We need to talk about China

The View

During the last four months the world as we knew it has stopped. Gone are many of the things we all took for granted. We know now that it will take years for our world to recover from the economic and social deprivation which have been the result of these months. Can you imagine what it must have been like as the world went to war in 1939, and how it must have been when peace was declared in 1945?

Outrage at the crimes of World War II: genocide, carnage, destruction, devastation brought most of the nations of the world together to make a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It stated: “The inherent dignity and…the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

It proclaimed the right to life, the right not to be be held in slavery or servitude; not to be subjected to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

It stated that the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State; that there is a right to believe, not to believe or to change belief; that there are employment rights, including the right to just and favourable conditions at work.

Evidence

In China today, despite the best efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, evidence of the most severe clampdown on human rights since the Cultural Revolution is emerging. There has been no effective response from the west.

Christians have been suffering for decades and more recently have seen an active campaign to remove all evidence and practice of religion from China.

At least one million, possibly up to three million, Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic groups have been forced into political re-education camps, which can be seen in satellite images, particularly in Xinjiang.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has described Xinjiang as “a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights’ zone, while members of the Xinjiang Uighur minority, along with others who were identified as Muslim, were being treated as enemies of the State based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity”.

People have been arrested and sent to the camps for simply having WhatsApp on their mobile phones, for having relatives living abroad, for accessing religious materials online, for visiting particular countries, and for engaging in religious activities. Often no reason is given at all.

They have no access to the law, no mechanism for appeal, and often families are not told where detainees are held.

People do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead.

No 
windows

Mihrigul Tursun, a Uighur who managed to escape from one of these camps, testified at the US Congress, saying: “I was taken to a cell, which was built underground with no windows…there were around 60 people kept in a 430 square feet cell…we had seven days to memorise the rules of the concentration camp and 14 days to memorise all the lines in a book that hails the Communist ideology…

“They forced us to take some unknown pills and drink some kind of white liquid. The pill caused us to lose consciousness…I clearly remember the torture…I was taken to a special room with an electrical chair…there were belts and whips hanging on the wall. I was placed in a high chair that clicked to lock my arms and legs in place and tightened when they press a button. My head was shaved…the authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head.

“Each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I could feel the pain in my veins. I thought I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me.”

Commentators are now saying that China is engaged in genocide”

Evidence is emerging that the Uighurs and others have been subjected to DNA tests, and have been used for forced organ donation.

China has a very extensive programme of organ transplants. It is reported that prisoners are routinely used to supply organs. Although the Chinese one child policy has been relaxed in some circumstances, members of these minority communities are being subjected to forced abortion and sterilisation.

The China Tribunal provided shocking new evidence in March this year of the continuing state-run programme of forced organ harvesting in China. The inquiry says that the organised butchery of living people to sell body parts could be compared to the “worst atrocities committed in conflicts of the 20th Century such as the Nazi gassing of the Jews and the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia.

The People’s Republic of China shows no sign of moderating its abuses and the Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang suffer gross abuses of their human rights. They are vulnerable to the destruction of their identity by enforced birth control and are at risk of becoming human organ banks.”

Commentators are now saying that China is engaged in genocide.

In addition to this, people in the camps are used as slave labour for parts of Chinese industry, forced to work in appalling circumstances enabling the production of cheap goods for sale across the world.

We have significant economic problems in Ireland and in the UK. We know now that so much of what we buy comes from countries far away, shipped across the world at huge environmental cost, leaving us very vulnerable to exploitation as we saw, for example, with some of the million of euros worth of PPE which was bought from China over the past months for hospitals and care homes, and which proved to be unusable.

Perception

Governments trading with China have not effectively challenged the human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party. The perception seems to be that our trade and economic interests are more important than the protection of minorities at the mercy of the Chinese Government. Most recently China has moved to extinguish democracy in Hong Kong.

We need to demonstrate that our short-term economic interests do not outweigh human rights abuses”

It is time for governments to change their China policies and to respond to the proven findings about gross human rights abuses, false arrest and imprisonment, torture, the murder of citizen detainees for forced organ harvesting, forced sterilisation and abortion, slavery and forced labour.

We need to demonstrate that our short-term economic interests do not outweigh human rights abuses and that violations of human rights, such as those routinely engaged in by the Chinese Communist Party will be rejected.

Simultaneously we could move to encourage industry in these islands, so that we become more self-sufficient, providing employment for more of our people, showing that human rights and economic stability are not mutually exclusive; indeed they are each necessary in a functioning democratic society.