« Previous | Main | Next »

The Battle for China's Human Rights

December 10, 2008 11:02 AM

By STEPHANIE SY, Correspondent, ABC News Beijing

Chinese citizens and journalists took bold new steps this week to assert their right to free press, assembly and expression.  Today, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, two dozen people protested in front of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. Most of them were petitioners, people who come to Beijing to plead redress for grievances they have against local officials. A few of them held up banners, one of them in English, reading, “Safeguard Human Rights.”

One protester named Zhang Zhenxin told The Associated Press Television, “Beijing's petitioners are planning to submit to the Chinese government an agreement on protecting human rights."

It isn’t clear how these protesters were organized, but a few days before, Chinese authorities reportedly arrested a well-known Tiananmen-era dissident named Liu Xiaobo, presumably because they thought he might do something to mark the anniversary of the UDHR. He and more than 300 other scholars, journalists and activists had recently signed a petition called Charter 08, calling for constitutional reform and more democracy. While Liu’s arbitrary detention under the dubious charge of “inciting state subversion” may show how far the Chinese government has to go to tolerating political dissent, another incident this week illustrates how more Chinese are holding local government accountable.

Earlier this week, the Beijing News published a hard-hitting investigative report that revealed petitioners in a Chinese province had been forced into mental institutions by local authorities and told they would not be released until they signed pledges to drop their grievances. The ill treatment of people who dare to challenge local governments and property developers is no secret, but the aggressive reportage of a state-owned newspaper on such a controversial issue may herald fresh courage among Chinese journalists. Even more telling is that the story was picked up by China’s other major state newspapers, including the Web page of the People’s Daily, the traditional Communist Party mouthpiece, and the state news agency Xinhua, which followed up on the original story and reported that an investigation had been launched. The English-language China Daily even published an editorial in light of the report, saying the actions of the town government were “barbaric,” “unlawful,” and “inhuman.”

Reports on government and corporate corruption, product quality and such formerly taboo subjects as the AIDS epidemic have seemed to increase in recent years. But rarely do papers cover the plight of petitioners, whom you often find standing in front of government complaint offices, documents in hand, and ready to plead to anyone who will listen to their problems. Often, the petitioners are seeking compensation for unlawful deaths, forced evictions or land seizures. Some of them may indeed be mentally ill.

Wu Yuzhu, the director of the Xintai Psychiatric Center, which was implicated in the report for admitting patients and forcing them to take drugs, said all the patients were accompanied by relatives and local officials with documents verifying their mental illness. Wu also told ABC News he was not aware that any of the patients named in the article were petitioners until after he read the Beijing News.

But the story has spread rapidly in China’s increasingly active online community and drawn fire from citizens, perhaps used to being shielded from such news. One post reads, “The story made me shiver. How hideous. Where is the justice?” Another reads, “It’s the same everywhere across the nation…the local governments don’t govern for the people. They don’t solve the people’s problems…”

The anonymity of online forums allows Chinese to vent opinions and feelings they’d be unlikely to feel comfortable expressing to, say, a foreign news organization. But slowly, critical voices are moving into the mainstream media, too. Journalists are taking risks, and some have paid for it. Jiang Yiping, a veteran newspaper editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily, was recently demoted after several controversial articles were criticized by the provincial propaganda department. It is unclear if the writer of the Beijing News investigation will also be part of a “personnel reshuffle” or if China is ready to allow its journalists the freedom to do their job.

Read more blogs by Stephanie Sy

Read more blogs from the ABC News Staff

December 10, 2008 in Stephanie Sy | Permalink | User Comments (1)

User Comments

Posted by: Betty | Dec 15, 2008 2:57:44 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: