From Torture to Plaintiff: a Pilgrim’s Progress in China
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
May 31, 2007
WEIHAI, China
Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.
They are Christians gathering in a little “house church,” reflecting a religious boom across China. But their story also underscores another trend: the way the legal system here offers hope of chipping away at the Communist Party dictatorship.
The tale begins a year ago when the authorities here in Shandong Province raided this house church and carted 31 Christians off to the police station. Such crackdowns are the traditional way the Communist Party has dealt with house churches in rural areas, and some Christians have even been tortured to death.
But this incident ended differently.
Tian Yinghua, a 55-year-old evangelical Protestant who runs the church in her living room, was outraged after she was ordered jailed for 10 days.
“We had done nothing wrong at all,” explained Ms. Tian. “We weren’t criminals.”
So Ms. Tian contacted a prominent Christian and legal scholar in Beijing, Li Baiguang, who traveled to Shandong Province to do something that once would have been unthinkable: Sue the police.
Even more unthinkable, Ms. Tian won. The police settled the case by withdrawing the charges. The police also formally apologized, paid symbolic damages of 1 yuan (a bit more than a dime) and promised not to bother the church again.
It was a historic victory for freedom of religion in China — and, even more important, for the rule of law.
“The police don’t bother us at all,” said another church leader, Wang Qiu. “They just stay away.”
That seems to be a growing pattern. The central government’s policy toward religion is much more relaxed than a few years ago, and in coastal areas the government usually lets people worship freely.
“In most places, it’s no problem today,” said Mr. Li, who himself was imprisoned for more than a month two years ago for his legal activism. “It’s just a problem in backward areas, or if you directly attack the Communist Party.”
Mr. Li, who enjoys a bit of protection because President Bush invited him to the White House last year, says that last year he filed suits like this one in eight provinces. The other he lost, but even in those cases the authorities were shaken enough that they have stopped harassing Christians, he says.
“On the surface we lost,” he said. “But in reality, we won in every case.”
Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist now exiled to Hong Kong, says that he has also found that suing the authorities is often an effective way to increase labor protections. Mr. Han was a leader in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, but now he is trying to bring about change from within. “I believe this is the way to develop a civil society, not through a revolution,” he said.
Of course, the legal system is still routinely used to oppress people, rather than to protect them. China imprisons more journalists than any country in the world, and one of them is my Times colleague Zhao Yan. Judges never go against the Communist Party; what they can do is rectify local injustices where the higher party officials are indifferent.
Moreover, even when lawsuits are allowed to go forward, many Chinese police and judges are so corrupt that they sell themselves to the highest bidder.
A common saying, which I even saw in an illegal poster pasted on a government building in Beijing, goes: “The bandits used to hide in the hills. Now the bandits are in the courthouses.”
Still, the rule of law has gained immensely since the 1980’s, when a defense attorney was imprisoned for having the temerity to claim that the police had arrested the wrong man and that his client was innocent. If the Chinese government continues to nurture the rule of law, China could increasingly follow the path of South Korea and Taiwan away from autocracy toward greater democracy.
Easing the repression could also change the religious complexion of China. Estimates of the number of Chinese Christians vary widely, but the number may be approaching 100 million, many of them evangelical Protestants who aggressively recruit new believers. And with the more relaxed policy, the numbers are soaring.
“In 20 to 30 years China will have several hundred million believers,” said Mr. Li, the lawyer who helped the Shandong church. “That will make China the biggest Christian nation in the world, with more Christians than the entire U.S. population.”
----
China’s ‘Genocide Olympics’
By Nicholas D. Kristof
May 26, 2007, 8:56 pm , nytimes.com
As I travel around China, I’ve been asking about Darfur. Most ordinary people seem unaware of it – and unaware of Chinese support for the Sudanese regime as it conducts genocide in Darfur. But government and Communist Party officials are acutely aware of the situation and deeply sensitive to it. The campaign to tie Darfur to the Olympics is working.
There’s a misconception that the campaign is about boycotting the Olympics. It’s not. That would never work and would be counter-productive by alienating ordinary Chinese. Rather the idea is to “brand” the Olympics, the pride of the Communist Party, as “the Genocide Olympics” unless China changes its policies. For example, athletes could wear armbands when competing or wear Save Darfur shirts when not competing.
Chinese officials keep telling me that they want peace in Darfur as much as anybody. They note that they have now sent an envoy to Sudan to encourage peace, and I think it’s true that they have become more diplomatically involved in the last few months. Above all, they preach the need for patience.
The point I keep making is that China has a special responsibility because it is Chinese weapons being used to kill kids in Darfur. As long as Chinese helicopters and Ak-47’s and bayonets are used to kill, China will – quite properly – be blamed. And the slaughter has gone on so long partly because China has protected Sudan on the U.N. Security Council for several years now and blocked further action.
I tell the Chinese that Darfur is like the Rape of Nanjing – only it has been going on for four years rather than six weeks, with Chinese complicity. I can’t imagine that China believes that the world should have preached patience as the Rape of Nanjing unfolded. And when Japan was occupying China in the early 1940’s and the U.S. moved toward economic sanctions as a result, China didn’t think that was a bad idea.
So the world should set benchmarks for China. Unless Sudan stops the genocide and seriously engages in peace talks with rebels (rather than bombing the rebels whenever they meet to develop a negotiating position, as Khartoum does now in an effort to obstruct negotiations), then China should suspend all arms transfers and aid. And that should happen immediately.
We should also ask China to speak bluntly about the genocide. It has been frank about North Korean nuclear tests, and it should be equally blunt about genocide.
I welcome China as a “stake-holder” in the international system. But right now China is helping to prop up the four worst regimes in the world: Sudan, North Korea, Burma and Zimbabwe. That’s the height of irresponsibility, and if China doesn’t suspend arms transfers and aid, and doesn’t denounce the genocide, then we should continue full speed ahead with the “Genocide Olympics” campaign. It’s working.
________________
Also from the Times:
Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields
WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about. [ MORE ]
====
[Acknowledgements to Iraqwarit .]
The New York Times
May 31, 2007
WEIHAI, China
Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.
They are Christians gathering in a little “house church,” reflecting a religious boom across China. But their story also underscores another trend: the way the legal system here offers hope of chipping away at the Communist Party dictatorship.
The tale begins a year ago when the authorities here in Shandong Province raided this house church and carted 31 Christians off to the police station. Such crackdowns are the traditional way the Communist Party has dealt with house churches in rural areas, and some Christians have even been tortured to death.
But this incident ended differently.
Tian Yinghua, a 55-year-old evangelical Protestant who runs the church in her living room, was outraged after she was ordered jailed for 10 days.
“We had done nothing wrong at all,” explained Ms. Tian. “We weren’t criminals.”
So Ms. Tian contacted a prominent Christian and legal scholar in Beijing, Li Baiguang, who traveled to Shandong Province to do something that once would have been unthinkable: Sue the police.
Even more unthinkable, Ms. Tian won. The police settled the case by withdrawing the charges. The police also formally apologized, paid symbolic damages of 1 yuan (a bit more than a dime) and promised not to bother the church again.
It was a historic victory for freedom of religion in China — and, even more important, for the rule of law.
“The police don’t bother us at all,” said another church leader, Wang Qiu. “They just stay away.”
That seems to be a growing pattern. The central government’s policy toward religion is much more relaxed than a few years ago, and in coastal areas the government usually lets people worship freely.
“In most places, it’s no problem today,” said Mr. Li, who himself was imprisoned for more than a month two years ago for his legal activism. “It’s just a problem in backward areas, or if you directly attack the Communist Party.”
Mr. Li, who enjoys a bit of protection because President Bush invited him to the White House last year, says that last year he filed suits like this one in eight provinces. The other he lost, but even in those cases the authorities were shaken enough that they have stopped harassing Christians, he says.
“On the surface we lost,” he said. “But in reality, we won in every case.”
Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist now exiled to Hong Kong, says that he has also found that suing the authorities is often an effective way to increase labor protections. Mr. Han was a leader in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, but now he is trying to bring about change from within. “I believe this is the way to develop a civil society, not through a revolution,” he said.
Of course, the legal system is still routinely used to oppress people, rather than to protect them. China imprisons more journalists than any country in the world, and one of them is my Times colleague Zhao Yan. Judges never go against the Communist Party; what they can do is rectify local injustices where the higher party officials are indifferent.
Moreover, even when lawsuits are allowed to go forward, many Chinese police and judges are so corrupt that they sell themselves to the highest bidder.
A common saying, which I even saw in an illegal poster pasted on a government building in Beijing, goes: “The bandits used to hide in the hills. Now the bandits are in the courthouses.”
Still, the rule of law has gained immensely since the 1980’s, when a defense attorney was imprisoned for having the temerity to claim that the police had arrested the wrong man and that his client was innocent. If the Chinese government continues to nurture the rule of law, China could increasingly follow the path of South Korea and Taiwan away from autocracy toward greater democracy.
Easing the repression could also change the religious complexion of China. Estimates of the number of Chinese Christians vary widely, but the number may be approaching 100 million, many of them evangelical Protestants who aggressively recruit new believers. And with the more relaxed policy, the numbers are soaring.
“In 20 to 30 years China will have several hundred million believers,” said Mr. Li, the lawyer who helped the Shandong church. “That will make China the biggest Christian nation in the world, with more Christians than the entire U.S. population.”
----
China’s ‘Genocide Olympics’
By Nicholas D. Kristof
May 26, 2007, 8:56 pm , nytimes.com
As I travel around China, I’ve been asking about Darfur. Most ordinary people seem unaware of it – and unaware of Chinese support for the Sudanese regime as it conducts genocide in Darfur. But government and Communist Party officials are acutely aware of the situation and deeply sensitive to it. The campaign to tie Darfur to the Olympics is working.
There’s a misconception that the campaign is about boycotting the Olympics. It’s not. That would never work and would be counter-productive by alienating ordinary Chinese. Rather the idea is to “brand” the Olympics, the pride of the Communist Party, as “the Genocide Olympics” unless China changes its policies. For example, athletes could wear armbands when competing or wear Save Darfur shirts when not competing.
Chinese officials keep telling me that they want peace in Darfur as much as anybody. They note that they have now sent an envoy to Sudan to encourage peace, and I think it’s true that they have become more diplomatically involved in the last few months. Above all, they preach the need for patience.
The point I keep making is that China has a special responsibility because it is Chinese weapons being used to kill kids in Darfur. As long as Chinese helicopters and Ak-47’s and bayonets are used to kill, China will – quite properly – be blamed. And the slaughter has gone on so long partly because China has protected Sudan on the U.N. Security Council for several years now and blocked further action.
I tell the Chinese that Darfur is like the Rape of Nanjing – only it has been going on for four years rather than six weeks, with Chinese complicity. I can’t imagine that China believes that the world should have preached patience as the Rape of Nanjing unfolded. And when Japan was occupying China in the early 1940’s and the U.S. moved toward economic sanctions as a result, China didn’t think that was a bad idea.
So the world should set benchmarks for China. Unless Sudan stops the genocide and seriously engages in peace talks with rebels (rather than bombing the rebels whenever they meet to develop a negotiating position, as Khartoum does now in an effort to obstruct negotiations), then China should suspend all arms transfers and aid. And that should happen immediately.
We should also ask China to speak bluntly about the genocide. It has been frank about North Korean nuclear tests, and it should be equally blunt about genocide.
I welcome China as a “stake-holder” in the international system. But right now China is helping to prop up the four worst regimes in the world: Sudan, North Korea, Burma and Zimbabwe. That’s the height of irresponsibility, and if China doesn’t suspend arms transfers and aid, and doesn’t denounce the genocide, then we should continue full speed ahead with the “Genocide Olympics” campaign. It’s working.
________________
Also from the Times:
Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields
WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about. [ MORE ]
====
[Acknowledgements to Iraqwarit .]
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