This appeal to all freedom loving people not to buy products manufactured in the People's Republic of China has not been made lightly. It would certainly be preferable if there were a more amicable way to dissuade China from its growing human rights abuses, its brutal military occupation of Tibet and its aggressive military expansionism. But since the USA's de-linking of trade and human rights, and the granting of permanent "Normal Trade Relations" status (or "Most Favored Nation" status, as it was known earlier) to China, the few modest leverages there were to influence China's actions have been effectively relinquished. Furthermore, most industrial nations in the world have also made similar adjustments to their national consciences and policies as the USA has done some having done so much earlier and more enthusiastically.

The United Nations has been completely ineffectual in restraining China, and, in fact, generally behaves as if its sole duty towards China was not to give it any cause for offense. For instance, the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the single most important world Buddhist leader, was refused participation in a UN backed Millennium Peace Summit last year attended by religious leaders from all over the globe merely because China demanded it.

The prevalent argument that market forces and international trade would transform China into a free-market democracy has by now been completely discredited. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened. China's human rights record has worsened with each passing year of expanding international trade and investment in China. In December 1998, President Jiang Zemin made a clear categorical declaration to the entire nation that China would never tread the path of democracy.1 To drive home the point, as it were, he repeated it a couple of days later, vowing, in addition, that China would crush any challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. Immediately afterwards there was a nationwide crackdown on the publishing and entertainment industry and harsh punishment was meted out to those "inciting to subvert state power."2 This flurry of hard-line activity came almost immediately after China signed the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in October 1998. The last two years have also seen unprecedented and brutal crackdowns on religious groups like the Falun Gong and perhaps more significantly, on increasingly defiant industrial workers and rebellious peasants.

This year, on Tuesday, February, 26, 2001, the State Department in its annual report on Human Rights confirmed that despite years of deepening American economic engagement with China, the human rights situation there had worsened significantly, with "intensified crackdowns" on religious organizations, political dissenters and "any person or group perceived to threaten the government." The report also stated that the situation in Tibet had worsened. Such increasingly negative accounts of China's human rights record have become a regular feature for the last few years in the annual State Department report.

A latest NEW YORK TIMES report (July 3, 2001) on the flight to the USA of the economist, He Qinglian, China's leading critic of official corruption, underscores the accelerating pace of the crackdowns. "In recent months China has arrested scores of dissidents, closed newspapers and fired outspoken editors in an accelerating effort to tighten control on public discourse. And it has charged several visiting scholars with spying, including a naturalized American who had been teaching in Hong Kong and a United States resident who had been working at American University in Washington."

A non-violent but direct response

With governments and big business in the free world having seemingly given up the use of economic leverage to restrain China, one non-violent way remaining for concerned citizens to exert some positive influence on China is through the power of the individual consumer. The campaign we are asking you to join aims at making consumers aware of the moral and political costs of buying products Made in China, and securing their participation in an effective boycott of all such products. It will also help to pressure businesses and industries to rethink their economic ties with China. Mobilization of this power will not only make an impact on its own terms but, in due course, influence governments and politicians to implement policies that could genuinely help to bring about democracy and freedom to the Chinese people, and restore Tibet's independence.

Economic boycotts have, on the whole, an impressive success record. Gandhi's Swadeshi campaign to boycott English textiles was one of the first effective demonstrations of the untenability of British rule in India. Gandhi's campaign caused much economic suffering in Britain. A large number of mills in Lancashire had to close down and many thousands were rendered jobless. But the moral righteousness of Gandhi's action was so evident that when he visited Britain in 1931 he was given a rousing welcome in Lancashire by unemployed mill-workers.

The power of economic action was most clearly demonstrated in South Africa in the struggle against apartheid. The boycott and international sanctions hurt the black community the most, since it was the poorest and had the least economic cushion against outright penury and hunger. Nevertheless, the resolve of the South African blacks and their leaders never wavered. In fact, even after Nelson Mandela was released and a number of important reforms put into place by President de Klerk, the African National Congress (ANC) called for the continuation of international sanctions until apartheid was completely dismantled and a transitional government was in place.

The imposition of economic sanctions and penalties on Poland by the West contributed to the downfall of the Communist regime and the advent of democracy in Poland.

Pro-democracy forces in Burma have been calling on all countries of the world for the imposition of an overall "South African-style economic sanction against the ruling military government in Burma." A worldwide campaign for a consumer boycott and shareholder pressure forced a number of Western companies to withdraw from Burma. At the beginning of this year the Burmese junta agreed to enter into negotiations with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader.

The increasing reports of strikes in China's industries and demonstrations and riots by the peasantry in spite of large-scale and savage reprisals by the state clearly disproves the oft-repeated (and somewhat racist) contention of China's apologists in the West that the Chinese people are satisfied living in a repressive state and only interested in their immediate economic well-being. If desperate workers are going on strike, without the benefit of unions and strike funds, and when striking is illegal and punishable to the extreme limit of the law, then it is evident that workers in China (and by extension, the peasantry) will approve and endorse any action (like an international boycott of Chinese goods) from the free world that though, possibly causing temporary hardships, is clearly aimed in the long run at helping Chinese farmers and workers to secure the rights enjoyed by people in the free world.

The above arguments are even more valid in the case of Tibet. The question often asked whether the ordinary Tibetan wouldn't prefer economic gain to political independence, or even personal freedom, is not only mistaken but grossly insulting. We are not in a position to conduct a poll in that unhappy country, but so far in every public protest and demonstration inside Tibet, in every protest song, dissident writing and clandestine poster, the single outstanding demand has been for Tibetan independence. The only reference to economics ever to appear did so in a dissident document which was circulating Tibet in the late eighties:

If (under China) Tibet were built up, the livelihood of the Tibetan people improved, and their lives so surpassed in happiness that it would embarrass the gods of the Thirty-Three Divine Realms; if we were really and truly given this, even then we Tibetans wouldn't want it. We absolutely wouldn't want it.3

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