As we start our meal, I ask Chen how he likes the food in New York. His wife gives him a piece of pizza, telling him what it is and that he can use his hands to eat it. He smiles and says he likes all kinds of cuisine, especially Japanese and...
Blind Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng, whose escape from house arrest sparked a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Washington, accepted an invitation on Friday to visit Taiwan, underscoring his drive to ensure his influence as a human...
Human rights groups have warned of a crackdown on relatives and friends of a veteran Chinese activists who questioned his strange death, after one was arrested for inciting subversion of state power. They believe Zhu Chengzhi is being punished...
More than 350,000 people identified as drug users are held in compulsory drug "treatment" centers in China and Southeast Asia. Detainees are held without due process for periods of months or years and may be subjected to physical and sexual abuse...
The political future of China is far likelier to be determined by the longstanding Confucian tradition of “humane authority” than by Western-style multiparty elections. After all, democracy is flawed as an ideal. Political legitimacy is based...
The Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States last month following top-level negotiations between US and Chinese officials. Several weeks earlier, Chen had dramatically escaped from house arrest in his village in...
Since June 2011, an estimated 75,000 ethnic Kachin have hostilities between the Burmese army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in northern Burma. Thousands of them have sought refuge in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, where the Chinese...
Dr. Xu Zhiyong is a lecturer of law at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and one of the founders of Open Constitution Initiative (公盟) that offers legal assistance to petitioners and rights defenders, and has been repeatedly...
It wasn’t safe for Pu Zhiqiang to go home. Or, to be more precise, he could go home, but once there he might not be able to leave again. Over the previous 48 hours, Chinese authorities had detained more than a dozen lawyers and activists. More...
Amnesty International surveys the landscape of human rights in China during 2011 and finds that China’s economic strength during the global financial crisis increased the country’s leverage in the domain of global human rights—mostly for the...
Fang Lizhi, a distinguished professor of astrophysics, luminary in the struggle for human rights in contemporary China, and frequent contributor to The New York Review, died suddenly on the morning of April 6. At age seventy-six he had...
The day after the Russian parliamentary elections in early December, the Chinese publication Global Times, an English-language newspaper and website managed by People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party official,...
China’s version of the Arab world's “Jasmine Revolution” was a complete failure. Online calls for protests against Communist Party rule have elicited little response from would-be protesters. Yet Beijing’s reaction was swift and overwhelming—...
In 2009, the Chinese government unveiled the National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP), the first of its kind in China. However, two years on, deficiencies in the action plan and government failures to adequately implement some of its key...
On December 10, I attended the award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the government of China had a few days earlier declared to be a “farce.” The recipient was a friend of mine, the Chinese scholar and essayist Liu...
Quiet diplomacy, as it’s called, has served for years as the principle guiding U.S. relations with China: the theory is that it is far better to engage the Chinese government quietly, behind the scenes, rather than through more robust public...
More than two years after protests—the largest and most sustained in decades—erupted across the Tibetan plateau in March 2008, the Chinese government has yet to explain the circumstances that led to dozens of clashes between protesters and police...
On July 5, 2009, thousands of Chinese of Uighur ethnicity demonstrated in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In the aftermath of the Urumqi protests, the authorities detained more than 1,400 people. In...
Following is an English translation of an Internet dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens that took place on May 21. The exchange was organized by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese intellectual known for his writing on Tibet and for...
On December 29, four days after being sentenced to eleven years in prison for “subversion of state power,” the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo filed an appeal to a higher court. For many familiar with the Chinese regime, the decision seemed quixotic:...
One year ago, the Chinese literary critic and political commentator Liu Xiaobo was taken away from his home in Beijing by the Chinese police, who held him without charge for six months, then placed him under formal arrest for six more months, on...
As the UN’s Climate Change Conference opens in Copenhagen this week, much attention will focus on China and the United States, who are, by a wide margin, the world’s two leading emitters of greenhouse gases. The success of the conference will...
The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is vitally important, touching on a wide range of areas including, among others, economic policy, security, foreign relations, and human rights. U.S. interests...
Since 2003, large numbers of Chinese citizens have been held incommunicado for days or months in secret, unlawful detention facilities. These "black jails" are housed in state-owned hostels, hotels, nursing homes, and psychiatric hospitals, among...
As the echoes of China’s spectacular military parade on October 1 were subsiding, officials in the Obama administration, in quieter settings in...
Human rights has been a principal area of U.S. concern in its relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly since the violent government crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989. Some policy makers contend that...
U.S. policy on Tibet is governed by the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 (TPA), enacted as part of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of FY2003 (P.L. 107-228). In addition to establishing a number of U.S. principles with respect to human rights,...
This paper focuses on issues of drug rehabilitation practices in China. Chinese law dictates mandatory rehabilitation for drug users. Every year tens of thousands of drug users are sent—without trial or due process of law—to mandatory drug...
Written less than two weeks before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this papers assesses progress made by the Chinese authorities to improve human rights in line with their own commitments made in 2001. This report provides a final summary and updates...
It is open season on the Dalai Lama and not just for Beijing, for whom he is “a monk in wolf’s clothing,” or for Rupert Murdoch, who dismissed him as a “very old political monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.” During his trip to London in May,...
This report, written in the aftermath of the widespread Tibetan unrest in Tibet and Tibetan regions of China in the spring of 2008, addresses the Chinese government with immediate demands. In cracking down on unrest, the Chinese government sealed...
This report delves into the situation of the children of undocumented North Korean refugees and Chinese nationals in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. It explains that many children of North Korean parents are not able to be registered...
While major gains have been made in terms of the rule of law over the past thirty years, this report from Human Rights Watch details consistent patterns of abuses against legal practitioners. These include intimidation, harassment, suspension of...
With little more than four months to go before the Beijing Olympics, few substantial reforms have been introduced that will have a significant, positive impact on human rights in China. This is particularly apparent in the plight of individual...
Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997 after more than one hundred years as a British colony. This report looks at how certain basic human rights have fared since the handover and assesses how far the HKSAR government has taken...
This report describes and examines the PRC state secrets system and shows how it allows and even promotes human rights violations by undermining the rights to freedom of expression and information, and by maintaining a culture of secrecy that has...
The United States has applied a different standard on human rights and dissent to China than it did to the Soviet Union. Several things explain this. First, beginning in 1972, relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were intended to...
Numbering just two million in the 1980s China's internal migrants are now part of the largest peacetime migration in history, with some experts estimating their numbers to swell to 300 million by 2015. While they have served as laborers fueling...
This report documents the serious impediments to the fulfillment of China's human rights obligations, in the areas of ethnic minority political participation, development, and preservation of cultural identity. Given the destabilizing levels of...
As of 1 October 2006, 102 states had ratified the Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court to prosecute genocide. China is one of only seven nations to vote against. Based on the strong political support expressed for the Court...
This report summarizes a number of Amnesty International's human rights concerns in China—concerns which the organization is continuing to highlight as key areas for reform in the run-up to the Olympics. They are: the continuing use of the death...
This 2005 report is the first in-depth look at the treatment of Chinese citizens who travel to Beijing to demand redress to their complaints of mistreatment by officials. While petitioning has long been in use in China, it is now on the rise; an...
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has recently recovered from an economic downturn and the SARS virus outbreak of 2002-2003 which crippled trade and tourism. There has also been a major change in top government personnel, with...
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, U.S. and PRC foreign policy calculations appear to be changing. The Administration of George W. Bush assumed office in January 2001 viewing China as a U.S. “...
At its triennial congress in Yokohama last September, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) overwhelmingly voted to send a delegation to China to investigate charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as “political...
Last May I was invited to China for two weeks, first to take part in a two-day conference at the law school of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and then to give several public lectures there and in other cities. The Tsinghua conference was...
Over a number of years, the United States has been actively engaged in efforts to improve human rights conditions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, some analysts suggest that the events of September 11, 2001, may make it more...
The main finding of this report is that both the United States and China will run risks as Beijing moves ahead with membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), but the potential payoffs for both countries are well worth it. It also points...
Connoisseurs of traditional Peking opera would have enjoyed the recent meeting in Shanghai sponsored by Fortune to consider “China: The Next 50 Years.” The audience of approximately three hundred CEOs of US and other companies and over a...
In August 1980 Deng Xiaoping laid down the Communist Party’s view of democracy. It continues to cripple China and is used both inside the country and by its apologists abroad to avoid the issue of repression. Deng said:
Democracy without...
Speaking to a small group in London this January, nearly two months after he was expelled from China, the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng told his somewhat startled listeners, “The earliest human rights movement in the world was the ‘People’s...
At the same time that President Bush is speaking up against Saddam Hussein’s human rights atrocities, he is appeasing China’s octogenarian leaders on the very same issue. In order to persuade China to cooperate in the United Nations actions...
