Fictionally the method by which people exercise power over the state, People’s Congresses are scheduled at the regional level in the latter half of January across China, a prelude to the national version that will be held in early March. Paradoxically, at this time, expressions of dissatisfaction are even more unwelcome to Chinese authorities than usual.
As a result, neighborhood committees, security guards and police have all been mobilized to obstruct people from formally reporting discontent at administrative centers, despite a legally guaranteed right to do so. According to Radio Free Asia, which cites contact with several sources on the ground, methods have included arrests, transport bans and the de facto confining of people to their localities. Due to China’s labyrinthine detention system, the arrests in particular place them at risk of being held incommunicado for weeks in conditions where mistreatment is common.
Strangling the peaceful communication of discord is the kind of abuse that will be analyzed by the United Nations Human Rights Office, which is preparing for the fourth cycle of its Universal Periodic Review of China on January 23, 2024. Organizations like Amnesty International, Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Human Rights Watch as well as representatives of specific minority and professional groups have already made submissions to the process that depict a depraved state where torture; violation of the right to a fair trial; punishments that exploit people’s pre-existing disabilities; denial of medical care; involuntary medical treatment; violation of reproductive rights; systematic forced labor; criminal persecution of activists; arrest and blacklisting of journalists; sexual violence in the context of arbitrary mass detentions; deliberate de facto orphaning of minority children from their parents; and discrimination based on ethnicity, physicality, gender, sexuality and urban/rural status are all rife.
As per the submissions, the range of victims takes in, but is not limited to, charities; children; Christians; the disabled; environmentalists; Falun Gong practitioners; feminists and #MeToo campaigners; Hong Kongers; the Hui and other Muslim-majority peoples; human rights defenders; labor groups and organizers; lawyers; media workers; migrant workers; people from sexual minorities; speakers of minority languages; professors and students; protesters; refugees; Tibetans; Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples; women who have been trafficked from neighboring countries, especially North Korea; and workers in Chinese companies overseas, particularly in the mining industry.
Accompanying non-government submissions to the review, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OUNHCHR) has produced a concurrent compilation of information that includes details such as concerns from independent human rights experts mandated under the special procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council that “detainees from ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities might be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations” which have reportedly resulted in them being “registered in a database of living organ sources that facilitated organ allocation.”
The office itself has concluded that “serious human rights violations had been committed in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region” that consist of “interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights, which were characterized by a discriminatory component.”
It has also summarized countless recommendations from oversight and other bodies under the United Nations umbrella that China should end practices like the “coerced residential (boarding) school system imposed on Tibetan children,” take prompt steps “to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,” officially recognize “all ethnic groups in its territory,” guarantee “the full independence and impartiality of the judiciary” and discontinue the arbitrary confiscation of passports from ethnic minority women.
As unrelated reports from Nikkei surfaced that the German Emissions Trading Authority is investigating the suspected fraudulent issuance of certification to prove carbon reductions at fossil fuel companies in China, climate profligacy was also highlighted by the OUNHCHR compilation, which referenced fears that Beijing is contributing to rising temperatures with international consequences due to its expanding portfolio of coal-fired power plants and the suspected insufficiency of its efforts to meet obligations under the Paris Agreement.
All in all, the scope and foundation of these allegations is breathtaking, yet rectification will only occur slowly — if at all — due to flaws in the Universal Periodic Review procedure. As pointed out by Renee Xia and William Nee of Chinese Human Rights Defenders in an article for The Diplomat last month, recommendations that emerge from the process often come from other states who abuse human and environmental rights and are therefore frequently worded to enable China to proceed with its present systematic norms.
This tactic may be precipitated by organizations that contribute to the review and appear to be from civil society but which actually operate under Beijing’s control, whose suggestions for human rights action can be taken up by China-friendly countries and proposed to the Chinese government as if they did not, in practice, originate with it. Beijing can then implement them, giving the appearance that the United Nations is being accommodated. In places, non-government submissions to the fourth cycle show possible signs of such an approach. Follow-up on the progress of more substantive recommendations is then undermined by the intimidation, imprisonment or disappearance of anybody who reports negatively on them.
Thus, people living under Chinese Communist Party rule are condemned to endure violent subjugation. Currently, reports are emerging of arrests among an estimated 10,000 citizens who took to the streets in late December to protest the official cause of death of a Henan schoolboy. The boy, whose body, according to his family, exhibited signs of bruising and torture, has been recorded by police as a suicide, but protesters have not been placated by the quality of evidence. As explained by Bitter Winter, a specialist media outlet that reports on religious persecution, the incident is not the first of its kind.
Meanwhile, people are being denied the material to understand their own recent history, too, as a newly released documentary on the 2020 Wuhan lockdown has predictably fallen victim to censors. The documentary compiles footage shot on location in the city as the Chinese Communist Party scrambled to contain the deadly outbreak of a new virus, COVID-19, after having initially denied its infectiousness. The topic’s sensitivity to authorities after four years and a partial revolution reminds that the full political consequences of the pandemic are yet to have played out. For their safety, several of those involved in the documentary’s production have already fled China.
True to form, Beijing is moving to limit the potential for similar materials to ever emerge with amendments to law that will tighten controls on how the media reports disasters and emergencies. Therefore, in the climate crisis era, during which China can be expected to protect its interests by diverting disasters toward those it deems of lesser importance, the fifth cycle of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review of the country, whenever that may be, will almost certainly contain evidence of yet more detained, disappeared and tortured journalists and members of the public who deliver narratives that depart from the government’s.
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