China Snubs Democracy - New York Times

China Snubs Democracy - New York Times
November 23, 2005
Editorial
China Snubs Democracy
Almost everywhere President Bush went in Asia last week, he proclaimed America's support for democracy and human rights in China. And almost every time he did so, Chinese leaders either ignored him or changed the subject. Beijing even dispensed with the symbolic gestures that often accompany American presidential visits. None of the human rights cases Mr. Bush personally raised with China's president, Hu Jintao, earlier this year have yet been resolved. Christians who tried to worship alongside Mr. Bush were turned away or detained. Prominent democracy advocates were confined to their homes for the duration of Mr. Bush's stay.

Despite the lack of results, we applaud Mr. Bush for raising these sensitive but crucially important issues. Democracy and human rights are universal, not merely American, values. Beijing's stonewalling on democracy is more than a diplomatic snub of Mr. Bush; it is an insult to China's own people. One thing still reliably Communist about the Chinese Communist Party is its Stalinist repression of all political dissent.

Still, the ritualistic American preaching of democracy to China's increasingly confident leaders has become less likely than ever to directly produce any useful effects. Washington's international reputation has been battered by its invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, while China's has been steadily rising on the basis of its phenomenal economic advance. Beijing's leaders are in no mood to listen to lectures from an American government that depends on Chinese surpluses and savings to finance its supersized budget deficits.

The best way for America to advance democracy in China, as elsewhere, is by setting a positive and consistent example, at home and abroad. That is not something that the Bush administration has yet learned how to do, even after having made democracy the rhetorical centerpiece of its second-term foreign policy.

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China Shutters Prominent Lawyer's Firm

China Shutters Prominent Lawyer's FirmChina Shutters Prominent Lawyer's Firm
Rights Activist Had Refused to Disavow Letter Defending Religion, Falun Gong

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 6, 2005; A15

SHANGHAI, Nov. 5 -- Judicial authorities in Beijing have shut down the law firm of a prominent civil rights lawyer after he refused to withdraw an open letter urging President Hu Jintao to respect freedom of religion and stop persecuting members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Gao Zhisheng, among the most daring of a generation of self-trained lawyers who have been pushing the Chinese government to obey its own laws, said that the Beijing Bureau of Justice ordered his firm suspended for one year on Friday. The move came just hours after he filed an appeal on behalf of an underground Protestant pastor accused of illegally printing Bibles and other Christian literature.

According to Gao, the government said the firm was being suspended because it had failed to register with the authorities after moving into a new office this year. But he said the action followed his refusal to renounce the open letter to Hu and withdraw from politically sensitive cases as demanded by officials during a series of recent meetings.

Gao said that his firm notified the government when it moved but that officials refused to let the firm register at the new address.

"We're very angry," Gao said by phone Saturday. "By doing this, the Chinese Communist Party is demonstrating it defies all laws, human and divine. They are saying that anyone who believes in law, who criticizes the political system, who exposes crimes against the people, will be targeted."

The closure comes as officials crack down on religion, press freedoms and other civil liberties in China, and confirms that Hu's government is also willing to take action to restrict the growing influence of members of China's budding legal profession. Lawyers such as Gao have been at the forefront of a campaign to inform citizens of their rights under laws that are often ignored by the government and to help them assert those rights in court.

Gao said he planned to fight his firm's suspension at a formal hearing next week.

In an Oct. 18 letter addressed to Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao that he posted on the Internet and distributed widely by e-mail, Gao described several cases he had investigated involving Falun Gong practitioners who have been detained, sent to labor camps and tortured. In one case, he said, a man was hanged from overhead pipes until his legs rotted.

In another case, he said, police tracked down and arrested a practitioner, a college sophomore, after he posted a note on the Internet announcing his resignation from the Communist Youth League.

Under the direction of Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, the Chinese government in July 1999 banned Falun Gong as an "evil cult" and has all but crushed it in an often violent campaign involving the arrests of thousands of people. As practitioners have been released from labor camps in recent years, Gao said, the government has renewed its brutal campaign.

"The persecution of Falun Gong compatriots by some local officials has already reached the point where they are doing whatever they please," Gao wrote in the open letter. "We cannot accept these brazenly inhumane, savage atrocities to occur in the society of mankind in the 21st century."

"This evil catastrophe did not begin with you, but the catastrophe has continued while you two have led the government," he told Hu and Wen.

Gao also urged the government to accept that a revival of religious faith in China was inevitable. In addition to working on behalf of Falun Gong members, Gao is one of several lawyers who have volunteered to defend Cai Zhuohua, the pastor of a house church in Beijing who has been jailed on charges of "illegal business practices" for printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of Bibles. The Bush administration has expressed concern about Cai, who was arrested with several other Christian figures in September 2004.

Gao has been under pressure from the authorities for months. Government officials recently demanded that he withdraw from two politically sensitive cases: a citizen effort to impeach the chief of Taishi village in southern China's Guangdong province and a landmark lawsuit brought by thousands of private investors accusing officials in northern Shaanxi province of seizing oil wells from them worth as much as $1 billion.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

China Gives Political Outcast Rare Revival

China Gives Political Outcast Rare Revival
Tiananmen Figure Recognized, Raising Hopes for Official About-Face on Incident

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 19, 2005; A18

BEIJING, Nov. 18 -- China's senior leadership on Friday honored the reformist Communist Party chief whose death sparked the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, breaking more than a decade of official silence on his legacy. But notably absent from the politically sensitive ceremony was the man who approved it, President Hu Jintao.

The memorial for the late Communist leader Hu Yaobang, whom hard-liners ousted in 1987 because he had tolerated a wave of student protests in support of democratic reform, took place behind closed doors and amid heightened security in Beijing. State television reported the event Friday night, and within hours thousands flooded the country's most popular Web sites with notes of remembrance and support.

The ceremony in the Great Hall of the People was a rare political rehabilitation of a deposed leader in China. The Communist Party almost never admits errors and usually tries to avoid reminding the public of the democracy demonstrations that swept China in the spring of 1989. Those protests ended on June 4 of that year when troops opened fire on crowds near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands.

President Hu Jintao's decision to restore Hu Yaobang's reputation raised hopes that the party was taking a step, however tentative, toward changing its position that the student-led demonstrations were subversive or admitting it was wrong to use military force to crush them. Such a reversal would be necessary before any attempt by the party to adopt substantial political reforms, party officials and analysts said.

"It's already been 16 years," said one retired official who attended the ceremony and spoke on condition of anonymity. "The fact that they can take a small step forward isn't bad. We can't expect them to take a big step."

Hu's absence from the event, along with a series of other moves by his government to limit its impact, suggested that he has no plans for immediate change. Hu, who took office two years ago, has pursued a repressive crackdown on journalists, religious groups and other elements of civil society.

Officials portrayed the commemoration as an attempt by Hu to improve his image and repair relations with the party's reformist wing, which regards Hu Yaobang as a hero. In a similar gesture, party leaders allowed Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed after the Tiananmen crackdown, to visit his hometown last month, people familiar with the move said.

In a written statement, Bao applauded the party's decision to rehabilitate his former colleague. "The Communist Party once learned a deeply painful lesson because of its treatment of Yaobang," he said, referring to the students who occupied Tiananmen after Hu's death demanding that the party revise its official view of him and triggering weeks of mass demonstrations. "The party should not equivocate again and continue covering up its errors."

Hu Jintao originally approved a series of events to honor Hu Yaobang on the 90th anniversary of his birth on Sunday, including a ceremony with 2,000 guests, a symposium to discuss his legacy and the publication of a biography and a collection of his writings, party officials and other sources said.

He later scaled back the activities to Friday's ceremony, which state media described as a seminar with 350 participants. In addition, by moving the commemoration forward two days, Hu provided himself with an excuse not to attend, the sources said. He was in South Korea for a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders Friday and expected to return to Beijing Saturday for a meeting with President Bush.

The sources said Hu scrapped the earlier plans because of concerns that a high-profile commemoration might encourage new calls for democratic reform and threaten social stability. Some factions of the party also expressed doubts because a decision to restore Hu Yaobang's reputation would imply criticism of those who ousted him, including China's paramount leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping.

A party official familiar with the decision making process dismissed reports in Hong Kong that four of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's top ruling body, opposed the commemoration. He said none of the senior leaders would dare go on record opposing a move to rehabilitate a popular figure such as Hu Yaobang, but acknowledged that many expressed reservations.

Wu Guanzheng, a Standing Committee member who serves as the party's top disciplinary official, presided over the ceremony, and Vice President Zeng Qinghong, considered a potential rival to President Hu, delivered the keynote address. Premier Wen Jiabao sat between them at the front of the room, but did not speak, participants said.

Hu's widow and his children, including a son who serves in a senior party post, also attended the ceremony, along with a host of other party officials, past and present.

"Comrade Hu Yaobang was a long-tested and staunch communist warrior, a great proletarian revolutionist and statesman," Zeng said, according to a text of his speech released by the official New China News Agency.

People who attended the event said none of the speakers mentioned the circumstances of Hu Yaobang's fall from power or the demonstrations that followed his death. In another sign of caution by President Hu, the speakers did not read a message from him, as would be customary at such an event, participants said.

Party authorities instructed state media outlets to use only official reports on the ceremony. The authorities have ordered at least two journals with essays devoted to the late party leader recalled from libraries and newsstands, officials said.

Many Chinese remember Hu fondly for clearing the records of the millions persecuted during Mao Zedong's political movements and launching the economic and political reforms that ended the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Deng forced him to resign after hard-liners accused him of refusing to crack down on what they called "bourgeois liberalization," referring to a wave of student protests demanding democratic reform.

A member of Hu Yaobang's family who attended Friday's ceremony expressed satisfaction with his rehabilitation. "No matter how you look at it, this was still a breakthrough from nothing after so many years," he said. "It makes it possible to hold deeper discussions in the future."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

China Honors Deposed Leader - New York Times

China Honors Deposed Leader - New York TimesChina Honors Deposed Leader By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 18, 2005
Filed at 6:41 a.m. ET

BEIJING (AP) -- China's communist rulers commemorated an ousted reformist leader for the first time since his 1989 death led to the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, praising him as a statesman in a ceremony Friday to mark the 90th anniversary of his birth.

The ceremony, attended by Premier Wen Jiabao and other top officials, rehabilitated the memory of Hu Yaobang and appeared to be an attempt to strengthen the leadership's reformist image.

''Comrade Hu Yaobang was a long-tested and staunch communist warrior, a great proletarian revolutionist and statesman (and) an outstanding political leader for the Chinese army,'' Vice President Zeng Qinghong said in a speech at the ceremony, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Hu Yaobang, who is no relation to current President Hu Jintao, is an awkward figure for communist rulers. He was respected in the party, but his link in the public's mind to the 1989 protests made any official action involving him sensitive.

Hu Yaobang was dismissed as Communist Party general secretary in 1987 by then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping for allowing student protests.

After Hu's death in April 1989, students who admired his reformist record left funeral wreaths in Tiananmen Square. The outpouring grew into demonstrations that ended in a military attack on June 3-4, 1989, which killed hundreds and perhaps thousands.

Hu Yaobang was liked by party liberals, and analysts say that by honoring him, President Hu might be trying to reach out to liberals and revive stalled political reforms. President Hu was at an Asian-Pacific economic conference in South Korea on Friday.

''They certainly believe that this gesture of commemorative activities may help to strengthen a little bit their reformist image,'' said political analyst Joseph Cheng, chairman of the City University of Hong Kong's Contemporary China Research Center.

But Cheng said Zeng's remarks were ''neutral language'' meant to appeal to public affection for Hu Yaobang while avoiding offending any party faction.

And Cheng said it was unlikely to affect public opinion.

''People can see there is no active program for genuine political reform,'' he said.

Xinhua said the ceremony was attended by 350 people, including Hu's relatives. It came two days before the anniversary of Hu's birth on Nov. 20. The government gave no reason for celebrating it early, but the date falls on Sunday, the first day of a visit to Beijing by President Bush.

Xinhua credited Hu Yaobang with helping to repair damage done by the violent 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. It said he ''helped correct numerous misjudged cases ... and exonerate more than three million purged cadres.''

''In his revolutionary career of six decades, he contributed all his life and built immortal merits for the liberation and happiness of the Chinese people,'' Zeng was quoted as saying.

''His historic achievements and moral character will always remembered by the party and our people.''

Hu Yaobang's successor, Zhao Ziyang, was dismissed for sympathizing with the Tiananmen Square protesters and lived under house arrest for 16 years until his death in January.

Cheng said Chinese leaders also might have decided to honor Hu in order to mollify members of the public who were offended at the handling of Zhao's funeral in January. That event took place under heavy security and lacked the honors extended to Hu.