异议作家吕耿松案首次开庭 | 中国 | Deutsche Welle | 2008.01.23

异议作家吕耿松案首次开庭 | 中国 | Deutsche Welle | 2008.01.23

CNN: Human rights questions remain for China

* Story Highlights
* China has made promises on environmental issues tied to the 2008 Olympics
* IOC: Olympics will be “key moment” for China’s political development
* Human rights observers say social controls have tightened in China since 2001

By Niall Fraser
For CNN,January 23, 2008

HONG KONG, China (CNN) — With a year to go before the 2008 Olympics get under way, questions linger over China’s efforts to improve its human rights record.

Observers and pressure groups have criticized the efforts of the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since Beijing won the bid in 2001, rejecting assertions by both that the Games will lead to lasting positive change in the world’s most populous nation.

After praising Beijing’s preparations as “excellent across the board,” the IOC official charged with overseeing Beijing’s preparations, Hein Verbruggen, sparked further anger from advocacy groups with his recent comments that, “…the way the Games are being used as a platform for groups with political and social agendas is often regrettable.”

The International Federation for Human Rights claimed his remarks will “embolden” hard-line elements within the Chinese Communist Party to ignore international pressure over human rights promises. But the IOC says, there is a widespread misconception that a list of “human rights promises” was ever sought by the IOC in the first place.

“There were some declarations made by senior Chinese leaders in Beijing who raised the human-rights question proactively and talked about how the Games would be part of the process to help human rights development,” says IOC’s director of communications Giselle Davies,. “But that was never a [piece of] criteria on which the IOC judged and assessed Beijing’s bid.

“The IOC decision is not made in a political or social context. It is very much based around what is a coming together at a sporting event and everything for which that can be a catalyst for,” Davies adds.

And that, she believes, is a force for good. “The IOC fundamentally believes that the world will look back and see the Games as a key moment along a period of change and development for good in China,” she says.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has sharply criticized Beijing. On Thursday, the organization said China’s government has failed to live up to pre-Olympics promises of greater human rights freedoms and has instead clamped down on domestic activists and journalists, according to reports from The Associated Press.

“The government seems afraid that its own citizens will embarrass it by speaking out about political and social problems, but China’s leaders apparently don’t realize authoritarian crackdowns are even more embarrassing,” Brad Adams, Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a statement carried by the AP

On first glance it would appear Beijing is sensitive to certain international concerns. In June, Chinese officials and the IOC moved quickly to launch an investigation into allegations by the advocacy group Playfair 2008 that four official souvenir makers were using child labor. Earlier that month, Beijing took the landmark step of allowing the mother of a victim of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown to mark the anniversary of his death publicly.

But others believe that since 2001 there has been a tightening of controls on political dissent and freedom of speech, as Beijing has sought to contain the social and political fall-out from the country’s breakneck economic development.

The IOC says, for example, that the Olympic Games has led to improvements in China’s labor system in which workers endure long hours in harsh conditions for less than the legal minimum wage.

Han Dongfang, the Hong Kong-based labor rights activist for the China Labour Bulletin organization, which monitors workers’ rights in China, insists “It’s about markets and it’s about cheap labor … Labor rights have become worse over the past few years.”

He says that any real change in China can only come from the inside as a result of pressure from workers and the development of free trade unions and the right to collective bargaining — and not from international pressure.

“The Chinese leadership does not care about international pressure. It is not China who is knocking at the door of the international community looking for favors — it is the other way around,” Han says.

The IOC says “enormous” progress has been made in terms of the freedom the news media will have to report on the Olympics, following the 2001 pledge by the secretary general of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee Wang Wei. “We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China,” he said at the time.

Not so, says veteran China scholar Willy Wo Lap Lam, author of the recently published “Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era.”

“The police and secret police departments in every city have lists of dissidents and ‘dangerous’ people who are not supposed to talk to the western media,” Lam says.

“So, instead of following these Western reporters around, the police will simply post more ‘guards’ outside the dwellings of ’suspect’ people in each city and county. They will ensure they can’t talk or work with western journalists.”

Professor Joseph Cheng of Hong Kong’s City University agrees with Lam. “China’s only concern as far as the Olympics is concerned is to showcase itself to the international community. To this end it will treat foreign journalists and visitors very well – but all the troublemakers will ‘disappear’,” he says.

“Twenty years ago they put trouble-makers under harsh house arrest or worse. Today, they give them a holiday. Either way, they won’t be speaking to foreign journalists.”

Lam adds that any pledges Beijing did actually make does not necessarily mean human rights will improve. “The main pledges made by Beijing are clearing up the environment and curbing traffic jams. Both of these are achievable through draconian methods,” Lam says.

Furthermore, while the world-at-large may be expecting an Olympics-led metamorphosis, the reality is very different, he says.

“Beijing will not relax controls over dissidents, NGOs as well as ‘agitators’ for Tibet or Xinjiang. There will be tighter surveillance of potential troublemakers,” Lam says.

“The South Korean Olympics in 1988 marked the beginning of genuine political liberalization. For China, it is a very different story. The Chinese Communist Party sees the Games as an opportunity to show the world China’s great achievements in the economy and infrastructure and to demonstrate their diplomatic clout. Internally, the Games will help the Party foster ‘internal cohesiveness’ using national pride to justify the Party’s ruling status.

“No Chinese Communist Party leader wants to use the Games as a juncture to push forward reforms.”

Beijing announces pre-Olympic social clean up

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday January 23, 2008

Guardian Unlimited
Beijing’s Olympic chief has ordered a social cleansing operation to clear the city of beggars, hawkers and prostitutes before the start of the event in August.

The planned relocation of “problem” residents and businesses is aimed at creating a salubrious image of the Chinese capital in time for the arrival of an estimated half a million tourists, athletes and journalists.

Among the targets will be homeless people, unregistered taxi drivers, mobile snack vendors and fronts for prostitution, such as hairdressing salons and karaoke parlours.

Amid fears of human rights abuses, Liu Qi, the head of the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee, said police should exercise restraint in carrying out the clean-up orders.

“The problems of vagrants, beggars and unlicensed businesses must be solved before the Olympics,” he was quoted as saying in today’s Beijing News. “But in enforcing the law, [officers] must be civilised, they must explain their actions and be reasonable. They must not create social environment problems.”

The authorities previously announced plans to put migrant beggars and hawkers in special holding centres that will be expanded ahead of the Olympics. Such “undesirables” are kept at these facilities before being forcibly sent home.

Beijing is not the first host city to adopt such measures. Ahead of the last games in Athens, 2,700 Roma were reportedly evicted. Last year, a study by the UK’s Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions found that more than 2m people have been driven from their homes since 1988 to make way for the Olympics.

But the concerns are particularly great in China, where the authorities often used brutal tactics to clear people from their homes and stifle opposition.

Several petitioners and human rights advocates have been arrested in recent months in an apparent attempt to silence the government’s most outspoken critics ahead of the arrival of an estimated 30,000 foreign journalists.

Among the most prominent is Hu Jia, the Aids campaigner, who has not been seen since he was taken by police at the end of December. His wife Zeng Jinyan, and their newborn baby are under house arrest.

The heavy handed tactics cast a shadow on the positive image that China wants to project during the Games. Compared to the past, millions of people enjoy greater personal freedom and affluence.

China Calls for Stepped-Up Propaganda

China Calls for Stepped-Up Propaganda

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 23, 2008; 5:17 AM

BEIJING — Chinese President Hu Jintao has told officials to breathe new life into propaganda efforts, putting renewed emphasis on a key pillar of Communist rule ahead of this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

Hu’s remarks at a major party gathering reflected the government’s traditional focus on controlling information and guiding public opinion, yet also indicated concern that those efforts were losing their edge in the face of the Internet and other independent sources of information and entertainment.

Officials should “perform well the task of outward propaganda, further exhibit and raise up the nation’s good image,” Hu said.

Reports on his remarks Tuesday to party leaders and propaganda officials dominated the front page of the party’s flagship People’s Daily and other official newspapers Wednesday.

The reports did not indicate any direct mention of the Olympics by Hu. However, they said he called for boosting China’s “cultural soft power,” a reference to influence in culture, sports and other spheres outside traditional military might and hard-nosed diplomacy.

China has only lately embraced the concept of “soft power,” although propaganda has been a central tenet of Communist rule even before the party seized control in a 1949 revolution.

Directing those efforts is the Propaganda Department, which sits under the direct control of the party’s powerful Central Committee. The body outranks all government ministries and the Cabinet’s State Council Information Office, which is chiefly responsible for propaganda directed at foreign audiences.

As the voice of party rule, the department is headed by a party hard-liner and exercises broad control over print media, film, television and the Internet.

In an apparent attempt to appear more progressive, the department’s English name was changed a decade ago to the Publicity Department, although its name in Chinese remains unchanged.

The department has wide-ranging powers to punish outlets, writers, filmmakers and journalists that defy its guidelines, both written and implied, although the process of censorship is highly opaque.

Organizers of the Beijing Olympics inaugurated a media center early on and hired international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to advise on publicity and media relations for the Games, which get under way in August.

Those efforts are especially important given human rights groups’ attempts to use the games to publicize their criticisms of Chinese policies on everything from religious freedoms to the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.

In the reports on his remarks, Hu also emphasized the importance of propaganda in maintaining stability in a society increasingly riven by disparities between rich and poor, ethnic divisions, and challenges to the party’s once unquestioned authority.

Officials, he said, must “advance the building of the body of socialist core value and further boost unity and harmony between all ethnic groups.”

BBC: 美国人权组织年度报告批评中国

008年01月23日 格林尼治标准时间14:56北京时间 22:56发表
转寄朋友 打印文稿

子川
BBC中文部记者

中国人权
人权组织：中国是东亚发展民主的障碍。
美国”自由之家”（Freedom House）最近发布年度全球人权报告，其中有关中国的部分显示，北京奥运在过去一年并没有给中国的人权带来改善，并且中国已经成为东亚地区发展民主的障碍。

“自由之家”是有国际影响的人权组织，每年都会就世界人权情况做出评估。”自由之家”在纽约的研究主任帕丁顿（Arch Puddington）在接受BBC采访时表示，全球人权状况不容乐观，有38个国家的自由程度下降，占世界的五分之一。

而奥运并没有给过去一年中国的人权状况带来任何改善，不自由度得分依然是13分的高分，自由之家非常失望。

帕丁顿说，奥运前夕，北京当局为了维持稳定，采取了很多高压政策，比如对互联网严密控制，有的网站被禁被关，也有异见人士被捕，缺乏言论自由。同时，也有上百万人因为奥运而被迫搬迁。

他还说，中国在政治权利与公民自由上的得分只排在缅甸、朝鲜、利比亚、苏丹等国之上。

自由之家的报告还说，中国目前是东亚地区发展民主的最大障碍之一，主要原因在于中国对缅甸军政权和朝鲜当局的支持。

不过，美国卡内基国际和平基金会中国项目主任裴敏欣认为：在缅甸这个问题上，除了中国之外，还有印度。印度也在背后拼命支持缅甸的军政权。而印度是个民主国家。这就很难讲是由于中国一家的影响而使缅甸的民主化不能实现。因为这涉及到各个国家的经济、政治和战略利益。

“当然中国和缅甸的军政权有很长很长的历史，而且由于中国本身不是一个民主政权，那么中国肯定会在缅甸问题上受到国际舆论的最为负面的主要关注。”

对自由之家年度人权报告中中国的人权状况，在美国的政论家陈奎德评论说：中国面临一个基本的选择，是要把这次奥运办成一个1936年德国柏林式的奥运呢还是办成1988年的汉城式的奥运？这是对中南海当局的一个考验。

美国卡内基国际和平基金会中国项目主任裴敏欣认为，奥运并不可能改变中国政府的做法。因为中国政府的政策一贯是稳定压倒一切。奥运期间如果稳定成功，并没有出现意想不到的所谓突发事件，那么中国政府会松一口气，但它不会在奥运之后搞所谓政治改革民主化，这是不现实的。

RFA: 吕耿松的自我辩护书

RFA: 吕耿松的自我辩护书