Taiwan has been ranked as the second-freest nation in Asia, just behind Japan and outscoring China in every measure of self-determination.
According to an annual Freedom of the World report released on Wednesday by the Freedom House in Washington, Taiwan had an overall score of 89 out of 100, while Japan had 96, Mongolia, 86, South Korea, 83, and India, 77.
Taiwan was given a perfect score — 1 out of 7 — for political rights, 2 for civil liberties and 1.5 for overall freedom.
China was judged to be “not free” with the lowest possible score of 7 for political rights, 6.5 for freedom and 6 for civil liberties.
The “country report” on Taiwan giving details of its success is not scheduled to be released until spring.
However, the report on China, issued on Wednesday, said that harassment of women’s rights defenders, labor activists and human rights lawyers intensified last year.
It said there had been an “unprecedented crackdown” on the rights-defense movement, Internet controls had tightened and professional journalists were detained, imprisoned and forced to make televised confessions.
As the report, Global Freedom Under Pressure, was released, the New York Times carried an opinion piece titled “How China Lost Taiwan.”
“The Taiwanese see an increasingly repressive mainland government across the Taiwan Strait — and want no part of it,” the piece by Yale Law School resident fellow Nick Frisch said.
It concluded that Taiwan’s voters had pushed Beijing’s dream of unification “even further from reach.”
The Freedom House report said last year was the 10th consecutive year of decline for global freedom.
“Economic downturns and fear of social unrest have led Russia, China and other authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent, while mass migration and new forms of terrorism fueled xenophobic sentiment in major democracies,” the report said.
Over the past year, 72 nations showed a decline in freedom while just 43 made gains.
Of the 195 nations assessed, 86 were rated free, 59 partly free and 50 not free.
The Freedom House report on China said: “In addition to advocates of democracy and political reform, tens of thousands of grassroots activists, petitioners, Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, Tibetans and Uighurs are believed to be in prison or extrajudicial forms of detention for their political or religious views.”
It added that torture remained widespread in China for the purpose of extracting confessions or forcing political and religious dissidents to recant their beliefs.
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