Human Rights China

Members of the first foreign delegation invited to examine human rights in China arrived in Beijing. They said the 12-day visit probably won't prompt vast changes but that it signals an important policy shift.

There are many metrics by which to judge the summit between President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, but one has attracted the most attention: Did Obama adequately stand up for human rights in China? Much as we would have preferred a more full-throated criticism of China's abysmal record ? including the imprisonment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo ? we recognize that Obama was required to balance principle and protocol. The principle part took place largely in private.

The Clinton Administration has launched a secret, intensive diplomatic campaign to get China to make more concessions on human rights in the final weeks before the U.S. deadline for deciding whether Beijing's trade privileges in this country should be renewed, officials say. Meanwhile in Beijing, the Chinese government early today bowed to U.S. pressure by releasing Chen Ziming, the most prominent dissident still in jail from the 1989 democracy movement, for what it said were medical reasons.

The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo "for his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. " The award dealt a resounding slap to the Chinese government, which called the decision a "blasphemy" and warned that relations with Norway would be damaged. "Liu Xiaobo is a convicted criminal who broke Chinese law," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement published on the ministry website. "If the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to such a person, it absolutely disobeyed the spirit of this prize and it is a blasphemy to the prize.

President Clinton, striving to demonstrate continued American pressure to end Chinese human rights abuses, has outlined a five-point program "to support forces of constructive change in China while strengthening the U.S.-China relationship."

In a reflection of the wide gap that still divides Washington and Beijing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday that the Bush administration intends to follow up on the release of three scholars convicted of espionage by pressing China on the fate of other detainees with U.S. connections.

Chinese police have detained three dissidents, including one taken from a hospital bed as he was being treated for heart and lung ailments stemming from abuse during 11 years in prison, human rights groups said. Labor activist Li Wangyang was removed May 6 from a hospital in Shaoyang, a city in Hunan province, and charged with subversion, New York-based Human Rights in China said.

A Chinese student leader told a U.N. Human Rights Committee that 120,000 people may have been secretly killed since the June crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Li Lu gave the estimate at a meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination. Li, on Beijing's most-wanted list for his role in the student-led movement, urged the panel to condemn China for human rights violations.

Fellow prisoners severely beat dissident Wei Jingsheng after being promised reduced sentences if they attacked him, human rights advocates charged Thursday. They said the beating seriously worsened Wei's already poor health. The 46-year-old Wei, China's most famous dissident, is serving a 14-year sentence at a prison in northern Hebei province near Beijing for advocating democratic reforms.

A human rights campaigner who fled China and returned early this year with assurances that he would not be punished has been arrested, beaten and sent to a labor camp, a human rights group said Saturday. Family members visited Yao Zhenxiang at the camp on Oct. 15, in their first meeting since police arrested him and his older brother on a Shanghai street nearly six months earlier, the New York-based Human Rights in China said.

"The decision in 2001 to give the games to China was made in the hope of improvement in human rights and, indeed, the Chinese themselves said that having the games would accelerate progress in such matters." -- IOC member Dick Pound in his book "Inside the Olympics." -- One political issue overshadowed the rest when International Olympic Committee members voted in 2001 to award the Summer Games to Beijing -- human rights. Tibetan activists demonstrated against the bid near the Moscow convention center where the secret ballot was held, and Russian police broke up small protests by free-speech advocates.

Under cover of the war on terrorism, the Chinese government has significantly stepped up its crackdown against alleged separatists in the western region of Xinjiang since Sept. 11, a human rights group charges. Authorities have shut down mosques, detained thousands of people deemed suspected separatists and clamped tighter controls on the local media to discourage unrest among the indigenous Uighur population, according to a report released today by Amnesty International.

About 25 members of Falun Gong expelled from China after protesting in Beijing's Tiananmen Square returned to the United States on Friday, displaying bruises, cuts and scrapes from what they said were police beatings. "I was trying to say 'Falun Gong is good,' but they kept hitting me over and over again," Mark Gardner, 22, of Brea, Calif., said as he arrived in Detroit on a Northwest Airlines flight from China.

A Hong Kong businessman convicted of smuggling Bibles into China returned to the territory Saturday after he was released from a Chinese prison. A Hong Kong Security Bureau statement said officials have been in touch with Li Guangqiang's family since his return. It gave no other details. President Bush, who is to visit China this month, had expressed concern about Li's case and asked the State Department to look into it.

The United Nations' top human rights official told Chinese leaders Friday that efforts to combat terrorism must not infringe on the human rights of China's Muslim minorities. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson told officials that, since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, her office had seen an increase in allegations of summary execution, imprisonment and torture of ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China.

Four members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group who allegedly incited other adherents to immolate themselves were sentenced to lengthy prison terms Friday, Chinese state media reported. The four were convicted by a Beijing court of "organizing, masterminding, instigating and assisting" five Falun Gong practitioners who set themselves afire in Tiananmen Square in January to protest the Communist regime's ban on their faith.

One of China's few active dissidents has been sentenced to two years in a labor camp, a human rights group said Saturday. Authorities told Shen Liangqing's mother that he was being punished for contacting foreign human rights groups and reporters, a Hong Kong human rights monitoring group said. Shen, 35, was detained during a February roundup of people who had petitioned the Chinese legislature before its annual session.

"The next sound you hear is the sound of freedom of speech in Communist China," begins a radio ad sponsored by the Family Research Council. What follows is silence. The ad is part of a well-financed campaign by the religious right opposing renewal of most-favored-nation trade status for China on grounds that the Chinese are engaged in religious persecution. The announcer continues: "And now the sound of Chinese Christians singing their favorite hymns at an open church service." More silence.

The State Department voiced its strong displeasure Monday with Chinese state television's decision to edit out comments on Taiwan and human rights from an interview with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell it broadcast over the weekend. The U.S. Embassy in China had an agreement with Chinese Central Television that Saturday's interview would be aired in its entirety, department officials said.

In a reflection of the wide gap that still divides Washington and Beijing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday that the Bush administration intends to follow up on the release of three scholars convicted of espionage by pressing China on the fate of other detainees with U.S. connections.