Human Rights Abuse in China
Uploaded by paperstor on Jul 15, 2007
Human Rights Abuse in China
China's disregard for the basic human rights of its citizens was brought to the attention of the international community during the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, the incident was "very troublesome to everybody that had been following the issue of human rights in China" (Reuters, 1997).
The Chinese official which sought to deny the people of their most basic freedoms was Deng Xiaoping, whom recently passed away. "Xiaoping leaves behind not only a legacy of economic liberalization and reform, but of authoritarian repression that has systematically suppressed all demands for human rights and democracy in China" (HRIC, 1997). The legacy of Xiaoping will live on however, with his most notorious accomplishment of normalizing relations with the United States in the late 1970's.
A group called Human Rights in China, or HRIC, a prominent New York-based rights group, released the following press release after Xiaoping's death:
In the wake of Deng Xiaoping's passing, Human Rights in China calls on the government of the People's Republic of China to declare a general amnesty for all prisoners of conscience currently being held throughout China (HRIC, 1997).
The extensive abuse of human rights in China has gone to the core of the most fundamental of all rights, which are the rights to life and liberty. The following are the abuses which the U.S. Department of State reported in their annual release on Chinese affairs:
Abuses included torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, and arbitrary and lengthy incommunicado detention. Prison conditions remained harsh. The Government continued severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, privacy, and worker rights. Some restrictions remained on freedom of movement. In many cases, the judicial system denies criminal defendants basic legal safeguards and due process because authorities attach higher priority to maintaining public order and suppressing political opposition than to enforcing legal norms (U.S. Department of State: China Country Report on Human Rights Practices, 1996).
According to the Chinese government's own statistics, there are at least 3,000 "counter-revolutionaries" being held in Chinese prisons today(HRIC, 1997). The HRIC believes this figure to be inaccurate. They believe the number is actually much higher, citing the prisoners being held in China and Tibet on other charges as the reason.
Extrajudicial killings, or killings which occur with little or no due process, have been one of the most...