While many outsiders still remain hopeful for the eventual opening of China, Beijing continues to crack down on individual liberty and human rights in ways both big and small.
Start with the big: The use of “judicial psychiatry” continues apace. The practice involves locking political dissidents in booby hatches and nut houses because disagreement with the ruling elite is apparently proof positive that someone has a few pandas loose in the top paddock.
“From the early 1990s onwards, scattered reports from China began to indicate that individual dissidents and other political nonconformists were being subjected to forensic psychiatric appraisal by the police and then committed to special psychiatric hospitals on an involuntary and indefinite basis,” Robin Munro explains in a report for Human Rights in China, an organization founded by Chinese scientists and scholars – two frequent targets of Chinese repression.
The most recent victim is outspoken AIDS activist Hu Jia, whose work includes helping orphans and others afflicted by the disease. Though he shows no genuine signs of going loopy (not that involuntary hospitalization can be so easily excused anyway), according to an HRIC source in China, officers of the Beijing Public Security Bureau have ordered the activist’s family to admit Hu Jia for “evaluation and treatment.” If he doesn’t pass muster, he’ll be forcibly and indefinitely institutionalized.
Given how gentle the police have been thus far to Hu Jia (a few beatings and house arrest), treatment in the asylum is likely to result in genuine, serious mental harm, not some phantom notion of recovery. His family is concerned about that very possibility and recently issued a statement that reads, in part, “If the police forcibly commit Hu Jia to a mental hospital against the wishes of himself and his family, this constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution.”
Not that it’s anything new in the Empire of the Sun, which has used similar tactics to harass and persecute the Falun Gong sect, labor-rights agitators and pro-democracy activists.
Commenting on the Hu Jia case, HRIC president Liu Qing said, “The imposition of psychiatric treatment against political dissidents and religious believers seems to be on the increase, and is an issue that should be raising more concern in the international community.”
It should – and so should the milder forms of repression and suppression. As we see with China’s crackdown on Internet use, sometimes the milder forms quickly turn into the 180-proof variety.
In a recent exhibit of China’s near paranoid fear of free information flow, the BBC reports that Beijing is now moving to censor mobile-phone text-messaging to halt the flow of – says the State – bogus info and porn. But others know better – dissidents are the real target. According to Paris-based free-speech organization Reporters Without Borders, one Chinese mobile-phone snooping company claims it is currently keeping track of “false political rumours” and “reactionary remarks” – in other words, anything critical of the government. In addition to groking and squashing text-messaging, RWB reports that between October 2003 and July 2004 Chinese “cyberpolice … tightened their grip on Internet discussion forums, strengthened surveillance of e-mails and increased [their] propaganda sites …”
People running afoul of the infocops find themselves in serious hot water. During the same stretch of time just mentioned, RWB reports, “two senior figures in the reformist press were sentenced to heavy jail terms, one famous editor-in-chief was arrested for his reports on SARS and torture, 10 Internet-users and cyberdissidents were arrested and 20 others were sentenced to prison terms, some of them of up to 14 years.”
China’s continued poor handling of individual rights leaves little room for encouragement regarding its willingness to substantially loosen its political stranglehold on the Chinese people anytime in the near future.
In an excellent essay on the subject, John Israel explains the problem:
It is hard to demonstrate that human rights are essential to the building of a state power or to material and military modernization. In fact, from the point of view of China’s rulers, a contrary series of propositions seems more logical: (1) modernization requires unity; (2) human rights activists threaten to undermine unity with dissent and agitation; (3) therefore, human rights run contrary to modernization.
This syllogistic reasoning has been devastatingly effective, first because it appeals to Chinese principles of unity, order and harmony (especially in vogue since the Cultural Revolution); second, because it invokes sentiments of national loyalty and patriotism, irrefutable arguments for modern Chinese; and third because it is backed up by a state monopoly of police and judicial power …
For whatever progress China has made, it is sad that Israel’s words – written more than 20 years ago – still fit so well the current situation.
From barring its citizens from the free flow of information (critical not only for business, but, as our founders discovered over 225 years ago, if citizens are to be able to communicate to each other the abuses of the State and work to halt such abuses), to forcibly institutionalizing dissidents for daring to disagree with State policy – not to mention countless other repressive and oppressive policies – China is a long way off from anything close to a liberal society.
As Beijing continues to open markets, we can hope that these efforts will eventually lead to political liberty as well – though one does not always flow from the other. In the meantime, however, expect more crackdowns, more jailings, more torture, more state-sanctioned murder.
For now, that’s just how they do things there.
Has Trump 2.0 learned from Trump 1.0?
Josh Hammer