Pasadena officials have rejected calls that the city condemn China's human rights record or take any other action regarding a controversial Rose Parade float celebrating the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The decision came despite impassioned protests and is a key victory for the Tournament of Roses as well as prominent Chinese Americans and business interests sponsoring the planned float.
"Voters look to us for local issues like planning, police protection and potholes," said Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard shortly after the City Council meeting ended late Monday evening. "I believe the proper channel for dealing with human rights is through the federal government and not the state and local government."
John Li, president of Caltech Falun Club, which is associated with Falun Gong -- a spiritual group outlawed in China that has led efforts to condemn the float -- accused the City Council of missing an opportunity to take a moral stand against China's human rights record and set an example for other cities to follow.
"I'm so sorry to see the result," Li said. "What makes them hide from the facts?"
The City Council's decision late Monday ends months of debate that has brought to the forefront Southern California's ever-growing ties to China and the conflicting views of local Chinese Americans -- many of whom share a collective memory of a downtrodden homeland but now see the economic boom and modest freedoms in modern China as massive improvements.
To some, the proposed Rose Parade float itself represented how far China had come. But other groups, including the Falun Gong, Tibetan independence activists, Burmese interests and advocates of religious and journalistic freedom, offered accounts of torture and wrongful imprisonment at the hands of Chinese authorities, saying they provide emotional reminders of China's serious shortcomings.
It was because of that testimony that the Pasadena's Human Relations Commission recommended in September that the City Council create an ad hoc committee to bring opposing sides on the matter together and issue a resolution addressing concern over the violation of human rights in China.
But by the end of Monday's meeting, the seven-member City Council agreed on more generic terms that didn't even mention China. They approved motions to endorse the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and denounce human rights violations wherever they occur.
