President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) should not have applauded China’s economic performance in his statement on the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, because its rapid growth was borne out of policies that violate human rights, a former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official told a forum.
Ruan Ming (阮銘), a former special assistant to the late CPP secretary-general Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) who was forced into exile in the late 1980s for advocating political reform, made the remarks at a forum in Taipei to commemorate the massacre.
Ma yesterday urged China to set free two prominent dissidents — Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) and artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) — while at the same time lauding China’s fast-growing economy, which last year surpassed Japan to become the second-largest in the world.
“Ma has failed to see that China’s fast economic growth goes hand in hand with its oppression of the Chinese people,” Ruan told the forum co-sponsored by groups such as the Taiwan Association for China Human Rights and the Mainland Democratic Movement Support Group.
“This ‘bright’ economic growth is the result of its oppression of huge numbers of farmers and workers, its seizure or destruction of people’s land or homes to support its construction programs and sacrificing the environment,” he said.
“Big and small protests and suppression now take place every day in China,” he added.
Ruan said although Ma has called on Beijing to release Ai, Beijing is afraid to free him because of his investigations and revelations of social injustice in China.
Ruan also cited allegations of inhumane working conditions at the Foxconn factories in China owned by Taiwanese entrepreneur Terry Gou (郭台銘), saying they were contributing to Chinese authorities’ oppression of workers.
Lai I-chung (賴怡忠), a researcher at Taiwan Thinktank, said rapid economic growth had given rise to increasing social disorder, with more than 100,000 protests taking place in China annually.
The democratization of a country does not happen by itself, Lai said, but needs a group of people driving it and promoting it.
However, “we still have not seen such a power exist in China,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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