immolation by their continued oppression. 

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China annually details gross violations of human rights.
China’s brutal actions belie its claim that economic modernization would lead to decreased human rights abuses. 

Such notions are disproved by headlines about the latest outrages, such as when human rights lawyers were beaten earlier this year while seeking to visit unlawfully jailed political prisoners. 

China’s “reforms” involve change in economic and governmental institutions or minor procedural improvements. 

They do not extend to meaningful human rights reform.
President Xi Jinping’s “commitment” to the rule of law was exposed as a lie when one of China’s most prominent human rights advocates, Xu Zhiyong, was detained in July. 

The Post editorialized: “The detention of Mr. Xu suggests that the powerful machinery of the Chinese state security remains on the prowl against those who challenge the [Communist] party’s monopoly on power . . . a system in which the party-state stands above human rights, freedom and rule of law.”
Some believe that the United States cannot press China on human rights because it seeks Chinese cooperation on economic and national security issues. 

But Washington has negotiated arms-control and trade agreements with other countries, including the Soviet Union, while pressing for human rights reform.
Other nations have risked economic ties to criticize Beijing, including Norway, which awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo over China’s strong objection; Canada, which has sharply criticized Chinese treatment of Tibetans; and the European Union, which has condemned China’s human rights abuses.
To be elected to the council, candidates must get 97 votes from General Assembly members. 

If each U.N. democracy votes no, China will not succeed. 

U.S. resolve would help other democracies summon the courage to confront China. 

The United States has opposed other candidates for the council that have terrible human rights records, including Syria and Iran. 

Beijing’s record of rights abuses is even worse.
How could U.S. representatives at the United Nations vote to place the torture capital of the world on the international body charged with protecting human rights? 

The United States may not have been able to intervene in the case of Xia Junfeng. 

But opposing China’s candidacy for the U.N. Human Rights Council is the least Washington can do.

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The U.S. needs a new strategy in addressing China’s human rights

By Jared Genser

Supporters of the Chinese pro-democratic movement stage a demonstration in California on Oct. 4.
In recent decades, China’s economy has grown about 10 percent a year, lifting more than 500 million people out of poverty, generating wealth for the middle class and expanding global trade. 

But as the world’s most populous nation has become an increasingly important player on the international stage, it has also brazenly refused to respect fundamental human rights at home. 

Nowhere is this more evident than the continued persecution of high-profile rights activists and their families.
Repeated efforts by the State Department have not changed the calculus of Chinese leaders. 

There appears to be little prospect of improvement, absent a new approach from the White House that leads with a consistent public message.
Chen Guangcheng’s escape from illegal house arrest and his arrival at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in the spring of 2012 briefly focused major international attention on the treatment of those who defend human rights in China. 

But Chinese officials’ continued failure to keep their promise to end the persecution of the broader Chen family has been less widely reported. 

And Washington’s muted response to the flagrant violation of this commitment sends a terrible message to Chinese officials.
Despite assurances by the Chinese government that it would investigate and end the targeting of the Chen family, local authorities continue to detain, harass, threaten and intimidate the family. 

After Chen Guangcheng’s escape to Beijing, party officials and thugs attacked the family home. 

They severely beat his relatives, including his nephew Chen Kegui, who was later convicted of “assault” and is serving more than three years in prison for defending himself from the onslaught. 

Authorities have repeatedly detained Chen Kegui’s parents. 

They have launched a smear campaign against the family and have destroyed part of the family’s subsistence farm. 

Beer bottles and animal carcasses are regularly thrown at the home, and the family’s village is under constant surveillance by teams of police. 

Also, Chen Kegui has been denied access to adequate medical care.
Unfortunately, this kind of impunity is nothing new. 

When confronted about the disappearance of Chinese legal pioneer Gao Zhisheng in 2010, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that he could not be expected to locate the renowned activist among the country’s 1.3 billion people — even though it was police who told Gao’s brother that he had “disappeared.” 

Similarly, Chinese officials deny that Liu Xia, a prominent poet and artist who is married to imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, is under continued house arrest. 

Despite official claims, police repeatedly turn diplomats, journalists and supporters away from Liu Xia’s apartment building.
These stories demonstrate the comfort that Beijing feels in flouting its legal obligations to its own people and in outright lying to the international community. 

Given that continued inattention only breeds more persecution, a new strategy is desperately needed.
First, the clear violation of China’s commitments and its lies must be directly and publicly confronted. 

Failure to squarely address the government’s impunity only emboldens those in the Chinese government who interpret quiet diplomacy and private protestations as a license to oppress. 

It was disheartening, for example, when President Obama failed to sign a letter to incoming Chinese President Xi Jinping last December from 134 Nobel laureates pressing for Liu Xiaobo’s release. 

The White House has never publicly called for Liu Xia to be released from her extralegal house arrest. 

This signals to Beijing that there will be no real price for failing to respond to private requests for action on these cases.
Second, in instances in which Chinese officials refuse to engage as honest actors, it is incumbent upon the U.S. administration to meet with Chinese dissidents and their families who can speak with unique authority about the persecution they continue to face in China. 

Meetings with President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, in particular, make clear that the United States views human rights as a central component of its foreign policy.
Finally, each high-level meeting with Chinese officials should include a substantive discussion of human rights issues relevant to the subject of the meeting. 

International standards on political, social, economic, environmental and cultural rights inform nearly all aspects of modern life. 

Prioritizing a bilateral relationship that consistently emphasizes fundamental freedoms would allow the administration to articulate a coherent strategy for addressing human rights while fostering the conditions for a real dialogue.
The fundamental problem is that the White House has approached Chinese human rights as an issue to manage rather than a problem to solve. 

By any measure, this strategy has failed. 

It is time for the Obama administration to reassess, reengage and recommit to the cause of human rights in China.

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China Acknowledges Human Rights Shortcomings

by Zlatica Hoke

For years, Western governments, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents have been accusing Beijing of grave violations of human rights and freedoms.

The 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square remains the most egregious blot on China's human rights record, but since then the communist government has been dogged by numerous allegations of arbitrary jailing, torture and harassment of dissenters and their families.
In Geneva on Tuesday, the Chinese government faced a United Nations report listing grave abuses and violations of international human rights norms. 

While China’s response showed some softening of its rhetoric, some observers are not reassured.
Rights activist Ni Yulan was released from prison earlier this month, after serving 2.5 years in a women's prison on charges of fraud and stirring unrest. 

Ni has been at odds with the Chinese authorities since 2001, when she began protesting the destruction of homes, including her own, to make room for the construction of the Olympic village in Beijing.
"In the last 12 years I have been treated as a criminal, both when I was at home or sitting in prison. At home we were under police surveillance; they surrounded my house and turned it into a prison. We were not allowed to freely come and go, [and] my family was harassed," said Yulan.
Renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was not spared either. 

After criticizing the government, the designer of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium was arrested in 2011 and held in jail for almost three months without official charges. 

Chinese authorities said Ai Wewei was investigated for alleged economic crimes.
The long list of China's alleged rights abuses includes repression of minorities, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet, and excessive control of the media and the Internet.
The United States has repeatedly warned China to stop the abuses, but human rights groups say this is not enough.
"I think the reality is that for the United States, human rights issues in China remain an issue to be managed, not a problem to be solved. And, not as one as absolutely foundational, fundamental to securing progress on other issues in the bilateral relationship," said Sophie Richardson, China Director for Human Rights Watch.

On Tuesday, China acknowledged shortcomings but insisted that a lot of progress has been made. 

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying expressed the familiar Chinese line that human rights issues are China’s internal affairs and other nations should not meddle.

In Hong Kong, City University professor Joseph Cheng said Beijing wants to influence the international human rights agenda.
"China intends to soften external criticism, to defend its basic position and to lobby hard for support among other third world countries, especially those in Africa and Asia. Not only to defend China, but also to support China's membership of the [UN Human Rights] Council in the election to be held in November,” said Cheng.
Cheng also said China now wants to play a more active role in the U.N.'s human rights forum and in shaping the human rights policy of the United Nations.

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China crackdown to come under scrutiny at U.N. rights review

By Sui-lee Wee

Xi Jinping has definitely taken China backwards on human rights

BEIJING -- China's human rights record under President Xi Jinping will come under formal international scrutiny on Tuesday for the first time since he took power, with the main U.N. rights forum set to hear accusations that the government is expanding a crackdown on dissent.
The United Nations Human Rights Council, which reviews all U.N. members every four years, will give concerned countries a chance to challenge the administration of Xi, who some experts had thought would be less hardline than his predecessors.
Instead, critics say Xi has presided over a clampdown that has moved beyond the targeting of dissidents calling for political change. 

For example, authorities have detained at least 16 activists who have demanded officials publicly disclose their wealth as well as scores of people accused of online 'rumour-mongering".
"Xi Jinping has definitely taken the country backwards on human rights," prominent rights lawyer Mo Shaoping told Reuters.
"Look at the number of people who are being locked up and the measures that are being taken to lock them up."
China will make a presentation at the start of the debate in Geneva, during which diplomats will speak. 

Non-governmental organisations are not allowed to address the council but can submit reports, often echoed in country statements.
The council has no binding powers. 

Its rotating membership of 47 states does not include China, although Beijing is expected to run for a spot in about a month. 

The hearing will be the second time China has been assessed under a process that began in 2008.
Diplomats are likely to raise questions over China's crackdown on dissent, the death penalty and the use of torture among other topics, said Maya Wang, an Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Of special concern, Wang said, is the arrest in August of prominent activist Xu Zhiyong, who had called for officials to reveal their wealth. 

Wang also cited the September disappearance of Cao Shunli, who had helped stage a sit-in this year outside the Foreign Ministry to press for the public to be allowed to contribute to a national human rights report.
China had sent a large delegation to Geneva to engage in dialogue with an "open and frank attitude", Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference on Monday.
"If there are some criticisms, some constructive criticisms, the Chinese government will listen with an open mind and accept them and will give them serious consideration," she said.
"As for malicious, deliberate criticisms, of course we will uphold our own path and our own correct judgments."
In 2009, China rejected calls from Western and some Latin American nations to end the death penalty but agreed to suggestions from Cuba that it take firm action against "self-styled human rights defenders working against the Chinese state and people".

CRACKDOWN SPREADING
The ascendancy of Xi as Communist Party chief in a once-in-a-decade generational leadership transition last November gave many Chinese hope for political reform, spurring citizens to push officials to disclose their wealth in several movements throughout the country.
But the detention of activists making those calls is a strong indication the party will not tolerate any open challenge to its rule, even as it claims more transparency. 

The activists face trial on the charge of illegal assembly.
Hundreds of microbloggers, people who post short comments online, have also been detained since August in a campaign against "rumour-mongering", according to Chinese media and rights groups.

Most have been released, but some are still being held on criminal charges.
On Sunday, Chinese police arrested Wang Gongquan, a well-known venture capitalist, Wang's lawyer, Chen Youxi, said on his microblog. 

Wang had helped lead a campaign for the release of another activist. 

Chen did not answer calls to his mobile phone.
"Before, officials used a selective form of suppression, which is to say, they mainly suppressed rights lawyers and dissidents," said Huang Qi, a veteran rights activist.
"But in the past few months what the government used to allow some people to say online -- things that violated or exceeded the official view -- has now been suppressed."
Li Fangping, a prominent rights lawyer, said China would likely win a seat on the council given its international influence.
"I don't believe that China is ready for that," Li said. 

"There are still a huge number of citizens for whom a lack of human rights is a growing problem."

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Spain to Proceed With Indictment of China’s Ex-President Hu Jintao

"The person who began the year as president of China, embraced by heads of state, kings and ministers of the economy throughout the world, is since yesterday the Number One accused of genocide in Tibet"

By RAPHAEL MINDER

The Number One accused of genocide in Tibet

MADRID — Spain’s national court has approved the indictment of Hu Jintao, the former Chinese president, as part of an investigation into whether the Chinese government tortured and repressed the people of Tibet as part of an attempted genocide.
The court’s decision, made Thursday, follows an appeal by Tibetan exile groups against a June decision by one of the Spanish court’s judges to drop the case.
Instead, a criminal review panel of the national court decided to overturn the judge’s decision and proceed with the indictment, given China’s refusal to carry out its own judicial investigation into the allegations of human rights violations and because one of the plaintiffs, Thubten Wangchen, holds Spanish citizenship.
The Spanish lawsuit was filed in 2006 by a group of exiled Tibetans and also targets other former leaders of China’s ruling Communist party, including Jiang Zemin, Mr. Hu’s predecessor as president. 

The others had already been indicted. 

It was filed in Madrid because the plaintiffs also hoped to take advantage of the fact that Spain’s judiciary has long been at the forefront of efforts to apply universal jurisdiction to crimes involving human rights abuses.
Retired Chinese leaders do not travel abroad, and none of the indicted leaders, including Mr. Hu, who stepped down as president in March, is likely to ever face the prospect of defending himself before a Spanish court.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly criticized the Spanish court’s latest decision. 

A spokeswoman for the ministry, Hua Chunying, said at a daily news conference in Beijing on Friday that China “adamantly opposes any state or individual using issues related to Tibet as a pretext for interfering in China’s domestic affairs.”
The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected accusations that it has perpetrated genocide or other widespread human rights abuses in Tibet, which came under the control of Communist Party forces from 1949. Instead, China maintains that its economic support has been a boon to the region.
Associations defending the rights of Tibetans welcomed Spain’s judicial U-turn and the decision to indict Mr. Hu, who lost his right to immunity after leaving office this year.
Alan Cantos, the president of a Spanish association called Comité de Apoyo al Tíbet that is a plaintiff in the case, said of Mr. Hu, “The person who began the year as president of China, embraced by heads of state, kings and ministers of the economy throughout the world, is since yesterday the Number One accused of genocide in Tibet.”

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