Globe and Mail: Don't turn a blind eye to rights abuses

Saturday, February 10, 2001 The buzz on Parliament Hill this week was all about human-rights violations -- with the purge in Stockwell Day's office slightly elbowing out the persecution of the Falun Gong as conversational fodder. [...] That said, let's turn to the substantive issue of China, where a different group of leaders, equally ham-handed but far more powerful, are involved in a more serious purge. When the Prime Minister and his mega-delegation of premiers and business people land in Beijing this morning, they will be arriving in a country in the midst of turning back the clock on human rights. The full force of a police state has been turned on a once-obscure [group] known as Falun Gong. As we've seen in recent weeks, the group's seemingly innocuous meditative exercises have once again exposed the ugly face of Chinese authoritarianism. Thousands have been imprisoned in "re-education camps" -- museum pieces, one would have hoped, of the Cultural Revolution. And the latest reports by international human-rights groups indicate that 112 of the detainees have died in captivity. The rationale for the sort of constructive engagement Canada and other Western countries have employed with China is that it ultimately furthers the cause of political liberalization and human rights. It is hard to sustain free-market policies without political freedoms, the reasoning goes. The rapid modernization of the Chinese economy should, therefore, be unleashing powerful democratic forces in the Middle Kingdom. But so far, the Chinese Communist Party is proving itself stubbornly resistant to the irresistible forces of democratization. The current crackdown on freedom of association and belief was correctly characterized by Liberal MP and human-rights lawyer Irwin Cotler this week as "the most persistent and pervasive assault on human rights in China since Tiananmen Square." Nearly 12 years after the tanks, the situation in China is moving backward, not forward. Indeed, the Chinese authorities seem to have totally lost their heads over the Falun Gong. An article in an official party organ several days ago rekindled a bygone era of propaganda by referring to [group] members as "running dogs of foreign anti-Chinese forces." The last time Jean Chrétien went to China, in the fall of 1998, political pressure had reached a sufficient pitch at home that he felt it necessary to raise the human-rights issue not just in private conversations, but actually in his public remarks. He told an elite group at a Beijing business school that "Canadians are disturbed when we hear reports from your country of restrictions on the right to free expression of different political views." Recent developments demand an even stronger response on this visit. For one thing, China's behaviour has gone from bad to worse. As well, Canadian parliamentarians have found new focus for their cause in the person of Mr. Cotler, the Montreal MP with a wealth of experience in international human-rights matters and an innate talent for a sound bite. Mr. Cotler spoke this week at a luncheon on Parliament Hill for released Falun Gong prisoner Kunlun Zhang, whom he met while both were professors at McGill University. Mr. Zhang owes his freedom to the good fortune of dual Canadian citizenship and the apparent desire of China to keep Mr. Chrétien's trade mission on track. Some have felt the Prime Minister would move quickly to squelch the independent-minded Mr. Cotler. So far, that's proven not the case. Instead, Mr. Cotler has catalyzed a bipartisan coalition of concerned MPs, providing a moral leadership and intellectual rigour they previously lacked. He was hardly standing alone this week in his calls for greater attention to China's human-rights record. This human-rights advocacy, so far, has displayed intelligence with its moderation. No calls for cancelling the trade mission or reducing economic ties; merely a reminder that a trade agenda cannot be divorced from a human-rights agenda -- certainly not if globalization is to be about more than profits. Last time Mr. Chrétien was in China, Premier Zhu Rongji warmly praised the Prime Minister as "our good old friend." As a good and old friend, Mr. Chrétien owes it to his Chinese hosts to explain that global citizenship requires adherence to certain international norms -- especially when the Chinese are seeking international concurrence to join the World Trade Organization and host the 2008 Summer Olympics. On Tuesday, Mr. Chrétien is to speak on human rights in a speech at China's National Judges College. His advisers no doubt are still calibrating the tone of his message. As they write and rewrite his speech, they should keep in mind the following quotation about the balances a sustainable globalization agenda must contain: "We must, in short, adopt an agenda that puts people first -- that recognizes that our citizens can reach their full potential only when their safety is guaranteed, their rights are respected and their access to economic and social opportunities is assured." No, these sentiments were not expressed by Mr. Cotler, but rather by the Prime Minister himself -- five days ago when speaking at the Organization of American States in Washington. What's right for a free-trade zone in the Americas is right for trade relations across the Pacific -- economic opportunity must move forward hand-in-hand with political freedom. The Prime Minister can't make it so, but he can do the right thing by speaking bluntly and respectfully to his Chinese friends.