Introduction
Good evening. It is a great honor to have been selected to give the 2008 Shirley and Leonard Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights. The efforts by Shirley Goldstein and others to support persecuted Jews and other citizens of the Soviet Union ultimately helped create the momentum that not only contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also helped point the way for the modern human rights movement.
As the media director at Human Rights Watch, I suppose you could say I am a representative of that relatively new movement. Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years ago as Helsinki Watch, to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the Helsinki Accords. Like Shirley and Leonard Goldstein, Helsinki Watch worked to bolster brave citizens across the Eastern bloc who were trying to hold their governments to basic human rights standards.
Today, Human Rights Watch-which began as that once-small movement led by courageous writers, lawyers and advocates -is a truly global organization of 280 professionals, investigating and exposing abuses in more than 80 countries around the world. From Burma to Turkmenistan, from North Korea to Zimbabwe, we work with domestic human rights advocates to raise the cost of abuse, so that governments and others think twice before violating the rights of their people.
Human Rights Watch fought for the release of imprisoned Soviet refusniks and dissidents, including Natan Sharansky who was finally freed in 1986. It is a pleasure to stand at this podium one year after Mr. Sharansky delivered the 2007 Goldstein Lecture, and nine years after my friend the Chinese human rights leader Xiao Qiang delivered the inaugural Goldstein Lecture.
Echoing the work of Shirley Goldstein, one key theme of my talk tonight will be the work of courageous human rights defenders and journalists inside China, who clearly took their own government at its word that the Olympics would lead to expanded freedoms. That so many of them ended up in prison or under house arrest speaks volumes about the repressive environment in China today.
The Eyes of the World
It is fitting that for this year's Goldstein lecture we return to the question of the future of China and its 1.3 billion people. When U.S. President George W. Bush announced in the fall of 2007 that he had accepted an invitation by Chinese President Hu Jintao to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, he said, "The eyes of the entire world will fall on Beijing."
That has certainly been the case. Many consider 2008 to be the "year of China." From the Tibet crackdown in March to the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May to the Olympics in August, China has dominated the world's headlines.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were always going to attract massive international media attention. But the challenge for governments, journalists, and the human rights community has been how to address China's major human rights problems in the context of the Olympic Games (which are, at least in principle, about sport). And, ideally, how to use the spotlight of the Olympics to push forward a reform agenda in China.
One major reason for hope that rights reform was an achievable goal was that in order to win the right to host the Olympics, the Chinese government had made specific human rights and media freedom commitments to the International Olympic Committee and also to the world community.
From Mao to Now: Great Leaps backward
To evaluate the human rights legacy of the Games in China, it is important to understand the historical context, what Beijing promised to get the Games, and why.
The title of this talk, China's Great Leap, refers to one of the darkest periods in China's long history. A campaign launched by Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1958, the Great Leap Forward sought to rapidly industrialize China by collectivizing farms and attempting to turn villages and peasant households into centers of steel production.
One of the world's worst famines followed, with deaths throughout China estimated to be 20 million or more. When Deng Xiaoping and other party leaders managed to take control and reverse the Great Leap Forward's catastrophic course, Chairman Mao responded by launching the Cultural Revolution.
During the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to his death in 1976, Mao unleashed a decade of political, social and economic chaos. Intellectuals, artists, writers and those simply with contacts with the outside world were denounced and sent to the countryside to perform manual labor and "learn from the peasants"-or worse.
Millions died, were jailed or "purged" as Mao's power struggle took over the country. Today, many Chinese families still carry with them shocking stories of disrupted education, unhinged careers and shattered lives. Two years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, who had been put under house arrest by Mao in his last days, became the country's new "paramount leader". He managed to correct some of Mao's worst excesses through economic opening and other reforms.
For Chinese people, 2008 is not just an Olympics year. At the end of this month, the country will mark the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening" policy. Over the last three decades, China has changed profoundly, with hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people able to lift themselves from poverty and regain some control over their lives.
But increasing economic and personal opportunity has not always compensated for the lack of basic civil liberties and human rights in China. Flashpoints include the violently suppressed protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in Tibet earlier this year.
From Tiananmen to the Bird's Nest
In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Chinese government needed to find a way to reengage with the world community, sweep away the televised images of tanks in Tiananmen Square and boost domestic credibility.
In 1990, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping came up with a plan: he announced that "China will apply to host the Olympics."
However, when China initially bid for the 2000 Games in 1993, the images of tanks in Beijing were still relatively fresh. That first Olympic bid failed- largely due to human rights concerns.
So, to secure the 2008 Summer Games, the Chinese government came back to the Olympic bidding table better prepared. Beijing committed to major reforms, such as allowing international reporters unfettered access across the country. Top officials made human rights improvements a cornerstone of their case to be an Olympic host.
In July 2001, in his final presentation to win the Games at the Moscow vote, Beijing Mayor and Bidding Committee president Liu Qi proclaimed, "I want to say that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will have the following special features: They will help promote our economic and social progress and will also benefit the further development of our human rights cause."
In official bid documents, speeches and interviews at the time, the promises were:
- general human rights improvements;
- "complete press freedom" for foreign journalists. Press freedom guarantees are enshrined in the Olympic Charter, so without this promise, Beijing would not have been awarded the Games at all.
- no internet censorship; and
- to allow peaceful demonstrations during the Games in designated protest zones;
Empty Olympic Promises
By the Chinese government's own self-set yardstick, how were these human rights pledges fulfilled before and during the Olympics?
In short, it was a major missed opportunity.
Instead of the promised general human rights improvements, Human Rights Watch documented a serious deterioration in human rights over the past year.
Human Rights Watch made a decision to focus on rights abuses that were specifically linked to the Games. We wrote reports on forced evictions, migrant labor abuses, and the government's brutal crackdown on peaceful dissent. We also sought to put a face on human rights abuses in China, both by asking Chinese writers to contribute to China's Great Leap, and by commissioning photographs of China in transition that also illuminate major human rights concerns across the country today.
Olympian Human Rights Abuses
Among the Olympics-related abuses documented by Human Rights Watch are:
- The forced evictions of thousands of Beijing residents to make way for Olympic venues and infrastructure, often without consultation or compensation.
- The "sweeps" of undesirables such as rural petitioners, whose settlement in Beijing’s Fengtai District once housed 10,000 prior to its demolition in the fall of 2007.
- The exploitation of many of the four million migrant workers who literally built the new Beijing, working in hazardous conditions for paltry wages which in some cases remain unpaid. The Chinese government admitted that six workers died working on the National Stadium (Bird's Nest) alone.
- The stifling of journalists, in violation of Beijing’s own pledges on reporting freedom for the 25,000 foreign journalists who travelled to China to cover the Games. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China reported 30 incidents of violence and detentions against foreign reporters in the Olympic period alone. Death threats to a dozen foreign reporters remain uninvestigated. Tibet was closed to reporters and locked down. Many Internet sites were censored. Meanwhile, China remains the world's top jailer of journalists, with nearly 30 writers in prison.
- The jailing of human rights activists including Hu Jia, who had criticized the Chinese government for seeking to burnish its image by hosting the Olympics while failing to address rights abuses. Hu was found guilty of “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge often leveled at critics of the government.
- The failure to accept any of the 77 applications for official protests during the Olympics, despite the establishment of three protest zones for precisely this purpose. In an Orwellian twist, several of the applicants ended up in jail for their efforts. The Chinese government imposed reform-through-labor sentences on two women in their 70s who had sought to exercise their right to protest, though these sentences were suspended in the wake of the ensuing international media storm.
The Human Cost of China's Olympic Success
We knew that the Chinese government would invest huge resources in ensuring that the Games were technically perfect: massive new sports venues, spectacular ceremonies, cleaner Beijing air. But we also knew that China would make every effort to produce a positive image of the country for the outside world's consumption. The Chinese government largely succeeded in this effort, but at what cost?
As the world watched the fireworks of the Beijing Games' opening ceremony, the seeds of China's latest deadly public health disaster were being sown. When stories first surfaced of baby formula that was poisoning children, the news of the deadly milk was censored by the Chinese government. By the time the Olympics were over, at least four children were dead from melamine poisoning and more than 50,000 were sick.
In both the HIV/AIDS and SARS health crises, the Chinese government's reflex was to stifle news coverage rather than to assist the victims-allowing the epidemics to expand. The SARS epidemic ultimately spread to 23 countries and killed 774 of the more than 8,000 people it infected.
This latest chapter in the toxic product scandals is a sobering reminder of the ongoing public-health threat posed by Beijing's media censorship.
China's Challenges
Despite China's official assurances that hosting the 2008 Olympic Games would help to strengthen the development of human rights in the country, the Chinese government continues to deny or restrict its citizens' fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. And tonight I have painted a fairly grim picture of the range of human rights and other challenges inside China.
But there is also one great source of hope for a freer China: the development over the last decade of a true domestic civil society-lawyers, activists and citizens who look at their own constitution and demand their rights, in court, in the media and sometimes on the streets. These courageous human rights defenders risk harassment, unlawful detention, forced disappearances, and long prison sentences, often on trumped-up charges.
They work on issues such as housing rights, land seizures, workers' rights, HIV/AIDS and police abuse. Yang Chunlin, a land rights activist, was found guilty in February 2008 of "inciting subversion" for his role in organizing a petition titled "We want human rights, not the Olympics."
Lu Gengsong, a former lecturer turned activist who documented illegal eviction cases and official collusion, was arrested in August on suspicion of subverting state power-a charge often used to silence government critics.
Leading human rights advocate Hu Jia, who had used the Internet to inform the outside world about HIV/AIDS, peasant protests and legal cases, became a human rights case himself when he was hauled away from his wife and baby daughter in December 2007. He was sentenced in April to three and a half years in prison.
One month before his arrest, Hu had deplored the "human rights disaster" in China while testifying via webphone at a hearing of the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights. He had also signed an open letter with the human rights lawyer Teng Biao affirming their "belief that there can be no true Olympic Games without human rights and dignity."
To bring this talk tonight full circle, Hu Jia and his brave compatriots remind me of the refusniks and dissidents inside the Soviet Union whom Shirley Goldstein worked so hard to help. There was a time when trying to help those inside the Soviet Union seemed a futile effort at best. Yet by persevering, Shirley Goldstein saw many of the individuals and families she defended gain liberty and live out their lives in freedom.
Those who wish to see China progress should remember that there are similarly courageous people inside China who are even now willing to stand up for human rights, to fight for what they believe in.
Equally important is to remember that the Chinese government is not monolithic. External pressures to reform can only help domestic reformers who are striving daily and at considerable risk towards a goal that could literally change the world: a China that is rights-respecting at home and abroad.
Thank you for your time and interest. I will happily take questions.
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Website of the Goldstein Lecture: http://www.unomaha.edu/religion/goldstein.home.htm
Web page, China's Great Leap: http://china.hrw.org/chinas_great_leap
