Crossposted from Dailykos
President Bush goes to China this weekend, and there’s a sense that this trip could be his legacy:
WASHINGTON — For the rest of the month, President Bush should forget about Scooter Libby and his low polls and concentrate on getting ready for China. His trip there this month could be the most important step he takes this year.
It could be his legacy.
…….
The Chinese people are gradually realizing they don’t want to live in a totalitarian state, but, so far, the state still rules. Human rights do not apply. How the capitalization and the democratization of China play out will be crucial to Americans.
A president plagued by scandal at home goes to China in search of a legacy, this seems vaguely familiar. While so much attention has been focused on Taiwan, the far more important story of continuing human rights abuses in China has not recieved the attention it merits.
Last night this diary went into histerionics about how Bush upset the balance of power in East Asia with this statement:
“Modern Taiwan is free and democratic and prosperous. By embracing freedom at all levels, Taiwan has delivered prosperity to its people and created a free and democratic Chinese society.”
There are several things that stand out here.
This doesn’t change existing US policy, note the careful use of the word “Chinese” society, and as Malacandra points out the article goes on to state:
While saluting Taiwan’s progress and urging China to take more steps, Bush stresses that the United States is not changing its official policy that there is one China — including Taiwan — or its position that there should be no unilateral attempt to change the status quo by either side, AP reported.
Tempest in a green tea pot, but there’s something else that stands out here, for once the president has managed to do something right. He confronted the Chinese on human rights, but words alone are not enough.
Furthermore, the Bush Administration shows a myopic focus in the expression of their outrage.
This isn’t about the conviction of their beliefs, it a cynical attempt to use belief to avoid convictions. As noted above, Bush seems to be running away scandals at home looking for a legacy in the Far East, like certain other presidents with less than successful second terms……
Browsing the full text of the speech, looking through the third of the document that actually deal with China, two things pop out.
First, when Bush is talking about freedom, he’s not talking about pressuring the Chinese into relinquishing the grip the All China Trade Union Federation, the CCP’s trade union wing, holds on the representation of Chinese workers. Note this statement:
Taiwan is another society that has moved from repression to democracy as it liberalized its economy. The people of Taiwan for years lived under a restrictive political state that gradually opened up the economy. This opening to world markets transformed the island into one of the world’s most important trading powers. Economic liberalization in Taiwan helped fuel its desire for individual political freedom because men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will eventually insist on controlling their own lives and their future.
Work makes free
So let me get this right work makes you free, all the better if it can be exploited for private profit, while using the infrastructure of the state to imprison and murder those who demand to be treated like men and not machines. And there’s this statement that destroys any hope Bush’s new found criticism for the boys in Bejing was anything else than a play to the base back home:
I have pointed out that the people of China want more freedom to express themselves to worship without state control and to print Bibles and other sacred texts without fear of punishment. The efforts of China’s people to improve their society should be welcomed as part of China’s development. By meeting the legitimate demands of its citizens for freedom and openness, China’s leaders can help their country grow into a modern, prosperous, and confident nation.
Friends, it’s all about the bibles and the bejamins, they don’t give a damn about the working men (and women). Christians are treated atrciously in China, but their plight is part of a larger disrepect for human rights and the right of law in China. This cynical exploitation of the plight of house Christians in China is deeply reminiscent of the White House’s embrace of human trafficking as an important issue to be confronted, and then turning the serious issue of humans trafficked for slave labor into just being an issue about sex trafficking, leaving the victims raped of their labor but not their sexual purity out to dry. This is the deal struck to keep well meaning evangelists from turning their righteous anger towards Bush’s donor base.
Remember Bush’s Burman Sweatshirts.
I guess the Bush view is that’s it’s ok to screw workers over so long as there’s no penetration, after all no one wants to lose their piece of the pie, the irony of this being that in engaging the Chinese on their one terms not only have they become collaborators, they are having their trademarks and patents ripped off by the same disrespect for the rule of law that allows them to profit of the exploitation of Chinese workers. I guess its right what my high school history teacher said about capitalists and selling rope.
By refusing to confont the Chinese government about human rights abuses and clinging to the discredited notion that trade alone will create pluralism in China, we all become collaborators in the oppression of the Chinese people by their government.
So now they naysayers, say that America has no right to speak against the Chinese because of our own failings.
They are dead wrong. These are the same type of people who excused Stalin’s gulags because of Hitler’s concentration camps, or excused Hitler’s concentration camps because of Stalin’s gulags. As the old saying goes two wrongs don’t make a right, and the flaws of the messenger shouldn’t discredit the message.
The message is simple. China has a huge human rights problem, and I’m only going to point out some of the more egregious abuses.
The first myth that needs to be busted is the idea that China is an invincible economic dragon, leaving the impression that unemployment is not a problem.
The Economist wrote on this in 2004 noting that the official rateis much lower than the real unemployment rate:
Mr Wen’s concerns about the problem appear to indicate that it is much worse than official figures suggest. Last year the government put the urban unemployment rate at 4.3%, which in most other countries would be regarded as close to full employment (see chart). The official target this year is to keep it under 4.7%. Officials do not seem worried about achieving this. But everyone knows the figure has little to do with reality.
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So what is the real unemployment rate? The government’s number only includes those who are officially registered as unemployed. It does not include those who have been laid off from state-owned enterprises but who still get a basic stipend for three years after losing their jobs. Taking them into account, and adjusting for other distortions, many Chinese analysts put the figure at around 8-10% in urban areas. A survey of five large cities conducted by academics at the University of Michigan and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found unemployment rose overall from 7.2% to 12.9% between 1996 and 2001.
Regional variations are considerable. By the government’s very conservative calculations, Beijing’s unemployment rate was 1.4% last year, compared with more than 6% in some cities of the north-east which have heavy concentrations of state-owned industries. The gap between the official estimate and reality is particularly evident in such areas, which have been plagued in recent years by frequent, albeit orderly, and mostly small, demonstrations by laid-off workers and retired employees. The unemployment rates in places like mining towns, dependent on just a few industries, are probably as high as 40%.
The issue isn’t the understatement of unemployment, which is an issue in the US as well, rather the issue is that China needs to grow by 9% a year to absorb all the peasants and laid off state entreprise workers entering the urban labor market.
And it is those chinese workers being exploited in the urban labor markets that we have the most power to help. Without the American export market the Chinese economy would crumble under the weight of bad loans made by state banks, and the economic collapse would lead to revolution by the long oppressed working classes (the irony of the threat of a proletarian revolt in China should be apparent.) If the US were slap tarriffs on trade with China, we’d lose cheap manufatured items, the Chinese leadership would likely lose their head.
And now the naysayers say the Chinese would dump their dollars.
Making the products they sell to Americans even more expensive,, and thereby further crippling their export sector, not to mention devaluing their remaining dollar reserves. The US has the upper hand here, and we should be using this to pressure the Chinese government to establish enforceable labor standards.
Just to site one of the more horrifying incidents, Peking Duck tells the story of how Child labor killed in at least one case:
In March of this year we saw the tragic case of five adolescent girls who appeared to have been poisoned by carbon monoxide smoke from a coal brazier lit in the confines of their cramped factory sleeping quarters. Upon discovering them unconscious, the factory manager did not call for medical assistance, but took them to a crematorium to quickly dispose of their remains. An employee of the crematorium noticed that the bodies of the girls were still warm and their limbs soft, and that no medical certificate accompanied their bodies, so he refused to accept the bodies. In an attempt to hide culpability for the girl’s deaths, the panicked factory manager ordered that the bodies be disposed of immediately.
Sources say that when the girls’ families heard of the matter, they insisted on viewing their daughters’ corpses, but were refused. The factory also insisted that the families make no further inquiries into the girls’ deaths as a condition of paying each family 15,000 Yuan (less than US$2000) in compensation. However, the families still insisted on viewing the corpses, and four days later the factory finally acceded to their request. Upon viewing the corpses, the families were horrified to discover that at least two of the girls, 14-year-old Wang Yajuan and 17-year-old Wang Shimian, appeared to have been alive when they were placed in the coffins. Their faces were caked with vomit and tears, their noses had bled and their necks were swollen. Wang Shimian was found to have kicked through the cardboard lining of her coffin, and her body was twisted in apparent struggle.
What does it say about the human rights situation in the country when employers literally can get away with murder?
And now say the naysayers, the labor situation in China results from a reverence for authority native to Confucian cultures in East Asia, and if only workers would stand up and press for rights on their own the labor situation in China would change from the inside.
Well, I’ve got some bad news, sunshine. The Chinese have a saying, “Kill the monkey to scare the chickens.”, and that’s precisely what happens to Chinese workers who try to stand up.
China permits only one trade union to operate in the country, the government controlled, ACTUF, and those who try to organize their wokers into anything even remotely resembling an independent union, end up in prison.
Amnesty Interntional has a great primer on the labor situation at the time of the great labor protests in Daqing in 2002. The protests continue, and exist throughout the country, but I think it’s useful to illustrate what was and is happening in China:
IMPRISONED LABOUR ACTIVISTS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AN INDEPENDENT TRADE UNION MOVEMENT
There is a long history of labour disputes in China and the existence of an active labour movement is not a new phenomenon. Since the late 1980s there have been several attempts to create independent trade unions to give an independent voice to the needs and grievances of workers. All of these have been short-lived and repressed, and their leaders imprisoned. (18)
In May 1989, during the pro-democracy movement, groups of workers in various cities formed Workers Autonomous Federations (WAFs) as an alternative to the ACFTU. The WAFs were short-lived: they were banned by the authorities following the 4 June 1989 crackdown and their organizers arrested and prosecuted on “counter-revolutionary” charges. Many other workers who had taken part in the protests were also prosecuted on ordinary criminal charges.
Since 1989 there have been other attempts to form independent trade unions or labour rights groups. Again, the organizers have been jailed. For example, in 1992 a group who had formed a Preparatory Committee of the Free Labour Union of China (PCFLUC), distributed leaflets in Beijing encouraging workers to form free trade unions. The group was quickly suppressed in May 1992 with the arrests of its founding members, some of whom remain imprisoned.
In 1994 another group of people who had attempted to set up the League for the Protection of the Rights of Working People (LPRWP) were arrested in Beijing. Liu Nianchun, one of the founding members, was assigned three years of ”Re-education Though Labour”. He has since been released. According to its provisional charter, the LPRWP was to be a “corporate social body established according to law” devoted to protecting the rights of working people.
In 1998 Zhang Shanguang (see below for further details) tried to establish the “Shu Pu Association for the Protection of the Rights of Laid-Off Workers” in Hunan province. He was arrested after applying to the local government for permission to register the association and sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
In 1999 Yue Tianxiang and Guo Xinmin established the “China Workers Monitor” in Gansu province, exposing corruption among officials and mis-management of the company that had laid them off. Yue was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and Guo Xinmin two years along with another activist.
These and other cases are described in more detail in a document published separately by Amnesty International. (19) These cases include people imprisoned since 1989, veteran activists and others such as lawyers detained for attempting to defend activists, as well as transport, paper, printing and other workers. Some of them have been tortured and are in ill-health.
Legislation and methods under which labour activists are imprisoned, detained or silenced
Many labour activists and supporters have been detained during or immediately after demonstrations or strikes, then released after a short period in detention. Others, usually the organisers, have been formally charged or detained for longer periods.
Some of those imprisoned in the early 1990s were convicted under ”counter-revolutionary” provisions of the Criminal Law which were removed from the law when it was revised in 1996. Despite that, their cases and those of other people convicted of ”counter-revolutionary crimes” prior to the revision of the law, have never been reviewed.
Others are imprisoned under the Criminal Law on charges of ”subversion” or for revealing ”state secrets”, which may simply refer to reporting labour unrest. For example, Zhang Shanguang, whose case is cited above, is currently serving a ten year sentence for ”illegally supplying intelligence to hostile organizations and people abroad”. One of the charges against him was based on an interview he gave to a foreign radio station during which he spoke, among other things, about peasant demonstrations in Hunan Province. He was the founder of a local organization, the ‘Shu Pu Association to Protect the Rights and Interests of Laid-off workers’ and it is believed that his arrest was partly in connection with his plans to register his organization.
Some are imprisoned on criminal charges which appear to have been brought by the authorities in an attempt to discredit the activists – charges such as tax fraud or violence. One example is the case of Li Bifeng, a labour activist from Sichuan province who publicized the violent dispersal by police of massive worker protests in Sichuan over alleged misappropriation of funds in 1997. Li Bifeng was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for alleged fraud, a charge which is reported to have been unfounded. His trial was unfair and his imprisonment is believed to be directly linked to his labour rights activities.
In other cases, the authorities have used administrative punishments which bypass the criminal justice system and allow for detention without trial. One well known example is that of Zhou Guoqiang, a prominent dissident in Beijing who was a founding member of an independent labour union, The League for the Protection of the Rights of the Working People (LPRWP). He was assigned to three years ”re-education through labour” as a result in 1994 . In July 1995, an extra year was added to his sentence because he allegedly went beyond the boundaries of his labour camp. Zhou Guoqiang went on hunger-strike in May 1997 to protest against another extension to his sentence. He was finally released on 20 January 1998, after completion of sentence. Although released, he remains at risk of detention. He is reportedly often harassed by police and has been detained briefly for his outspoken views.
In another case, Cao Maobing, a labour activist at a silk factory in Funing, Jiangsu province, was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital. He was released in July 2001 after seven months of forcible detention in Yancheng No.4 Psychiatric Hospital. He alleged that he was forcibly given drugs and electric shock treatment while held at the hospital. He had been detained after he led a strike and tried to form a union group to fight against corrupt factory leaders who had not paid pensions and other monies owed to the workers. Cao Maobing had also talked to journalists about the lack of leadership and support the ACFTU gave to ordinary workers.
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When you apologize for China because you don’t like George Bush, you collaborate in the torture Cao Maobing and the rest.
In case you haven’t noticed, the common thread that unites all these accounts is like the Borg, the Chinese government believes reistance is futile, and while Amnesty International never comes out and names it, China mantains a large network of labor camps for which Harry Wu of the Laogai Research Foundation popularized the term laogai, which roughly translates as “reform through labor”.
There’s on last thing I want to mention to crystalize why what’s happenening in China is truely horrific. During the 90’s the US State Department became aware that China was trafficking organs taken from executed laogai prisoners. Harry Wu tells the story in his book Troublemaker, how the practice of guards eating executed prisoners organs, to gain their strenght, morphed into a money making business with big wigs in the Communist party and wealhy foreigners paying for the organs of prisoners, many excecuted for no other reason than to sell their organs. The Village Voice tells the story more luridly in this article:
In China, human rights groups say, citizens have been executed for nonviolent offenses like taking bribes, credit card theft, small-scale tax evasion, and stealing truckloads of vegetables. Political dissidents have also been sentenced to death. Chinese embassy officials did not respond to requests for comment, but in the past the government has denied promoting the for-profit organ trade….
Forced labor from China’s laogai has always been a source of cash for the country’s rapidly advancing economy. And punishment doesn’t necessarily end at the point of death, usually a single shot to the back of the head. Families are often forced to pay for the bullet used. But the laogai turned into Execution, Inc. less than 20 years ago after the introduction of Cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant drug that prevents rejection of organs by the recipient’s body.
Wei Jingsheng, an agitator at Columbia University’s Human Rights Center, testified before the International Relations Committee and Government Reform & Oversight Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 4, 1998, that while he was on death row a guard confided that often organ removal is the means of execution in and of itself. Wei, who now heads his own foundation in Washington, D.C., stated that the guard told him, “There are almost no exceptions. They first are given anesthesia. Just the same as killing a pig. . . . We use cloth to wrap them up and bring them to the execution ground. No one cares if they are alive or dead.”
Further, Wei said he had confirmed, through a plan hatched with a 20-year-old cellmate, that executed prisoners were being harvested against their will. The young man, whom he called Zhang, was to cry out, “I’m not sick, I don’t need a doctor,” if he saw a medical team equipped to harvest his organs waiting at his execution. If there was no evidence of this, Zhang was to scream as the condemned normally would.
After a long stretch of silence, Zhang sent the message. “My first feeling was of satisfaction, knowing that this evidence finally proved this practice. But this feeling was quickly replaced by another,” Wei told the congressional committees. “My second feeling was of heaviness, knowing that this young man used his life to record an unbelievable crime. If I did not have the opportunity to tell others of this evil, if I did not have the opportunity to try and stop this evil from continuing, then I would have to apologize to this young man. All this time, I have deeply felt this responsibility. We must stop this practice.”
Harry Wu spent 19 years in the laogai, and has also testified before Congress. His Laogai Research Foundation claims that when bullets are used, the target reflects the market: a shot to the head when a liver’s wanted, a shot to the chest when corneas are in demand. Amnesty International also reports that a form of lethal injection gaining acceptance in China can be used to kill without damaging crucial organs, and can blur the line between life and death.
Young, nonsmoking prisoners are given blood tests and medical exams to assess compatibility with arriving patients, the investigator explains, and courts set execution dates accordingly.
At this point, I’m imagining I’m going to be attacked for being a neo-con, dragging all this out, and suggesting we have a responsilbity to do something about it. I’m no neocon, and I don’t think dropping bombs is the answer, far from it. We have the power as a nation to use our economic relations with China to bring change for the Chinese people.
We can’t make China change, but we damn well don’t have to sit by and allow products made in the laogai, or tainted by the oppression of chinese workers to find their way onto American store shelves.
Prior to the pasage of Fast track in 2001, a provision of the Jackson-Vanik required the yearly approval of normal trade relations with China, nominally linking access to American markets to human rights. With Fast Track, and China’s ascession to the WTO, that ended.
I argued last night that we need to reinstate Jackson-Vanik, after which I promptly informed that I support the unlimited emigration of Chinese to the United States, because emigration is all that Jackson Vanik was about. While it’s true that emigration was part of Jackson Vanik it was more than that. It was about linking access to American markets to the protection of human rights.
We need to press for polcies that allow change in China, but don’t involved torching the place. Nathan Newman over at Labor Blog, makes the argument that the US needes to use its economic power to press China on the abuse of human rights:
I wouldn’t argue for an embargo on China but a more nuanced policy where we enacted a rule that legal challenges could be made to the importation of any goods where plaintiffs could demonstrate that labor rights had been violated.
This approach has multiple advantages:
* Since many companies in China are not controlled directly by the government these days but my multinationals, the lawsuits could be brought against those companies to bar their specific goods.
This would apply pressure to China without applying an embargo against the whole country.
* It would give a venue for labor rights activists to highlight labor abuses in specific cases, allowing maximum leverage for those workers in China increasingly willing to challenge their treatment in the workplace and creating a situation where their imprisonment would become international news far more easily, since they would be potential plaintiffs in US court.
* It would encourage US unions to work closely with available Chinese partners in building campaigns and lawsuits, encouraging mutual cooperation rather than potential antagonism between US and Chinese labor activists.
Here is the key goal of labor activists globally — create tools that empower workers to help themselves in demanding better treatment. Our approach to China should follow this in creating new tools to support campaigns where workers in China have actually tried to organize and demand better treatment– and been punished for their efforts.
China may be an authoritarian state, but they have tied their economy increasingly to that of the United States– which means we have far more power to effect their actions, especially if we do so creatively in alliance with Chinese workers themselves.
I agree we need to restore the power of the US government to lay tarriffs on China if they abuse human rights. We need laws that permit foreign governments and corporations to be sued if they are found to be abusing human rights. If governments refuse to take corrective action, the US government should impose tarriffs on products made where human rights abuses have occurred.
At last, US emigration law should be changed to allow Chinese workers who have evidence of human rights abuses to seek asylum, and allow them and their families to emigrate to the United States.
The Chinese government would crow and threaten, but in the end they would be forced to confront the issue of human rights abuses in the country.