There is less and less room to criticize the government, follow a religion or receive justice in a court of law.
Chinese rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong appears in People's Court, August 22, 2017, in Changsha, China.
Chinese rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong appears in People's Court, August 22, 2017, in Changsha, China.
The right to criticize the government, follow a religion and to get a meaningful defense in court are all deteriorating in China, activists told Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, Human Rights Day.
Over the past year in China, 45 pro-democracy activists and former lawmakers in Hong Kong were jailed for “subversion” after organizing a democratic primary, prominent dissident Xu Zhiyong held a hunger strike to protest his treatment in prison and a journalist was jailed for having lunch with a Japanese diplomat.
The ruling Communist Party has stepped up its suppression of public speech, organized religion and personal freedoms, while continuing to persecute anyone agitating for change, rights activists told RFA Mandarin in recent interviews.
On this day in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed the inherent, inalienable rights of every person “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Some of that language is echoed in China’s Constitution.
Article 34 guarantees citizens “the right to vote and stand for election,” while Article 35 guarantees “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.”
Article 36 promises them freedom of religious belief.
But activists say there is less and less protection for anything resembling those rights in China today.
“Right now, we don’t feel that human rights have improved,” Shandong-based rights activist Lu Xiumei told RFA Mandarin. “Controls have become more severe, and there are more rules and regulations.”
1,700 prisoners of conscience
According to the China Political Prisoner Concern Database, there are more than 1,700 known prisoners of conscience behind bars.
While many once believed that the internet would be impossible for the authorities to control, eventually leading to greater freedom of speech in China, the government has spent the last 30 years perfecting its control of online spaces.
The WeChat logo is displayed on a mobile phone, July 21, 2016.
The WeChat logo is displayed on a mobile phone, July 21, 2016.
“On social media platforms like WeChat and TikTok, it is almost impossible to post comments that have a negative impact on the government,” Jiangsu-based rights activist Lu Jianrong told RFA Mandarin. “You can only praise the government.”
Police have targeted young people who dress up for Halloween, particularly if their costumes had a satirical twist, while online censors have been going after social media accounts that use “unauthorized” language, including puns and homophones, to get around censorship.
Meanwhile, life is getting harder for women and for the LGBTQ+ community.
The party is also cracking down on its own officials if they’re found in possession of banned books, and taking direct control over the running of the country’s universities.
And it’s training up the next generation of religious leaders under President Xi Jinping’s “sinicization” of religion policy, to ensure that they put loyalty to the government ahead of the requirements of their faith.
A Protestant pastor from the central province of Henan who gave only the surname Li for fear of reprisals told Radio Free Asia: “There is almost no religious freedom; they don’t want to give believers any room to breathe at all.”
“A lot of churches have been banned, and are still being banned,” he said.
No criticism allowed
Even pursuing complaints against the government using its own official channels can get a person in hot water.
“Take Xu Weibao for example, a petitioner from Taizhou,” Lu Jianrong said. “He has been persecuted to the point that he can no longer survive in his hometown, and has had to move somewhere else.”
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Many who complain about official wrongdoing are targeted for harassment, extrajudicial detention and even physical violence, or locked up in a psychiatric institution for “mental illness.”
“There’s another petitioner from Taixing who was held in a psychiatric hospital for three years,” Lu said. “He’s still under surveillance, and has no freedom at all.”
Chinese journalist Dong Yuyu is seen in this undated photo.
Chinese journalist Dong Yuyu is seen in this undated photo.
A human rights lawyer who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals said that prior to the 2015 crackdown on public interest law firms and rights lawyers, the profession wasn’t generally regarded as a threat to the ruling party.
Now, they’re seen as a natural enemy of the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
“Many have had their licenses revoked, and some have also been sent to prison,” he said.
Heavier sentences
Lawyer Li Fangping, who represented the jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti said rights protections are getting weaker across the board in China.
“There’s a serious regression,” Li said. “We are seeing cases getting much heavier sentences now, especially for people who try to speak out, which is getting harder and harder.”
He said there has been scant information about the status of Ilham Tohti in prison.
Ilham Tohti, a scholar from China's Turkic Uighur ethnic minority shows how the officers stopped him at the airport, during an interview at his home in Beijing Feb. 4, 2013.
Ilham Tohti, a scholar from China's Turkic Uighur ethnic minority shows how the officers stopped him at the airport, during an interview at his home in Beijing Feb. 4, 2013.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning hit out on Tuesday at criticisms of China’s human rights record, saying the government had massively advanced its citizens' social and economic rights.
“Some countries have used human rights as a weapon to serve their political agenda,” Mao told a regular news briefing in Beijing.
“We also hope that certain countries will discard megaphone diplomacy and stop interfering in other countries’ internal affairs under the pretext of so-called human rights issues,” she said.
Also in Beijing, independent journalist Gao Yu said local police had once more taken steps to stop her from speaking out on Dec. 10.
“The police came to my house on Human Rights Day,” Gao said in a post to her X account, adding that she had used the day to commemorate late Nobel peace laureate and dissident Liu Xiaobo, whose subversion trial was held on Dec. 10, 2009.
Liu, who co-authored the Charter 08 manifesto calling for sweeping political change, died of liver cancer in prison in 2017 despite multiple applications for medical parole.
“I climbed up a ladder and tied a yellow ribbon to the window railing in front of them,” Gao wrote, adding that the local state security police were once more keeping watch outside her apartment building in a vehicle now very familiar both to Gao and her neighbors.
“Today is the 74th Human Rights Day, and the seven-seater Buick is here again,” she wrote.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.