What is your attitude to human rights in China?

[mugu]

What is your attitude to human rights in China?
I think human rights are too weak in China.

[imported_hanako]

Yea,you are right mugu.China is a terrible country...

[Tebriz-will-Rise]

pay attention to the plight of Uyghurs minority ethnic group in racist china fellow friends. china is a horrible country!!!!!

Massive Migration of Chinese to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), with Institutionalized Racial Discrimination
Xinjiang is very important to the Chinese government because it contains large oil and gas reserves and it serves as a passageway for transporting oil and gas from Central Asia. In its efforts to colonize and consolidate its control over Xinjiang, the Chinese government has waged an intense campaign to suppress Uyghur nationalist sentiment, dilute their culture, threaten their identity as a distinct people, and assimilate them into Chinese culture. One major way in which the government has accomplished these objectives has been by sponsoring the massive migration of Chinese to the area. In 1949, when the Communists asserted their control over Xinjiang, Uyghurs accounted for at least 93% of the region's population while Chinese accounted for 6 or 7%. By 1997, according to official statistics, the population of Xinjiang was over 17 million, 47% of whom were Uyghurs and 42% of whom were Chinese. In the last few decades, the Chinese-Uyghur ratio in Urumqi, capital city of the XUAR, has shifted from 20-80 to 80-20.

With the massive migration of Chinese to Xinjiang, the Uyghurs have become marginalized, second-class citizens in their own land. The autonomy accorded to the Xinjiang region by the PRC Constitution and the Law on Regional Autonomy has been largely symbolic. Although Uyghurs hold most of the top positions in the regional and local governments in Xinjiang, they have no real political power.The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) makes all of the major policy decisions and almost all of the top posts in the regional and local CCP committees are assumed by Chinese.


The Chinese have been the major beneficiaries of development in Xinjiang. The government widely discriminates against Uyghurs in education and employment.Chinese schools in Xinjiang receive much more government money and have vastly better facilities than do Uyghur schools.In its hiring practices, the government favors Chinese who have migrated to the area over their more qualified Uyghur counterparts.Furthermore, the government assures that foreign companies attracted by recent oil discoveries hire Chinese instead of the indigenous Uyghurs. Among the Uyghurs, the rates of unemployment, illiteracy, and poverty are very high. The government’s discrimination against the Uyghurs is a blatant violation of its obligations under the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ratified by China in 1982).

Political Persecution
The Chinese government has harshly cracked down on any activity that it suspects of supporting Uyghur nationalism (officially termed separatism by the Chinese government), including peaceful religious activity. It has also repressed all other forms of political dissent, such as criticism of the government's abuse of religious and cultural freedoms.In the course of this crackdown, the government has systematically perpetrated gross human rights violations against the Uyghurs including: arbitrary and summary executions; arbitrary arrests and prolonged detentions without charge or trial; denial of access to lawyers; summary trials in secret while families of prisoners are denied information about their whereabouts and legal status; and particularly cruel methods of torture to extract confessions and incriminating information.The government has justified its crackdown on the Uyghurs as necessary to maintaining national security and social order by pointing to the handful of Uyghurs who have resorted to violent means to protest against the government. However, according to cases documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the vast majority of the victims of these violations have been Uyghur activists who have peacefully exercised their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and freedom of dissent, such as through distributing anti-government or pro-independence literature, engaging in non-violent demonstrations, or communicating the Uyghurs' plight to foreigners. Furthermore, the vast majority have dissented in the name of human rights and freedom, not in the name of religion. Even the Uyghurs who are suspected of resorting to violence have fundamental rights that the government must respect, including the right to a fair trial and the right not to be subjected to torture.

According to Amnesty International, the XUAR is the only region in China where political prisoners are known to have been executed in recent years.Some political suspects, including women, have been extrajudicially executed. In addition, according to Human Rights Watch, there was an increase in the number of public sentencing rallies in Xinjiang in 1999, some attended by hundreds or thousands of people, as well as an increase in lengthy prison terms for suspected Uyghur “splittists” in 1999. Uyghur political prisoners are also known to have been subject to particularly cruel methods of torture, that are not being used in other parts of China, in order to extract “confessions” and other incriminating information, including: inserting horse hair into male prisoners’ penises, or a special wire with small spikes which fold flat when inserted but extend when it is pulled out; using unidentified injections which cause the victims to become mentally unbalanced or lose the ability to speak coherently; and inserting pepper, chili powder, or other substances into the prisoner’s mouth, nose, or genital organs. Other forms of torture include: using electric batons and wires to give powerful electric shocks; inserting sticks or needles under the fingernails or pulling the fingernails out; using handcuffs, shackles, or ropes to tie prisoners in ways which cause intense pain; exposing prisoners to extreme heat or cold; severely beating prisoners with fists or a variety of instruments; kicking; suspending prisoners by the arms or feet often combined with beatings; using trained dogs to attack prisoners; and allowing Chinese male criminals to rape Uyghur women political prisoners. These practices amount to blatant violations of the UN Convention Against Torture, which China ratified in 1988.

Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Chinese government has used the United States' global war on terrorism as a justification for intensifying its crackdown on the Uyghur people. China has found an opportunity in the tragic events of September 11 to falsely portray the entire Uyghur struggle for basic human rights and self-determination as terrorism, and therefore to justify a brutal and indiscriminate on the Uyghurs. The Chinese government's definition of terrorism makes no distinction between peaceful dissident activity and violent activity. It considers virtually all Uyghur dissidents to be terrorists and therefore subject to punishment. According to the U.S. State Department's 2001 Country Report on China (released March 4, 2002), "Because the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Government regularly lists together those involved in "ethnic separatism, illegal religious activities, and violent terrorism," it is often unclear whether particular raids, detentions, arrests, or judicial punishments target those peacefully seeking their political goals or those engaged in violence."

Religious Persecution
The Chinese government has placed many restrictions on the Uyghurs’ practice of Islam and has persecuted Uyghurs for studying Islam.The government has justified its actions to the outside world with claims that Islamic fundamentalism is rampant in Xinjiang and must be controlled. However, according to Xinjiang experts as well as the rhetoric of the vast majority of Uyghur activists, the Uyghurs’ struggle is a nationalist struggle, not a religious one. Xinjiang experts have noted that the Uyghurs’ traditional values and practice of Islam are very different from the radicalism of militants in other parts of the world. Religious extremism has no real roots in Uyghur society.The influence of extremists from bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan has been limited to a small number of poorly educated Uyghur peasants in the south. Another reason that the government has cracked down on Islam is that religious practice has strengthened the Uyghurs' nationalist identity and has offered an opportunity for Uyghurs to come together and unify.

The Chinese government has closed down many mosques and Koranic schools, greatly restricted the building of new mosques, imposed tight controls on the Islamic clergy and forced them to undergo government training and communist indoctrination, dismissed or arrested religious leaders who are deemed to be too independent or “subversive”, and forbidden Uyghurs who work in government offices and other official institutions from practicing their religious beliefs, failing which they lose their jobs.

Denial of Cultural Rights
The Chinese government has also violated the Uyghurs’ cultural rights by harassing Uyghur entrepreneurs who manufacture traditional ethnic clothes, detaining Uyghurs solely for wearing symbols of their cultural or religious identity such as headscarves for Muslim women, and banning a social and cultural forum known as "meshrep".

In addition, the government has assured that Uyghur children learn a grossly distorted account of their people’s history in school.The government has repressed the truth about Uyghur history for fear of the development of nationalist sentiment. Several Uyghur writers of history have been harassed, detained, or placed under house arrest for not conforming to the Party line in their writings. According to the U.S. State Department, a Uyghur language press does exist in Xinjiang but it has a very small circulation and most Uyghurs depend on market rumors for information.

Nuclear Testing
From 1964 to 1996, China detonated 42 bombs in Lop Nor in southern Xinjiang.It officially ended testing in 1996 after signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, it has done nothing to deal with the terrible health and environmental ramifications of 32 years of testing.The high level of radiation in the area has caused widespread cancer in the Lop Nor area and many Uyghur children being born with horrific birth defects. Most of the people affected are not even receiving basic healthcare.

Forced Abortions
According to the Chinese government’s official birth control policy, national minority couples are permitted to have three children in rural areas and two children in urban areas. As in the rest of China, each area in Xinjiang is given a quota of permitted births for a particular time period, and pregnancies must be planned accordingly. The government may forbid a Uyghur couple from having a child for many years until the “plan” allows for it.Officially, the government’s method for enforcing the plan is through a system of rewards and penalties. However, Amnesty International has received numerous reports of Uyghur women who became pregnant without government permission being forced to have abortions. In addition, Amnesty states that forced sterilization is common.As a result of these forced abortions and sterilizations, many Uyghur women have chronic health problems.