Human Rights in China: trainwreck

Amnesty International issued harsh criticism on human rights for almost every nation today: with China the record setter.

TV and print news watchers love a good drunken starlet, a lost whale or an accident that has never seemed to have occurred to anyone before. On May 23 two trains collided in Denver, one loaded with beer and the other with asphalt. What a mess.

But some of the “odd” news is really very serious and important.

On the same day, The Washington Post’s Foreign Service reporter wrote that Chinese people were rioting in southern Bobai, China, 110 miles southeast of Nanning in Guangxi province. The reason for the rioting? The people of Bobai have been flaunting China’s “one-child policy”.

The people of Bobai don’t want to be limited by that policy so they have been ignoring it.

One of the reasons for ignoring “one-child” is deeply cultural. In China, men count a lot more than women. In fact, many families determine the sex of a child before birth and then abort the girl babies.

One reason men are so highly prized is central to the Chinese family (and many other Asian families): the parents have no recourse to nursing homes and huge retirement reserves. The Asian family generally keeps the old family members in the family and at home. You generally need a son or two to make this centuries old custom workable. But the Chinese communist government insists upon holding down the population, which already tops 1.3 billion.

So government functionaries were told to enforce the law in Bobai. Houses were broken into by government service or hired thugs and they went to work extorting fines. Refusal to pay meant your house was damaged or you and your family would be roughed up.

China also has a government program of forced abortions for those considered too prolific.

American women call abortion “choice”. Chinese women usually call abortion forced and government ordered. There is even forced and government ordered sterilization.

Coincidentally, on May 23 again, Amnesty International issued its Report on Human Rights 2007.

Amnesty International had plenty of negative remarks for, well, EVERY nation. But that is pretty much their history and the way they see their role. They skewered the United States as one might expect but they had plenty of evil acts to explain in Russia, Vietnam and elsewhere.

But reading the report for each country clearly reveals some country write-ups that make you cry, some make the hair on your neck stand up, and some that frankly seem to be a reach.

Here is some of what Amnesty International said about China:

“Rural migrant workers in China’s cities faced wider ranging discrimination. Despite official commitment to resolve the problem, millions of migrant workers were still owed back pay. The vast majority were excluded from urban health insurance schemes and could not afford private health care.

“Access to public education remained tenuous for millions of migrant children, in contrast to other urban residents. An estimated 20 million migrant children were unable to live with their parents in the cities in part because of insecure schooling.

“Beijing municipal authorities closed dozens of migrant schools in September, affecting thousands of migrant children. While authorities claimed to have targeted unregistered and sub-standard schools, onerous demands made it nearly impossible for migrant schools to be registered. Some school staff believed the closures were aimed at reducing the migrant population prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics."

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“Women were laid off in larger numbers than men from failing state enterprises.

“Women accounted for 60 per cent of rural labourers and had fewer non-agricultural opportunities than men. The absence of gender-sensitive anti-HIV-AIDS policies contributed to a significant rise in female HIV-AIDS cases in 2006. Only 43 per cent of girls in rural areas completed education above lower middle school, compared with 61 per cent of boys."

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“Executions by lethal injection rose, facilitating the extraction of organs from executed prisoners, a lucrative business. In November a deputy minister announced that the majority of transplanted organs came from executed prisoners."

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“Torture and ill-treatment remained widespread. Common methods included kicking, beating, electric shocks, suspension by the arms, shackling in painful positions, cigarette burns, and sleep and food deprivation. In November a senior official admitted that at least 30 wrongful convictions handed down each year resulted from the use of torture, with the true number likely being higher. There was no progress in efforts to reform the Re-education through Labor system of administrative detention without charge or trial. Hundreds of thousands of people were believed to be held in Re-education through Labor facilities across China and were at risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

Amnesty International goes on about China with a list of such detestable crimes against humanity by the Chinese Government that the AI criticism of France, Germany, the UK, and the United States, though harsh, pales in comparison.

In fact, the headline that emerged from the Amnesty International Report of Human Rights 2007 unveiling today, issued by news agency AFP, was “Economic Stars China and Vietnam Maintain Repression: Amnesty.”

So even as the communist Chinese government is trying to make everything look delightful in China before the 2008 Olympics, a culture of corruption and abuse of human rights, with millions inflicted by abuse every year, is difficult to dismiss.

Unless you don’t really care about human dignity and human rights.