Sun, Dec 10, 2017 page6

• China fights to undermine rights

  • By Herbert Hanreich
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  Modern human rights are meant to ensure that people can live a life of dignity. They value individual lives, enhance people’s capabilities and seek to secure their right to self-determination.

  Human Rights Day is celebrated annually on Dec. 10, the day when the UN adopted its core document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948.

  There is hardly any nation on the globe that does not infringe upon these essential rights, but the degree of such infringements varies from nation to nation.

  Among influential powers, China has long been a notorious “high-degree” violator of human rights, despite the economic progress that has elevated hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty.

  However, people do not only wish to be private consumers — they also wish to be public citizens.

  There are indications that China’s deplorable human rights record will not change in the near future. There are even signs that it has been continuously refining its methods and policies to undermine human rights, particularly at the international level.

  This ongoing process was ideologically complemented in 2012, soon after the present leadership led by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) came to power. The campaign against human rights now has, in Newspeak, an official title: “Xi Jinping Thought for the New Era of Socialism with Chinese Special Characteristics.”

  It began with massive attacks on Western ideas and ideals, often accompanied by a eulogy of China’s ancient and traditional values, and in 2015 climaxed in a speech by China’s then-minister of education Yuan Guiren (袁貴仁) at a forum lecturing educators to “[n]ever let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes.”

  Those remarks came with a warning to university professors to refrain from publicly criticizing China’s leadership or the political system, thereby unveiling what China’s “ancient and traditional values” really mean for the present rulers.

  I wonder whether the minister believed that Karl Marx, the main theoretician of communism and, subsequently, the People’s Republic of China, was an advocate of Chinese values.

  In another high-profile speech in Beijing in 2013, officials of the omnipotent Chinese Communist Party were instructed to “eradicate seven subversive currents” that would undermine the party’s legitimacy.

  Among those “perilous” currents were Western democracy, universal human rights, media independence and civic participation.

  Those despised currents are not exactly in line with traditional Chinese values, but returning to the internationalization of China’s anti-human rights policies, it leads to the core of official UN policies, especially those of its bodies concerned with human rights.

  In a report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) described in detail how China’s diplomats successfully obstruct any move at the UN that would officially denounce human rights violations resulting from a political agenda pursued by China (“Beijing seeks to silence critics at UN forums: HRW,” page 1, Sept. 6).

  China spares no effort to turn any sensible human rights policy into its opposite whenever its interests are concerned. It does so by suppressing criticism related to its human rights record, weakening institutional mechanisms that would advance human rights, denying accreditation to people or NGOs that are critical of China, harassing and intimidating UN officials involved in China-related matters, keeping Chinese human rights campaigners out of UN meetings they are entitled to attend and more.

  Such efforts directly contradict the letter and spirit of UN policies.

  China is supported in copious UN committee meetings by a group of nations called the “Like-Minded Group,” which often do the dirty work of obstruction in human rights-related affairs on behalf of their mastermind.

  It might not be surprising to learn that many of those “like-minded” political allies are also China’s economic friends, as it tries to secure energy sources and raw materials that would keep nurturing its growing economy.

  For this purpose, China has openly cooperated with the planet’s most corrupt and despotic regimes, including those of Zimbabwe, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Iran and Venezuela.

  These nations are among the richest in the world in terms of natural resources, but among the poorest in terms of living standards, thanks to corrupt elites.

  China’s business model is quite stunning: It provides cheap loans, which are then used to commission Chinese companies to develop and execute huge projects in those nations. As recompense, China is granted the right to deploy its companies to extract — unscrupulously exploit — natural resources or food supplies over a certain period.

  This all comes at high human and environmental costs: Chinese workers often have to work under slave-like circumstances and lousy safety standards, just like their local coworkers, who need to adjust to such wretched working conditions.

  Regrettably, China also exports its working “ethics” along with its laborers.

  The consequences are obvious: Worldwide, China supports regimes with miserable human rights records, thus prolonging the despair and abuse of the people living there. It contributes to massive and irreversible environmental damage and perpetuates systems of large-scale corruption.

  The book to be read on this subject is China’s Silent Army, published in 2011 and written by J.P. Cardenal and H. Araujo, two Spanish investigative journalists who tracked down China’s global investment policies via its state-owned companies.

  Returning to the 80-page HRW report, its summary of China’s diplomatic behavior as “a case study of how a powerful member state works within the UN system to undermine its ability to strengthen global compliance with international human rights norms” could also be applied to its general behavior throughout the world.

  China uses similar methods whenever and wherever its diplomats encounter Taiwan on the international stage, but what else would you expect from leaders whose economic and political power stems from cheap labor, and whose ideal of humanity is the production of slave-minded people, cloned a billion times?

  Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung.
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