Religious repression

The Communist Party of China has always regarded religion as a dangerous and unacceptable challenge to its exclusive right to the obedience and even devotion of the Chinese people. Although the Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of religion, in actual practice, every religious group has to undergo an onerous registration process and their activities are rigorously monitored. The government strictly controls printing and distribution of religious publications. Any group seen as attempting to move away from the strict and intrusive controls the Chinese government exercises, is immediately charged with "criminal activities" or "illegal gatherings". Long term imprisonment, physical abuse and torture by the security forces are routine against religious leaders or practitioners. Official demolition of churches, monasteries and mosques is common.

Popular indigenous religions

On July 5, 2001, The NEW YORK TIMES reported that fifteen more members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group had died in custody, raising the known death toll to well over 200. Chinese officials confirmed reports that the fifteen had died in a northeastern Forced Labor Camp, but claimed they had committed suicide. To date hundreds of thousands of members have been detained (for varying periods) while at least ten thousand are serving lengthy terms in forced labor camps. An unknown number have been committed to psychiatric hospitals. Beatings and torture of those arrested are routine and have resulted in many deaths. The massive and brutal crackdown on the Falun Gong with even far-flung regions having to demonstrate their active antagonism to the sect in public demonstrations and mass meetings recalls Maoist campaigns of the 50s and 60s.

While the Falun Gong is the most well know indigenous religious groups facing persecution in China, it is certainly not alone. For instance, another group, the Zhong Gong, has faced police crackdowns and its leader has sought political asylum in the United States. Earlier in Sichuan province in the 1980s, the Yiguan Dao (One Unity Way) spiritual movement was crushed ruthlessly by provincial security forces, with it leaders being executed and thousands of its members being sentenced to forced labor camps.

Tibetan Buddhists

Tibetan Buddhists have for the last few years been subjected to an intensely harsh, well-planned and coordinated campaign to crush their religion and culture. This was locally termed the "second cultural revolution" because of its severity, and the Dalai Lama denounced it as "cultural genocide". Arrests, savage beatings, torture of monks, rape of nuns, and occasional executions are routine. Moreover, there is intense official regulation of religious life, which includes daily political reeducation in monasteries and a complete ban on pictures of the Dalai Lama. But the recent escape to the free world of two of Beijing's showcase religious leaders in Tibet, the young Karmapa lama and Agya Rimpoche, abbot of Kumbum monastery, has forced a temporary lull in the campaign, while a reassessment is taking place. The child Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most important religious leader, and the world's youngest political prisoner, still remains in unknown confinement.

Catholics

Every day up to one hundred million Christians risk their lives by defying government orders banning free worship. Catholic organizations and congregations that recognize the spiritual authority of the Pope have been forced to go underground and Chinese bishops and priests and laymen have regularly been arrested, tortured and harassed. There have also been cases of outright murder of priests by security forces as in the case of Father Yan Weiping of Hebei province who after his arrest in March 1996 was found beaten to death on a street in Beijing.

At least thirteen Bishops and twelve priests are presently confirmed as under incarceration, while the fate of about forty more churchmen is simply unknown, with authorities refusing to confirm or deny whether they have been arrested or whether they are dead. Many more lay Catholics are suffering the same fate as their spiritual guides. The frail 81 year-old Bishop Zeng Jingmu of Jiangxi Province was rearrested on September 14, 2000 immediately following the completion of a three-year imprisonment term. He had previously been imprisoned for 30 years from 1955 to 1995. On September 11, 2000 in Fujian province, about 70 security police surrounded the house of an underground Catholic priest, the 82 year-old Father Ye Gong Feng, who was savagely tortured by security police until he fell into a coma.

Protestants

All Protestant denominations are required like the Catholics to observe the "three-self" policy which demands that they abjure support from foreign missionary organizations, and that they give up theoretical, doctrinal, and liturgical differences to join a "post-denominational Christian church" loyal to the Communist Party of China. The "three-fix" policy requires that all congregations meet at a fixed location, that they have a fixed and professional religious leader, and that they confine their activities to a fixed geographical sphere. For non-mainstream Protestant groups, which rely on lay leaders and which recruit members through evangelical preaching, the regulation effectively checks growth and allows effective official monitoring of groups. Therefore, many churches have attempted to remain unregistered but when discovered have had their leaders and members arrested, beaten and tortured.

In the Zhoukou area of Henan such unregistered "house" churches have proliferated and with it an intensified crackdown on worshippers. In the first ten months of 1995, police in the area took more than 200 Protestants into custody. Their leaders were sentenced to three-year terms of imprisonment. The evangelical network in the Zhoukou area also has links outside their area. A November 19, 1994 police raid netted 152 church leaders, many from other localities and provinces.

On February 18, 1995, Li Dezian a preacher from Guangzhou had his church raided by Public Security officials. Five officers reportedly used a Bible to beat Li on his face and neck in an attempt to break his windpipe. They used steel rods to break his ribs and injure his back and legs, and jumped on and kicked his prone body until he vomited blood. All those present at the church some one hundred were dragged away.

Human Rights Watch/Asia has reported raids, fines, and detentions, from other provinces and cities such as Shenyang, Xi'an, Fuzhou, Guilin, Tianjin, several locales in Sichuan province, and in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone in Southern China.
Indigenous Protestant sects, like the Shouters, the Disciples, Ling Ling Religion, the Holistic sect and the Beiliwang sects have been outlawed and authorities have declared that they would be "hunted down and severely punished"

Forced abortion and forced sterilization

China, as a whole commits about half a million third-trimester (ninth month) abortions annually. Most of these babies are fully alive when they are killed, and virtually all of these abortions are performed against the mother's will. Women are often imprisoned, brainwashed, and refused food until they finally break down and agree to an abortion. The actual methods by which the doctors carry out the "procedures" are brutal. Injections of Rivalor, commonly known as the "poison shot" causes the baby to slowly die over the course of two to three days at which time the baby will be delivered dead. Pure formaldehyde is also injected into the soft spot on the baby's head, or the skull is crushed by the doctor's forceps. Doctors in China are known to carry a few "chokers" in their pockets. These are similar to garbage-bag ties but longer. They are placed around the baby's neck and twisted, effectively strangling the child. Two other methods of aborting a child are by drowning the newborn in a bucket of water in plain view of the mother, and suffocation by towels forced into the baby's mouth as the doctor plugs the newborn's little nose. The latter two methods are used especially to "teach a lesson in obedience" and to act as a reminder that the People's Republic of China has strict family laws that are to be abided by its citizens.

The most dramatic revelation of China's inhuman birth-control policies came with the defection to the USA in May 1998, of Mrs. Gao Xiao Duan, who had served for fourteen years as the director of a so-called "Planned Birth Center" in a town in Fujian province. Mrs. Gao gave a detailed testimony to the House International Relations Human Rights Subcommittee and also extensive interviews to American television and newspapers. Mrs. Gao confirmed previous reports that the Chinese government routinely subjected those who violated its one child policy, to forced sterilization and forced abortions including women as much as nine months pregnant. Mrs. Gao revealed that the "Birth Center" maintained detailed files on the reproductive states of every woman under the age of 49. A network of paid informers slipped tips into a box about women in that area who had become pregnant without official authorization. She also added that in the first floor of the Center was a birth control jail for women who tried to resist, and jail cells for family members or friends who might attempt to intervene.

Mrs. Gao had managed to bring out videotapes and pictures, and with the help of Chinese dissident Harry Wu, had smuggled out hundreds of pages of official documents, which experts in the field say are the most damning evidence yet of the kind, of tactics used by China's planned birth program. It turned out that Mrs. Gao's defection came as she, herself, was in danger of being sterilized for violating China's one-child rule. She had secretly adopted an abandoned young boy, considered just as illegal as giving birth to a second child, and an informer had reported her to the Communist party.

Certain apologists for China maintain that, inhuman as it may seem, China is effectively doing what needs to be done to avert a population explosion, which could have serious global repercussions. Certainly, no sensible person will dispute that an effective birth-control program is necessary in China. On the other hand there is every indication that such brutal and inhuman measures as are being currently practiced are disturbingly short-sighted. Female infanticide figures have soared and earlier projections of drastic male female demographic imbalance are beginning to be realized. The latest research reveals that China's one-child policy has significantly failed because of widespread resistance by the peasantry with the collusion of local officials. In 1998, officials distributing emergency relief food in Paizhou county in Hubei province in the wake of summer floods discovered that the officially allotted quantity was not enough. The truth then emerged. There were 10% more people in the county than was recorded in the most recent census. Critics of the coercive birth-control policies believe that widespread resistance and cover-ups has made the government miss its original target by 300 million. It is also debatable whether China has actually done any better than countries which have not resorted to coercion. Fertility rates in India have dropped sharply, especially in areas where good healthcare and education is available.7 Moreover, India's average fertility rate is only marginally higher than that of rural China. In addition, India claims that its national family planning program has managed to prevent 230 million extra births and that its population will stabilize in 2040, just as China does.

Indiscriminate use of the death penalty

China executes, on average, 40 people every week, according to an Amnesty International Report, and throughout the 1990s condemned more of its citizens to death each year than the rest of the world put together. Amnesty recorded 2,088 death sentences and 1,263 confirmed executions in China in 1999, collating the figures from public reports. These figures are likely to be far below the actual number, as only a fraction are reported.

From 1990 to 1999, Amnesty International recorded 27,599 death sentences and 18,194 executions in China. "Many defendants most likely did not receive a fair trial and death penalties were carried out immediately after sentence was passed, thus denying the condemned the right to appeal," Amnesty said. Many defendants have been subject to torture to obtain a confession. Many may be illiterate and have little way of arguing their defense or understanding the process.

Many have been executed for being declared guilty of, what would be considered outside China, non-capital crimes: corruption, rape, embezzlement, tax-fraud and even on occasions such minor charges as the theft of a bicycle. Such capricious sentencing usually occurs during nationwide "anti-crime" and "anti-corruption" campaigns when regions and provinces are required to meet certain quotas in arrests and executions. In 1996, the Chinese Government "Strike Hard" campaign led to the execution of more than 4,000 people that year an average of 11 each day. Subversion and ethnic separatism are also crimes that warrant the death penalty, especially in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Tibet. An American tourist, Mike Melnyk, in Tibet during the current "Strike Hard" campaign in May 2001, reported two children in school uniforms, no older than sixteen (and one possibly even as young as twelve) being paraded through Shigatse town in open military trucks with other prisoners, prior to execution.

The number of capital offenses on China's law books has grown from 28 in 1979 to 74 in 1995. Since then, non-violent and economic crimes as speculation, bribery, and the forging of value-added tax receipts have been added to the list so that the current figure is probably around 90.

Most executions take place after sentencing rallies in front of massive crowds in sports stadiums and public squares. Prisoners are also paraded through the streets past thousands of people on the way to execution. Tens of thousands of arrested suspects and thousands assigned to "re-education or reform through labour" without charge or trial, have also been paraded at such rallies. The immediate families of the victims were, formerly, required to be present at the execution and to make a denouncement of the victim. This is no longer mandatory. However, the victim's family is still required to pay the cost of the bullet used in the execution.

In the ongoing "Strike Hard" campaign, public executions in Yunnan province were broadcast live on state television. Execution rallies in Shaanxi in April and May were reportedly attended by 1,800,000 spectators. At the Public Stadium in Chengdu on 23 June 2001, 54 people were executed in one day, before a capacity holiday crowd.

An Amnesty International press release dated July 6, 2001 described the latest round of "Strike Hard" executions as "nothing short of an execution frenzy". The press release stated that "At least 2,960 people have been sentenced to death and 1,781 executed in the last three months ... More people were executed in China in the last three months than in the rest of the world for the last three years." Yet, according to Amnesty these statistics are likely to be far below the actual number. "The figures above fall far below the actual number of death sentences and executions in China and are based on public reports which Amnesty International has monitored. Only a fraction of death sentences and executions carried out in China are publicly reported, with information selectively released by the relevant authorities. National statistics on the use of the death penalty remain a state secret."

Harvesting transplant organs from executed prisoner

In 1994, Human Rights Watch/Asia issued a 42-page report that charged China with using executed prisoners as its main source for organ transplants. The report clearly demonstrated how any notion of "consent" to organ donation in China is absurd, given what it calls the "fundamentally coercive" situation in which persons condemned to undergo judicial execution are placed. The complete lack of judicial safeguards in China guarantees that many people will be wrongfully executed and become unwitting organ donors. What the report underlined most disturbingly of all was that the practice of using prisoners' organs was common.

Citing government documents, doctors' statements and medical journal articles, the report reveals cases of kidneys being removed from prisoners the night before their executions. It also cited cases where some inmates were still alive when their organs were removed, and that often executions appeared to be scheduled according to transplant needs. Some executions are known to have been deliberately botched to ensure that prisoners were not yet dead when their organs were removed. The use of condemned prisoners' organs involves members of the medical profession in the actual execution process, in violation of international standards of medical ethics. Patients requesting Chinese surgeons for transplants are often advised to wait until a major holiday, when authorities traditionally execute the most prisoners. China's preferred method of capital punishment, a bullet to the back of the head, is conducive to transplants because it does not contaminate the prisoners' organs with poisonous chemicals, as lethal injections do, or directly affect the circulatory system, as would a bullet through the heart.

This Human Rights Watch report caused a brief stir in the West but was soon forgotten. A few years ago, in New York City the police broke up a bespoke service in the sale of organs of executed prisoners organised by Chinese officials. An article in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE on June 15, 2000 cited Dr. S.Y. Tan, one of Malaysia's leading kidney specialists, as claiming that more than 1,000 Malaysians have had kidney transplants in China from executed prisoners. Transplant patients from Thailand, Taiwan and other countries are reported to be using such services in China, and there are indications that this trend is increasing. All reports point to the absolute commercial nature of the transplant sales and affirm that organs are sold to the highest bidders, usually foreigners.

The latest report8 to date on this subject was one made in June of this year (2001) by a former Chinese Army doctor, Wang Guoqi, to a United States Congressional committee. Where he described how he removed skin and corneas from the bodies of executed prisoners. He described how injections of the anticoagulant heparin were given to the prisoners by hospital staff before the executions. After the prisoner was shot in the back of the head, transplant surgeons rushed to remove the liver, kidneys cornea and other organs either in an ambulance at the execution site or at a crematory. Dr. Wang reported that he witnessed doctors remove kidneys and other organs from victims who were still breathing. The Times article cited mounting evidence that China was selling organs from executed prisoners, sometimes to Americans. "Transplant doctors in the United States report that an increasing number of patients are showing up for post-transplant care after travelling to China for organs, particularly kidneys, that they would have to wait up to years in the West."

Routine torture of prisoners

The use of torture to extract confessions is routine in China's penal system. Furthermore, torture does not appear to result from random police brutality, miscarriage of justice, or anomalies in the application of the law, but is inherent in the system. An Amnesty International Report released in 1987 concluded: "We believe the law enforcement system and the justice system in China actually fosters torture." China signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, but nothing has changed since then.

Methods of torture consist of solitary confinement in windowless cells too small to stand up in, kneeling on glass shards, electrocution with high-voltage currents, and some cultural revolution favorites like the "airplane" where one's arms are forced backwards-and-up till the shoulders pop from their sockets; and also being strung up by the wrist or thumbs for days. Older traditional methods like the bamboo splint under the fingernail, and extraction of fingernails, have made their reappearance according to the Amnesty report. Beatings with clubs and truncheons are regular and since security personnel have been trained in Chinese martial arts (wushu), they are knowledgeable as to pressure and pain points in the body.

An article in THE BOSTON GLOBE, May 10, 2001, mentions the death under torture of Zhou Jianxiong, a 30-year-old agricultural worker from Chunhua township in Hunan province, on 15 May 1998. He was tortured by officials from the township birth control office to make him reveal the whereabouts of his wife, suspected of being pregnant without permission. Zhou was hung upside down, repeatedly whipped and beaten with wooden clubs, burned with cigarette butts, branded with soldering irons, and had his genitals ripped off.

For women in particular, especially in the case of nuns in Tibet, torture routinely includes rape by security personnel. Furthermore, use of electric-batons on women's genitalia has been frequently reported from prisons in Tibet. Tibetan children, some as young as nine years old, have been detained and tortured by Chinese security personnel, according to a report entitled A GENERATION IN PERIL: THE LIVES OF TIBETAN CHILDREN UNDER CHINESE RULE, released in March 2001, by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet. The report documents for the first time the routine practice of torturing even children arrested for "political" offenses.  The report also states that children are detained in deplorable conditions, often without notice to their families, and held for months or even years without a trial or access to a lawyer.

Criminal psychiatric abuse of political prisoners

Under Mao, psychiatry in any form was written off as the invention of bourgeois capitalism. But a report in The Columbia Journal of Asian Law authored by Robin Munro, a British researcher (cited in a New York Times article of February 18, 2001) condemned China's practice of imprisoning dissenters in psychiatric hospitals. The Times article mentions that previously "China has not been known for the systematic abuses of psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet Union, where hundreds of dissidents were spuriously diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked away. But Mr. Munro's article reported that at least 3,000 people who were arrested for some kind of "political" crime were referred for psychiatric evaluation, with many of them deemed mentally ill and subsequently imprisoned.

Besides labor activists like Cao Maobing, mentioned earlier, and Wang Wanzing (diagnosed as "paranoid psychotic" for unfurling a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square), the latest victims of this criminal abuse of psychiatry are members of the Falun Gong religious sect, whom the official press have openly branded as mentally disturbed and needing treatment. Hundreds of followers have been forcibly hospitalized and medicated according to reports from human rights monitors and many locked away.

Military occupation and genocide in Tibet

China invaded Tibet in 1950. After crushing all resistance, a systematic campaign was launched to destroy the Tibetan people and their way of life. This movement reached its crescendo during the Cultural Revolution, but continues to this day, in varying degrees of violence and severity. According to the latest estimates over six thousand monasteries, temples and historical monuments have been destroyed, along with incalculably vast quantities of priceless artistic and religious objects and countless books and manuscripts of Tibet's unique and ancient learning. Over a million Tibetans have been killed by execution, torture and starvation, while hundreds of thousands of others have been forced to slave in remote and desolate forced labor camps.

In spite of the Dalai Lama's many concessions and repeated efforts to negotiate on the question of Tibet, Chinese leaders have rejected all his overtures. Beijing's declared strategy now is to wait until the Dalai Lama dies, after which it is confident that the Tibetan issue could be terminated without international outcry. To ensure this, Beijing has adopted a policy of escalating Chinese population transfer to Tibet, deliberate subversion of Tibetan culture and identity, and the demoralization of Tibetans through unemployment, inferior educational opportunities, and unrelenting and ruthless repression of the Tibetan people by the organs of state security. In the last year, political repression has taken on new rigor with more arrests, torture, executions and vastly increased deployment of informers and security personnel throughout the country, especially in urban areas.

Though such measures have been successful in suppressing large scale-demonstrations and the kind of violent "independence" riots that broke out all over Tibet, especially in Lhasa, the capital city, in the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, they have been unable to contain public protests by
individuals and small groups (especially young nuns). More disturbing for State Security is the rise of bombing incidents in Tibet. These started in the mid-eighties with random and often harmless explosions of crude pipe bombs, but which now seems to be gaining in technical sophistication and political determination, as evinced by the case of a suicide bomber who disrupted a major official sports ceremony in Lhasa in 1999.

Draconian repression in East Turkestan

In far western China, the Uighur (a Turkic people) have been waging a decades-long struggle to establish the republic of East Turkestan. Just in the past few years there have been more than 130 uprisings, according to Uighur sources. The Chinese have responded with a draconian campaign of terror to wipe out Uighur nationalism. Daily arrests and public executions are part of normal' life in the bazaars of the Silk Route today. Mass executions of over fifty prisoners at a time have been reported.

Besides the invariable human rights abuses, the "one-child policy", large-scale population transfer of Chinese people to East Turkestan, and Chinese racism, the Uighurs protest China's nuclear tests in the region, which they claim has been the cause of serious and unexplained health problems in Uighur society. China has conducted 46 nuclear tests so far, and all of them in Xinjiang (the Chinese name for East Turkestan). One secret nuclear base located in the area of Malan, is only six miles away from a residential area where ethnic Uighur and Mongols live. The director of the local hospital told journalists from Taiwan that many local residents suffered from hair loss and various skin diseases. The number of patients found having pathological changes in their blood was five or six times that of the other areas. The number of children and women with leukaemia and throat cancer was also unusually high. The number of premature births and deformed babies had also increased dramatically since the construction of the nuclear base.

China's bacteriological weapons laboratories and testing sites are also located in Xinjiang. Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bacteriological weapons expert has reported the discovery of two rare strains of Ebola and Marburg in Xinjiang, which doctors had never even seen in Africa. China began experimenting with bacteriological weapons as early as the 1980s. During the first years of the 80s, epidemics occurred continuously in South Xinjiang and caused many deaths. Nobody knew the names of the epidemics, so they were identified as "No.1 disease, "No.2 disease" and so on, according to the year the disease struck. In the end, people simply dubbed the epidemics "unknown illnesses."

China does not play by the usual rules of business

It is not the author's intention here to provide a detailed expose on the hazards of doing business with China. The awareness that China does not play by the rules is growing as many Western businesses in China have become victims, not just of unfair practices by Chinese manufacturers and businessmen, but also by active Chinese government collusion in such schemes. Then there is the question of China's protectionism, which is a gigantic and unimaginably complicated system, featuring not only the standard state subsidies9 of exports industries, but a host of practices designed not only to undercut competitive foreign made goods but to confuse Western businessmen and politicians intending to reform it.

Subsidies come in forms of preferential bank loans among other practices. Another method is import substitution. The Chinese government rigs the market so that items being imported are produced domestically even if the cost is greater. China is also a master hand at other much cruder forms of protectionism. One U.S. government report catalogued the bewildering array of devices that China employs to block imports from the U.S. and other countries: prohibitively high tariffs from 35 to 150 percent, import licenses, import quotas, import restrictions, and certification requirements. In some cases after pressure from Congress or some federal agency, Chinese trade bureaucrats removed barriers on imports with great fanfare while simultaneously but quietly installing new barriers against the same imports. China's business "partners" hope that after China's entry into the WTO this will all change, but it is doubtful if China will ever give up such advantageous practices when Western leaders are unwilling to antagonize China, much less penalize it for offences far greater.

The Commerce Department figures released this year on March 19, showed a record US$369.7 billion difference between America's imports and exports during 2000 a 39 per cent jump on 1999. China led the way, selling some US$83.8 billion more than it imported. This trade deficit figure of $83.8 billion with China is the latest in a series of dramatically rising annual figures in the last half-decade. In the Japanese case, the deficit climbed slowly for three decades until it began falling in the mid-nineties. In China's case the imbalance seems to have struck almost overnight. In the entire postwar history of trade competition, by contrast, Japan never came close to putting the United States in such a disadvantaged position. Yet we might recall the Japan phobia that affected America in the eighties, exemplified by Michael Crichton's book and the film, RISING SUN, even though Japan was essentially a small, peaceful island nation, a democracy and a particularly close ally of the USA a near client state as far as defense was concerned. China is not only the world's most populous nation, but one that is avowedly hostile to democracy in general and the United States in particular. It is also, unlike Japan, a nuclear power that is everyday increasing its military power and aggressively pursuing an expansionist policy.

> Next: Additional reasons not to buy Made in China : Part 2/9