In the land where one of the state’s main concerns about children dying in fires is that citizens might talk about the reasons why such incidents keep occurring, the censorship pressure is so intense that local media apparently refrained from substantially covering the January 19 news that 13 Henan elementary-aged schoolboys had lost their lives after their dormitory went up in flames.
Reported by China Digital Times, social media hashtags related to the tragedy were deactivated and comments taken down. It therefore joined other disappeared insights into life under Chinese Communist Party rule from recent days such as a Caixin revelation that a man named Sun Renze (孫任澤) had died in police custody in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region back in 2018. He had allegedly endured torture such as waterboarding beforehand.
By erasing unflattering news, China President Xi Jinping intends to insulate his dictatorship against any form of domestic criticism and maintain the fiction of perfected governance. His position can still be weakened from beyond his country’s borders, however, by activists, journalists, civil society organizations and international institutions. This is a hole in his information control that he is pulling out all the stops to close.
Thus, on Jan. 23, 2024, during a routine Universal Periodic Review of China’s human rights record by the United Nations Human Rights Council, aided and abetted by the representatives of numerous governments around the world, his regime took advantage of procedural and institutional weaknesses to whitewash his record of mistreatment towards almost every minority that could possibly be abused or discriminated against and anybody who might be willing to serve as witness to the crimes.
To begin, even though China is operating a colonial empire that incorporates both the least free country on Earth as currently measured by Freedom House and the location where perhaps the largest detention of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust has been occurring, only three and a half hours were allotted to hear the review of its human rights situation, the same as will be apportioned to all other states, including those that are not suspected by the U.N. itself of crimes against humanity.
Predictably, there was no space in the paltry format for non-government or non-establishment minority voices to speak, despite them being the primary victims of Beijing’s behavior, and attempts were allegedly made on China’s behalf to photograph individuals and block them out of even audience seats. Then, the Chinese government was able to further squeeze the opportunity for its rights record to be scrutinized by rallying the representatives of friendly states to all apply to make a speech, meaning that, amid the sheer volume of statement-makers, the time for each individual had to be reduced to 45 seconds.
That left a farcical situation in which countries like Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Montenegro, Norway, Switzerland, the U.K., the U.S. and several others attempted to condense recommendations on every aspect of China’s human rights violations towards 1.4 billion people into three quarters of a minute, inevitably sacrificing some nuance and precision along the way. In the background, to the deliberate obliviousness of many delegations, reports continued to emerge on matters like the suspicious death of a young Tibetan woman who was never seen alive again after her arrest by Chinese police in December and Christians being dragged into detention from prayer groups.
Although it had been clearly explained to all states participating in the review that, for their opinions to have hope of becoming actionable, they would have to be prefaced by the words “recommendation” or “recommend,” some, like Bulgaria and Slovenia, omitted these terms from their most biting criticisms, rendering them less powerful. Others like Georgia, Jamaica, North Korea, the Solomon Islands, Surinam and Uzbekistan made no recommendations whatsoever, reserving their full 45 seconds for platitudes and blanking out space for more substantial contributions that otherwise could have been made.
The remainder of countries, many of whom are part of the Belt and Road Initiative, tended to waste half of their time uncritically commending Beijing on its favored talking points like poverty alleviation, while pitching for bilateral trade deals or offering recommendations that avoided the core elements of China’s human rights abuses. Sometimes, the phrasing of such advice was so vague or poorly chosen that it risked actively feeding into the mistreatment of entire peoples.
For example, as Anti-Slavery International, Sheffield Hallam University and the Investor Alliance for Human Rights released yet another document that highlights the need to shift solar supply chains away from Beijing-controlled Uyghur regions in order to reduce exposure to forced labor, countries like Barbados encouraged “increased efforts by China on the transformation to green industries and continued development of a clean energy system,” and those like Bahrain paid insufficient attention to evidence of coercive labor transfers in recommending China to “continue its efforts to provide stable employment for the poor population.”
In places, genuine issues like women’s rights seemed to be touched upon, but were subtly neutered. The topic was often approached generally, allowing Beijing to interpret it in its own way, a worry given the authoritarianism of its leader. For every representative like that of Mexico or Uganda who did mention the specific need for political rights for women, another from a country such as Mauritania focused solely on their educational and economic empowerment or pushed for improved natal and maternal outcomes, thereby conforming with China’s well-known demographic self-interest.
However, the most irresponsible and dangerous statements came from states such as India, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan and Venezuela. These by turns endorsed or encouraged the continuation of cultural elimination and assimilation in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) under the guise of education, stability or economic improvement or, worryingly, fortified China’s ambitions to remodel the concept of human rights on the international stage.
For instance, in calling upon Beijing to “promote the revitalization of higher education in central and western regions,” Kazakhstan could well be offering a carte blanche for the Communist Party to run more of the violent indoctrination programs by which it has previously arbitrarily detained ethnic Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples under its rule. Belarus, meanwhile, is intentionally opening the door to a system that prioritizes dictator-defined development over rights like freedom of expression by inviting China to “foster a fairer and more inclusive global governance of human rights through the concept of building a human community with a shared future.” Without irony, Benin, the Solomon Islands and Zambia felt the moment was right to declare their adherence to “non-interference” and the “one-China principle,” thereby paving the way for the People’s Liberation Army to invade Taiwan.
Thankfully, not all of the periodic review was a fix, and, alongside many strong statements in relation to ethnic minorities, religious believers, freedom of expression, the death penalty and activist protection, Cameroon, Ecuador, the Marshall Islands and Peru, among others, drew attention to the discomforting nexus of rights, business and development, a topic that spans several aspects from environmental destruction to unacceptable working conditions all around the world. Costa Rica brought up threats from facial recognition technology and cyber-policing, while several states, including the Ivory Coast, made explicit recommendations on the key subject of enforced disappearances.
Nonetheless, of all nations, China itself was allowed to dominate, consuming over an hour of the inadequate proceedings with speeches from various members of its large delegation. In response to pre-submitted questions from other countries, many of which were clearly formulated to enable it spout propaganda, it therefore presented itself as a peaceful liberator of Tibetan serfs, a harmonious restorer of rights for Hong Kongers, an innovative educator for impoverished Uyghurs, an enlightened defender of minority cultures and an upholder of the rule of law for one and all.
What is more, because the United Nations is totally defanged, Beijing will be able to pick and choose the recommendations it accepts from its peers. In this way, despite the subjugation of hundreds of millions of people proceeding under its rule, the entire U.N. exercise is set up for the world to proclaim China’s astounding human rights progress in five years’ time when the next review occurs.
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