Social Science Research Council

WORDS OBSCURE ACTIONS: HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH IN CHINA
By Sophia Woodman

Over the last five years or so, expert seminars in which Chinese and Western academics are brought together to discuss pre-agreed topics have become a regular complement to bilateral political dialogues on human rights. These dialogues now constitute the main element of human rights policy towards China in the European Union and its member states, as well as in Canada and Australia.(1)

The seminars have covered a range of topics, including the death penalty, torture, the right to education and minority rights. Often the agenda is agreed at the last possible moment, so there is almost no time for preparation. Usually lasting two days, each "side" presents papers or makes presentations, there are some discussions, and joint statements are prepared that outline areas of agreement. On occasion, it has been impossible to reach sufficient agreement for a statement to be prepared. In any event, they are rarely made public. Likewise the papers: sometimes they have been published, but mostly they are not. Certainly no account of the nature of the discussions is made available through the mass media in China, and generally the reporting in the dialogue partner countries is just as minimal. (The seminars are usually closed to journalists.) Although representatives of human rights NGOs have occasionally participated in the European seminars (under the auspices of individual country dialogues or the EU dialogue), mostly the trend is now towards excluding them.

The papers presented by the Chinese participants-including both officials and academics-generally consist of an overview of Chinese law covering the issue in question and an assessment, usually positive, of the law's level of compliance with international human rights standards. Some academics venture mild criticism of Chinese legal standards, speaking of how they still need to be "perfected," but there is virtually no mention of the specifics of rights practices on the ground, let alone detailed analysis of the reasons for well-documented rights violations.

For example, in some such seminars on the death penalty, Chinese academics have criticized the number of offenses punishable by death under the current criminal law. But there is no criticism of the actual application of the death penalty, or any mention of the number of executions, which remains a closely-guarded state secret.(2) This is at a time when China may be executing 15,000 people per year-far above the total for the rest of the world combined.(3)

In terms of the relative position of human rights issues on the agenda of relations with China for the dialogue partners, the "frankness" of discussion at seminars on the death penalty or other rights issues and the willingness of Chinese government officials to listen to regular recitations of concern from diplomats-behind closed doors, well away from the spotlight of the international media-now appear to be more important than respect for rights on the ground.

In the last few years, leaders of the dialogue countries have been willing to express concern about human rights in China in only the most general of terms-refusing to call publicly for the release of individual political and religious prisoners, for example-and some have even been willing to twist domestic law to shield visiting Chinese leaders from human rights protesters.(4) Most notably, fearing repercussions on trade and investment opportunities, they refuse to countenance bringing any action in the United Nations to censure China or to insist that the government comply with its international obligations.

In the "dialogue" and "cooperation" that have become a substitute for real action to pressure China to improve rights, scholars play a major role. The seminars mentioned above are just the most politically-visible aspect of a broad range of exchanges that are being funded by the Western dialogue countries, with the aim of improving human rights in China.(5) Although some Western diplomats are willing to admit privately that the same things are being said repeatedly in the political dialogues over and over again with little visible result, they generally argue that it would be a mistake to move towards a more critical posture as China would be likely to cut off the "cooperation" programs associated with the dialogues.

Human rights research has been a key aspect of such internationally-funded cooperation projects. Over the last 12 years, academic research on this topic in China has grown from virtually zero to the point where human rights centers have now been set up at a number of universities and research institutions, including Beijing University, Fudan University, Hunan University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In the assessment of the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law on its work last year, "The political climate for human rights education and research has dramatically improved in China in the last two to three years."(6)

The origins of this growth in research on rights reflect the dual role most scholars in this field continue to play, whether they like it or not. Promoting scholarly study of human rights was among the first responses of the Chinese government to the unprecedented and unwelcome international attention to China's human rights practices after its bloody suppression of the popular demonstrations of 1989.(7) In November 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Propaganda Department's Theory Department called scholars to a meeting at which research on human rights was presented as an "urgent" task.(8)

In 1990 and 1991, various academic institutions convened conferences on human rights, which were certainly among the first such events since the founding of the PRC. The objective of these conferences and the research related to them was to explore arguments for a "Chinese" perspective on rights that would counter the critical views being expressed outside China, both by Chinese exiles and scholars, by governments, in the international academic community and in the United Nations and other fora.

In these early debates, some old-school Marxists continued to argue that human rights were a bourgeois invention that China, as a socialist state, should reject. Others asserted that the best position was for China to develop its "own" distinctive interpretations of human rights, which would challenge the supremacy of "Western" views. Interestingly, the proponents of this view focused on China's political and historical circumstances and on contrasting the relative weight it gave to the good of the "collective" with the "individualism" of the West.

Cultural arguments, which have so preoccupied scholars since the emergence of the debate over "Asian values" and human rights in the 1990s, were hardly in evidence, and have remained a very minor note in human rights studies in China. One of the reasons for this may be that challenging the compatibility of "Western" human rights ideas with Chinese culture raises the question of why Marxism, undoubtedly a Western theory, could be applicable to China when human rights is not.

With the November 1991 appearance of the Chinese government's White Paper, "Human Rights in China," it became clear that the proponents of engagement with the human rights regime-on China's terms-had won the ear of decision-makers. This seminal document proposed a new right that it asserted was the primary concern of all Chinese people, "the right to subsistence." This right bound up the independence of the Chinese nation from colonial domination and the right to development with the right of Chinese people to adequate food, clothing and shelter, essentially conflating the survival of the Chinese socialist state (and by extension the CCP itself) with the survival of the people.

Some of the scholars who went on to become luminaries in the new human rights research institutions were involved in the drafting of this White Paper, and certainly their arguments informed its contents and the direction and concerns of human rights research in the following years. Academics (and some officials) also began to go overseas to study human rights law and human rights institutions in the rich countries of the world. (By contrast, there has generally seemed to be little or no interest among most academics in this field in China in examining approaches and positions on human rights among other poorer countries, or promoting systematic exchanges on such topics with them, despite the fact that the Chinese government often seeks legitimacy for its human rights positions by claiming to speak for developing countries.)

So what have been the fruits of this unprecedented development of human rights scholarship? Initially they were almost entirely theoretical in nature, concentrating on differing interpretations of particular rights. Subsequently, some attention has been given to analyzing China's current legal framework for specific rights, but there has been very limited critique of laws that do not comply with rights standards. In contrast, legal scholars outside the small circle of "human rights experts" sometimes point out conflicts between Chinese and international law. Chinese language compilations of international human rights documents have been published, and works of scholarship on the subject translated into Chinese, with a particular emphasis on arguments questioning the universality of human rights. Recently, some scholars have begun to incorporate international human rights law into their teaching, and there are various projects underway to prepare Chinese-language teaching materials on this subject for law students.(9)

But almost all the published research work specifically on human rights studiously avoids any serious examination of rights in practice in China, whether in terms of the implementation of laws or of the situation on the ground. There is slightly more scope to discuss issues like discrimination against women or domestic violence, but none to mention such issues as political imprisonment, torture of Falungong adherents, suppression of cultural nationalists among the PRC's ethnic minorities, or continuing reports of the use of force in the implementation of the family planning policy.

Also, the discussion hardly moves outside the walls of the academy; there has not been a concomitant growth in mass media coverage of rights abuses identified as such, or debate over the nature and scope of rights applicable to China-although there is certainly more reporting on areas such as violations of labor law, domestic violence and occasionally some form of discrimination than in the past. And during the same period of the "dramatic" improvement in the climate for rights research, official attitudes towards independent human rights activism have remained unrelentingly hostile; there is still no possibility of establishing rights monitoring groups inside the country. Individuals outside academic institutions have continued to be arrested and sentenced to prison for seeking to expose rights abuses, help victims, or exercise their own rights to freedom of expression and association. Attempts to organize independent human rights groups have usually ended with activists being sent to prison. The Tiananmen Mothers, who are painstakingly documenting the deaths and injuries that occurred in the 1989 assault on Beijing, have been subject to harassment and intimidation, with officials calling some key figures in the campaign, "traitors."

Overall, the evidence does not point to much in the way of improvement in the government's respect for rights in practice during the period when human rights research has expanded. As Svensson puts it: "[A]cademic research motivated by mere strategic considerations in effect do[es] little to actually promote and protect human rights; it only reveals that the PRC has been quick to realize the need to engage in human rights research in order to refute foreign criticism."(10)

Of course one could argue that human rights research should not be expected to have immediate, tangible effects. There is some validity to this view. However, dialogue partners have claimed that more can be achieved on a practical level from this type of activity than from the "reintegrative shaming" that is the principal enforcement tool of the international human rights regime.(11)

Essentially, the focus on expert seminars and human rights research in the dialogues forces the Chinese scholars involved into performing a kind of political theater to provide cover for the fact that Western countries want to put business interests first, and do not want human rights to mess up their chances of getting the most out of perceived opportunities to make money in China. In fact, the spotlight on human rights scholars may mean that they are even more constrained in their work than they might otherwise be, given the government's sensitivity towards the topic and the origins of the trend towards increased scholarly attention to rights issues. This observation is supported by the fact that in recent years the work of some Chinese sociologists has arguably revealed much more about human rights conditions-without using this word-than the work of the human rights researchers.

Support for this type of political theater also allows those in the West who benefit from the status quo in China to believe that the reasons for repression are that "the Chinese" put human rights lower down on the level of priorities and have a different interpretation of what rights mean in any case. It obscures the fact that there is a wide diversity of opinions on rights in Chinese society, and renders those who consider rights to be an important measure of social progress and development invisible.(12)

In addition, it raises troubling questions about the role of certain Western scholars who appear to be participating in some of these exercises without even being aware of how they are being used by the governments who invite them. To my knowledge, there has been no debate whatsoever in the academy in Europe, Canada, or Australia about the engagement of individual scholars or academic institutions in dialogue-related seminars or in the cooperation programs associated with them, or even on what the objectives of such participation are or should be. A few scholars who have raised questions about the utility of this approach find themselves excluded from subsequent events. In some cases, the purported "neutrality" of the academy is being compromised out of sheer ignorance. (No doubt the lure of the grants available and the opportunities for travel to and research in China are also factors in the calculus.)

Pointing out the connections between human rights research, the defense of the Chinese state's actions and the efforts of some Western governments to minimize friction in their relations with the Chinese government by avoiding more rigorous responses to rights abuses in China is not an argument for closing off exchanges with China, or for stopping support to academic institutions studying human rights. Both activities certainly have value, despite the uses to which governments put them. But the role of such institutions in international diplomacy needs to be more widely recognized, and certainly a little more skepticism about the implications of human rights research and what can be achieved through supporting it under current political conditions in China is in order.

____________

NOTES:

1. References to various sources on the dialogues, including official statements and NGO critiques, are available at Chinese Human Rights Reader.

2. Amnesty International, the main organization monitoring the application of the death penalty in China, has to comb through local newspapers to compile its figures on the number of death sentences and executions. This is despite the fact that legally all death sentences must be approved by provincial higher people's courts or the Supreme People's Court, and thus figures are undoubtedly readily available. 3. This figure is given as the average for the years 1997 to 2001 in internal government documents cited by Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley in "China's New Rulers: What They Want," New York Review of Books, October 10, 2002, p. 29. This figure is substantially higher than was previously known, but confirms estimates of well-informed scholars of China's criminal justice system. By contrast, Amnesty was only able to document 2,500 executions in 2001, which represented 81 percent of the known total of judicial executions for the world.

4. Examples are Jiang Zemin's October 1999 visit to the UK and June 2002 visit to Iceland.

5. A fairly comprehensive list of internationally-funded projects under the title "Law and Rights Project Digest" is available in China Development Brief, Vol. IV, No. 3, Winter 2001/2. This also includes projects funded by private agencies such as the Ford Foundation.

6. RWI, Human Rights Capacity Building Program Annual Report 2001. RWI has been running various programs in China since the early 1990s, including human rights training programs for officials in government agencies, providing books on human rights for academic libraries and more recently is focusing on work with academic institutions to expand study and teaching of international human rights law.

7. In the 1980s the combination of China's geo-strategic bargain with the United States and Western assumptions that Beijing's commitment to "socialist legality" and moves towards the market were leading China ineluctably towards liberalism meant that China was allowed to become what Roberta Cohen memorably labeled the "human rights exception." Despite the efforts of Amnesty International, which released its first report on China in 1979, and reports of extensive use of coercion in the implementation of the "one child" policy, China's human rights practices hardly registered on the diplomatic radar screen.

8. Along with my own observations, this account relies greatly on Marina Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China-A Conceptual and Political History (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

9. The Nordic countries have been pioneers in supporting such efforts to facilitate the growth of education in international human rights law, and RWI is one of the institutions involved in this.

10. Svensson, op cit, p.302.

11. This term is used in Ann Kent, China, the United Nations, and Human Rights-The Limits of Compliance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), citing John Braithewaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

12. This diversity has been apparent in debates among Chinese over human rights for over 100 years. See Svensson, op cit, for an overview, and Stephen C. Angle and Marina Svensson, The Chinese Human Rights Reader: Documents and Commentary, 1900-2000 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), for a broad selection of translations of writings by Chinese people about human rights. Some of the materials from this book are available on-line at Chinese Human Rights Reader.


Sophia Woodman is a GSC professional fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her project is entitled "The Impact of The Lack of Systematic Human Rights Monitoring in China on Internationally Funded Legal Reform Programs." She is currently researching international assistance to legal reform in China as a strategy for improving human rights conditions. Prior to beginning her research project, for 10 years she worked at the NGO Human Rights in China as research director and editor of the journal China Rights Forum.