The renowned Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization has released its latest report on the state of freedom throughout the world. It outlines particular concern for China, which not only violates the liberty and humanity of its own people, but seeks to extend its reign of terror throughout the planet. In this two-part series, we present key excerpts from its findings.
China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Its reaction could pose an existential threat to the rights of people worldwide.
At home, the Chinese Communist Party, worried that permitting political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. Abroad, it uses its growing economic clout to silence critics and to carry out the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began to emerge in the mid-20th century.
Beijing was long focused on building a “Great Firewall” to prevent the people of China from being exposed to any criticism of the government from abroad. Now the government is increasingly attacking the critics themselves, whether they represent a foreign government, are part of an overseas company or university, or join real or virtual avenues of public protest.
No other government is simultaneously detaining a million members of an ethnic minority for forced indoctrination and attacking anyone who dares to challenge its repression. And while other governments commit serious human rights violations, no other government flexes its political muscles with such vigor and determination to undermine the international human rights standards and institutions that could hold it to account.
If not challenged, Beijing’s actions portend a dystopian future in which no one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors, and an international human rights system so weakened that it no longer serves as a check on government repression.
The Chinese government stands out for the reach and influence of its anti-rights efforts. The result for the human rights cause is a “perfect storm”—a powerful centralized state, a coterie of like-minded rulers, a void of leadership among countries that might have stood for human rights, and a disappointing collection of democracies willing to sell the rope that is strangling the system of rights that they purport to uphold.
Beijing’s Rationale
The Chinese Communist Party is running scared of its own people.
Outwardly confident about its success in representing people across the country, the Chinese Communist Party is worried about the consequences of unfettered popular debate and political organization, and thus afraid to subject itself to popular scrutiny.
As a result, Beijing faces the uneasy task of managing a huge and complex economy without the public input and debate that political freedom allows. Knowing that in the absence of elections, the party’s legitimacy depends largely on a growing economy, Chinese leaders worry that slowing economic growth will increase demands from the public for more say in how it is governed. The government’s nationalist campaigns to promote the “China dream,” and its trumpeting of debatable anti-corruption efforts, do not change this underlying reality.
…What modest opening had existed briefly in recent years for people to express themselves on matters of public concern has been decisively closed. Civic groups have been shut down. Independent journalism is no more. Online conversation has been curtailed and replaced with orchestrated sycophancy. Ethnic and religious minorities face severe persecution. Small steps toward the rule of law have been replaced by the Communist Party’s traditional rule by law. Hong Kong’s limited freedoms, under “one country, two systems,” are being severely challenged.
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The Unconstrained Surveillance State
More than any other government, Beijing has made technology central to its repression. A nightmarish system has already been built in Xinjiang, the northwestern region that is home both to some 13 million Muslims—Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic minorities—and to the most intrusive public monitoring system the world has ever known. The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to monitor people for any sign of dissent, but the combination of growing economic means and technical capacity has led to an unprecedented regime of mass surveillance.
China’s Template for Prosperous Dictatorship
Far from being spurned as a global pariah, the Chinese government is courted the world over, its unelected president receiving red-carpet treatment wherever he goes, and the country hosting prestigious events, such as the 2022 Winter Olympics. … the Chinese Communist Party has shown that economic growth can reinforce a dictatorship by giving it the means to enforce its rule—to spend what it takes to maintain power, from the legions of security officials it employs to the censorship regime it maintains and the pervasive surveillance state it constructs. Those vast resources buttressing autocratic rule negate the ability of people across China to have any say in how they are governed.
China’s Campaign Against Global Norms
To avoid global backlash for crushing human rights at home, the Chinese government is trying to undermine the international institutions that are designed to protect them. Chinese authorities have long pushed back against foreign concern for human rights as an infringement on its sovereignty, but these efforts were comparatively modest. Now China intimidates other governments, insisting that they applaud it in international forums and join its attacks on the international human rights system.
Beijing seems to be methodically building a network of cheerleader states that depend on its aid or business. Those who cross it risk retaliation, such as the threats to Sweden after an independent Swedish group gave an award to a Hong Kong-based publisher (and Swedish citizen) whom the Chinese government had arrested and forcibly disappeared after he printed books critical of the Chinese government.
Beijing’s approach puts it at odds with the very purpose of international human rights. Where others see people facing persecution whose rights need defending, China’s rulers see a potential precedent of rights enforcement that could return to haunt them. Beijing’s methods often have a certain subtlety. The Chinese government adopts international human rights treaties but then tries to reinterpret them or to undermine their enforcement. It has become skilled at appearing to cooperate with UN reviews of its rights record while sparing no effort to thwart honest discussion. It prevents domestic critics from traveling abroad, denies key international experts access to the country, organizes its allies—many of them notoriously repressive themselves—to sing its praises, and often presents blatantly dishonest information.
Even when it comes to economic rights, Beijing wants no independent assessment of its progress because that would require examining not its preferred indicator—the growth in gross domestic product—but measures such as how the least favored in China are faring, including persecuted minorities and those left behind in rural areas. And it certainly wants no independent evaluation of civil and political rights, because respect for them would create a system of accountability—to civic activists, independent journalists, political parties, independent judges, and free and fair elections—that it is determined to avoid.
The review concludes tomorrow.
Visit Human Rights Watch here.
Photo: Chinese ministry of Defense