BOOK REVIEWS

Hatla Thelle (ed.): Political Development and Human Rights in China — Report from Five Seminars at the Danish Centre for Human Rights, and Anders Mellbourn and Marina Svensson: Swedish Human Rights Training in China – An Assessment

At a time when China is again beset by the rise of social movements, be they wildcat or organised—millenarian, obscurantist (Fa lungong) and xenophobic (anti-American demonstrations), these two short studies offer the reader a wealth of analyses and information which are refreshing to say the least. They help put into perspective these various and contradictory ideologies (although this is probably too weighty a term to characterise the jumble of opinions which have come out of Peking in recent months), investing contemporary Chinese society.

To begin with, it should be pointed out that these two works provide hardly any new material about Western and in particular Scandinavian policy with regard to the question of human rights in China. Nor do they aim to give a run-down on the actual human rights’ situation in that country. It is true that there are elements in these studies signalling a new approach to the issue. Indeed, in 1998 Denmark and the Netherlands were finally won over to the politics of “dialogue” adopted the previous year by a majority of countries in the European Union. Since then, only the United States has been continuing to put a resolution condemning China before the UN Human Rights Commission. It is also true that these studies do not deny that the overall record of the authorities in Peking in this area remains a negative one and has even tended to get worse since the repression of the leading Chinese political dissidents begun at the end of 1998—something borne out by the recent reports of the main NGOs (Amnesty International) and the American State Department (1).

But these publications highlight a certain number of developments that it would be wrong to pass over, and which provides good food for thought about the way in which we can work towards improving the human rights situation in China. First of all, the Danish study reminds us (pp. 40-41)—giving, let us hope so, and with good cause, some feeling of guilt to our leaders of yesteryear—that the West “discovered” human rights abuses in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Before 1989, only a few “human rights advocates”, mostly linked to dissidents, tried in vain to draw the attention of Western public opinion to an utterly deplorable situation. Needless to say, at the time of Mao, while human rights violations were reaching rarely surpassed heights, even fewer were those prophets who, such as Simon Leys, were crying out in a desert of disbelief or indifference which our strategic confrontation with the Soviet Union did not fully explain—and in no way justified.

The second merit of these studies is to have shown the importance assumed by the debate on human rights in China over the past few years. In fact, as the Danish study reminds us, there has been a remarkable and often underestimated turnaround in Peking’s approach to this issue in the last 20 years. From giving a radical critique of a concept that, prior to 1979, they considered to be “bourgeois”, officials in the Chinese Communist Party have come not only to adopt this notion but also to accept that it be debated in international fora. In order to disarm foreign, and especially Western, criticism, it was paradoxically following Tiananmen Square that China embarked on a “vigorous human rights diplomacy” (p. 62). Today, the country is engaged in an all-out dialogue on this issue. And such new-found discourse on human rights, as shown by the frank and forthright contribution of Ms Wu Qing (pp. 20-31), an independent feminist (ie. non communist) parliamentarian in the Haidian (Peking) district Assembly, cannot but have an influence on Chinese society.

It is clear that, as shown by Ann Kent and Marina Svensson, the conversion of the People’s Republic to human rights is quite relative. Its approach today is both culturalist (Asian values) and developmentalist or gradualist (rice before democracy); and the (provisional) softening of its line in this respect is still often dependent on international objectives (2000 Olympic Games, Clinton’s visit to China) which are fiercely fought for at the negotiation table. The dialogue proposed by China has above all the goal of defusing any confrontation with Western governments while at the same time giving the latter the means of self-justification at home at little cost (2). For a long time its attitude with respect to international instruments was mistrustful before becoming selective. For example, the implementation of the Convention against Torture that Peking signed back in 1986 cannot be independently verified in China; China’s signing of the Economic and Social Rights Covenant (in 1997) and even more its signing of the Civil and Political Rights Covenant (in 1998) are marred by reservations (notably on the right of association) that are full of weighty consequences. Moreover, for the time being, neither covenant has been ratified by the Chinese Parliament.

But, unlike the Soviet Union of old (which, we should not forget, was one of the first states to adhere to these two covenants…), China has not only instituted an increasingly “sophisticated” (p. 50) human rights discourse since the early 1980s, but has also promoted significant research on the subject. Moreover, its attitude has sometimes evolved in the right direction, at any rate externally. Thus, it now holds that the international community may act against human rights violations in a given country—that is infringe what to it are the sacrosanct principles of sovereignty and non interference in internal affairs—in extreme cases (apartheid, genocide) (p. 50). A position that one would have wished it to adopt at the time of the Khmers rouges and which does not yet seem to have affected its present support for Milosevic…

China today intends to establish a “socialist state ruled by law”. To this end, it knows that it has a lot to learn from the West, where virtually all of its jurists who have today gone abroad to complete their education are being trained. Whilst most of them are in universities, other, more politically engaged institutions have also been able to start making a contribution to this effort in recent years. Thus, beginning in 1996, the Peking authorities accepted the idea of sending around thirty upper echelon police and justice bureaucrats (judges, public prosecutors, prison authorities) each year to attend fortnight-long workshops at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. Established in 1984 in memory of the Swedish diplomat who saved countless Hungarian Jews during the Second World War (before vanishing in Stalin’s jails) and attached to the University of Lund in Sweden, the charter of this Institute is to promote research and training in such branches of the law.

Obviously, such an initiative brings with it many problems and gives rise to a range of criticisms of which the Swedish organisers are only too well aware. In fact, the government in Stockholm which supports this project considers human rights and democracy to be intimately connected, whereas the Peking government may be suspected of wishing, thanks to such training courses, to “modernise”, via some legal artifice, the Communist Party’s dictatorship over society and to improve the effectiveness of its responses to Western denunciations. It goes without saying that the authors of this report do not share such a view, and we would be tempted to follow them in this, subject however to some reservations.

First of all, merely deploring and condemning human rights violations in China is no longer credible today, so clear is it that, as in any other country, the multiplying of links between Chinese and foreign legal practitioners and experts represents a slow but sure factor of judicial and political change. Next, the idea of training the trainers (p. 15), in spite of its elitist character, is totally justified in view of the weakness of judicial culture in Communist China and of the present “top down” reform process. Moreover, to the surprise of the report writers, the Chinese trainees have on the whole accepted the content of the training very well, being especially pleased to learn that “the concept of human rights is not a specific Western weapon used against China but a universal concept” (p. 3). Only discussion on the death penalty—an issue too often tackled by Westerners from a moral more than a legal and social perspective—and torture have given rise to lively controversies, in particular with the representatives of State Security. On the other hand, the public prosecutors have shown themselves to be especially interested in the application of international norms in the area of penal procedures and attracted to the Swedish export product that the Institution of the Ombudsman has been for quite some time (p. 4).

Nonetheless, the real question is the impact that this kind of training will have. No-one today can assess its short to medium-term influence. The report writers, who do not deny this, state:

“Many of the participants [in these training courses] have been promoted... and could perhaps be agents of change in the future. But it is not realistic to put too much hope on a few isolated individuals in a huge country such as China. It is also dangerous to vest too much hope on enlightened higher officials, since human rights protection is much more a bottom-up process than top-down process.” (p. 31)

This last remark calls for two reservations which will serve as a conclusion. On the one hand, as in the evolution of most politico-juridical systems observed (cf. Taiwan), reforms decided upon by a government are shored up—or sunk—by the pressures of society. China is no exception, with its lot of claimants and plaintiffs of all kinds coming before public administrations and the courts. The setting up of laws and judicial institutions closer to ones we know in the West—and leaving it up to China, without futile rows or anti-Americanisms, to make its own choice between the various existing systems (Roman-Germanic law, common law)—is likely to gradually instil into a growing number of Chinese a certain legal spirit, that is a civilised way of settling conflicts among others (cf. mediation). But on the other hand, this necessary co-operation should not conceal the fundamental political conflict which sets us in opposition to the rulers in Peking. Condemning the Chinese government’s human rights violations and making overtures to this government aimed at relaxing its repression of political opponents must be pursued, whatever form such overtures may take in the future, preferably in a multilateral frame. As both these studies show, keeping up this type of action does not have the goal of giving oneself a clear conscience or appealing to certain sections of public opinion. Rather, it contributes to forcing the Chinese government to assume its responsibilities at a time when it sees itself as playing an increasing role in the international community.

Translated from French original by Peter Brown