I’d like to canvass your views on whether we should Boycott Beijing. I discussed this with a couple of people at last night’s Shozna event and views were mixed. Some thought that it was inevitable that China would change as an economic super power and that younger, more affluent Chinese would want political change. I am not so sure.
Coverage of the Olympics has understandably focussed on Steven Spielberg’s decision to renounce his role in designing the ceremonies because of the Darfur genocide.
Of equal significance is the refusal by Ai Weiwei, the stadium’s designer, to participate because of the “disgusting” political conditions in his own country, or the widespread web-based “We want human rights, not the Olympics” campaign in China itself, participants in which are part of the current round-up of dissidents.
Friends of mine have been campaigning in private for their reformist friends in China and in public for a debate about a boycott because of internal human rights. Following a trip to China last year, the people my friends came into contact with – reformers, dissidents, ex-prisoners of conscience – were arrested, imprisoned and in some cases tortured, even to this day.
The EU has a role to play in this, rather than peddling integrationist policies and undermining nation states, the EU could be a force for good in this area. The MEP Edward McMillan-Scott is the founder of the EU’s £100m democracy and human rights programme and has tried to gauge its capacity to work in the world’s largest country, and its biggest tyranny. Edward has campaigned for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics and has had conversations with Prince Charles over his recent decision not to attend the games over the religious and political persecution of his contacts. However, the EU last week decided that not a Euro was going to be spent in China in promoting human rights or democracy. Shame on them.
There is universal acknowledgment in the human rights community that the situation in China is worse today than it was in 2001, when China was awarded the games by a hopeful Olympic movement, its most political decision since the 1964 IOC boycott of South Africa because of apartheid.
In December, the European Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution expressing ‘serious concern’ about human rights in China and asking the IOC to make its own assessment of Beijing’s compliance with its 2001 promises. It’s a pity that they don’t do something more tangible.
The optimism and warm words of 2001 have been totally confounded by an arbitrary, brutal and paranoid regime which has carried on with what Spielberg calls ‘business as usual’.
Edward wrote a report for the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on EU-China relations in 1997 and used the hopeful phrase “not just business as usual, but also politics as usual”. We are all confounded by the reality of an economic superpower misusing its economic muscle to keep 1.3 billion in subjection.
The techniques of repression in the name of the Chinese Communist Party are so effective that, while PR company Hill and Knowlton is teaching 84 key Beijing spokesmen how to lie about them, China is selling the same techniques to other tyrannies around the world, from Burma to Sudan to Zimbabwe.
Harry Wu, the noted dissident, now runs the US-based Laogai Research Foundation. He estimates that China’s prison camps hold nearly seven million people under forced labour, detention without trial and torture. Manfred Nowak, the UN’s torture rapporteur, says it ‘remains widespread in China’.
My friends have met many survivors of torture in China’s camps. They tell of the progression from brainwashing and sleep deprivation to months of standing 20 hours a day motionless, then immersion in excrement, then beatings and electronic goads to the genitals. The husband of Zhang Lianying told how she was beaten black and blue and had lost her sight and hearing as she was tortured to renounce her faith: there is a picture of her on the web in the prison hospital a year later.
Last week I met a torture victim, Annie Yang, who spoke at a press conference I organised on the day that Spielberg announced his boycott. She spoke of beatings; being made to sit on a stool 6 inches square for 20 hours at a time until her bottom began to rot; of sleep deprivation and beatings by drug addicts who were sent to oversee her ‘reform’. When she left prison her hair had gone white, her teeth fell out, her eyesight had deteriorated and she had lost the feeling in her bowels and bladder. She was one of the luck ones – she had friends in the UK so her torturers were careful with her. Luckily for Annie she now lives in the UK and deals in antique art. I felt very humble in front of this woman who patiently explained to journalists from Sky, The Observer, The Mail on Sunday and others the degrading treatment she had received.
Although not religious myself, I sense that in China as in Soviet Europe, religion will play a part in change. This is the view also of one of one of our regular contacts, the noted Christian human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng. He disappeared after getting contacting us with a message from his house arrest last September about lack of freedom of speech, Olympic corruption and in particular religious persecution of groups like Falun Gong. He said “Who can rightly be called a human being and stay silent in front of these facts?”
His friend Hu Jia, an eco-dissident, Olympics opponent and HIV activist, who contributed by live phone link from his home in Beijing to conferences we have organised recently in London and Brussels, was rounded up by security forces six weeks ago.
Those belonging to banned groups like Falun Gong are non-persons. There is a list of 3,000 practitioners of this blameless Buddha-school spiritual movement who have died under torture since repression against their 70 – 100 million adherents began in 1999. Nowak and Gao have told me the majority of ‘forced re-education’ victims are Falun Gong.
Nowak goes on to mention the 18 mobile execution vans which have been distributed to courts in Yunnan province alone. Even the Beijing university academics studying the death penalty could not tell me how many thousand die each year through the courts or simple administrative decision.
The death penalty can be applied for scores of crimes. Last month it was announced that, instead of a bullet, executions would be by lethal injection. Is this is to preserve the bodies for evisceration of saleable body parts in the execution vans for the Peoples Liberation Army’s lucrative organ transplant business?
One young ex-prisoner – Cao Dong - told us that his buddy disappeared from their cell one evening (shared, incidentally, with several Tiananmen Square protesters). Next, he saw his friend’s cadaver in the prison hospital with holes where body parts had been extracted. There have been 40,000 ‘extra’ organ transplants in China since the persecution of Falun Gong began – the only prisoners to be routinely blood-tested. It is likely that they are literally being killed to order.
As US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter said in 1942 after hearing Jan Karski’s testimony about the Nazi death camps “I did not say that this young man was lying; I said that I could not believe what he was telling me. There is a difference.”
Cao Dong was later convicted for meeting my friends and re-imprisoned. Last week Beijing officially told the EU the name of the prison where he is being held. We knew that already, as well as the names of those torturing him today and those responsible. We were watching and now, thanks to the boycott campaign, the world is watching China too.
I am off for a few days now but will respond to comments on my return.
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