China redefines human rights at summit

WEN JIABAO dealt very firmly with the questions about his country’s human rights record. Calmly and patiently the prime minister of the world’s most populous country redefined human rights.

Speaking at last weekend’s Helsinki summit, he made no effort to justify China’s death penalty, crackdown on free expression or the jailing of anybody that disagrees with the state.

Instead he talked about having taken nearly 200 million out of poverty; making nine years of education free and compulsory for 160 million children; promoting democracy through elections in 680,000 villages and said that a review of the death penalty was being sent back to the supreme court for their judgment.

On human rights he added: “This is a global problem and no one can resolve it perfectly.”

Managing a country of 1.3 billion people is not simple and less so now that it is among the world’s fastest growing economies.

The EU leadership raised the abuse of human rights with the Chinese during the summit and tried to link it with trade negotiations that will renew their current agreement.

But the EU has found it increasingly difficult to pursue this policy especially when the balance of power is not in Europe’s direction.

The Chinese flatly rejected the proposal and, as a result, the EU will find it difficult to slow down progress in one area if there is not sufficient cooperation in the other.

Mr Wen’s answers to journalists’ questions were somewhat surreal.

He used western phrases with ease and his answers were sophisticated and difficult not to agree with. However, they were not what they seemed to be.

He spoke about what has been done in China to promote democracy, the rule of law, freedom and human rights. They were, he said, universal values.

But the concepts have no meaning in the Chinese system.

The fact is there is no democracy in China; there is no rule of law or independent judiciary. The communist party is the government and the law. There is no market economy.

Europe is not alone in conceding this. Businesses — Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are examples — have all shown they are happy to operate within whatever confines they are offered, irrespective of whether it breaches the UN Convention.

China even introduced major new news censorship on the very day of the EU summit.

As a result all foreign news agencies must go through the communist party’s mouthpiece, Xinhua, and will not be allowed to solicit Chinese customers.

So the Chinese will be blocked from learning about what is happening in the rest of the world.

Currently, with the collusion of Google and Yahoo, they cannot search the internet freely.

Monitoring human rights is almost impossible. Nobody knows how many are subjected to the death penalty every year — Amnesty says it might be as high as 10,000.

The increasing use of mobile execution vans suggestions that the state is involved in the sale of human organs.

They have proved themselves completely impervious to world opinion and watching Wen Jiabao parry hostile questions, this appears unlikely to change any time soon.