Case Number 1: On December 28th, Mr Lu Wenhe, a Chinese citizen resident in the US, was stopped by security police in Beijing as he made his way to the home of the mother of a student victim of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He was carrying $25,000 in donated relief funds for orphans and other Tiananmen bereaved. The police forced him to sign over the funds to State Security Bureau officials, and would not return his passport until he made his 78-year-old father, a retired professor, the legal guarantor for payment. Mr Lu returned to the US and got the bank drafts frozen. Failing to get their hands on the $25,000, the police confiscated the deeds to his father's Shanghai home.
Case Number 2: At midnight on Friday, February 5th, the start of the Chinese New Year, about 100 devotees of China's banned Falun Gong mystical movement, many elderly, gathered in Tiananmen Square for a peaceful display of meditation. Police descended upon them, punching and kicking. One man was beaten unconscious before being thrown into a police bus. Some are now believed to have joined the estimated 5,000 Falun Gong members in labour camps, or the 300 in jail.
Case Number 3: On Thursday last it was reported that Mr Liu Shizun (38) had been sentenced to six years in prison. His crime? "Subverting national political power" - i.e., helping to organise the China Democracy Party, set up two years ago to campaign peacefully for a democratic China. Mr Liu was an assistant of a party leader already jailed for 13 years, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights organisation.
These three recent cases demonstrate a consistent aspect of human rights in China. There are no rights for individuals who challenge the Communist Party's monopoly on power and the way it is exercised, whether the challenge concerns free speech or the right to assembly, or even donating money for charitable purposes. Nor is there any proper legal redress for such individuals.
The Chinese government knows its human rights record may compromise its national interests. It could affect approval by the US Congress of permanent normal trading relations status, which could in turn complicate Beijing's accession to the World Trade Organisation. China is also aware that it will draw censure at the annual session next month of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Beijing has been working hard, therefore, to build up a credible defence against what Amnesty International yesterday called the "most serious and widespread" crackdown on dissent since 1989. Last Thursday the government published a 15,000-word White Paper, 50 Years of Progress in China's Human Rights, the most closely argued response by the Chinese government to worldwide criticism of its human rights record. It goes back to the founding of Communist China and its constitution, which stipulates "that state power belonged to the people who, according to the law, have the right to vote and stand for election, and have the freedoms of ideology, speech, publication, gathering, forming associations, communication, personal affairs, residence, change of residence, religious belief and demonstration".
As only the Communist Party determines most of these rights, it is clear that the word "people" does not refer to individuals but to the masses represented by the Communist Party (and a few small affiliated pro-Communist parties). And the Communist Party has assumed the right to ban free speech, free assembly, free publication and the free forming of associations. As the arbiter of human rights, the Communist Party is accountable only to the law, but as the party determines the outcome of political and religious cases, the law or the legal system in China is incapable of providing protection or legal redress for individual citizens who challenge its leading role.
With no case to put forward as the protector of the political and religious rights of its own individual citizens, the authors of the document make an argument for the Communist Party as the champion of communal rights.
"China has thoroughly changed the situation which prevailed in Old China in which the majority of the Chinese population lived in a state of hunger or semi-starvation, and has created the miracle of supporting 22 per cent of the total population of the world on only 7 per cent of the world's cultivated land," the White Paper states.
It goes on to point out that while the poverty-stricken population worldwide has risen year by year since 1980, in China it has fallen by 10 million a year on average and that China, weak and impoverished 50 years ago, is now on the brink of prosperity. It claims to have eliminated the main social evils of the Old China - though anyone who has travelled around the country recently will find breathtaking the assertion that prostitution has been "basically wiped out".
It details dramatic improvements in life expectancy, per capita income, literacy rates, nutrition, women's rights and health and the introduction of democracy at village level.
The paper refers briefly to unidentified setbacks during Communist rule, presumably the Great Famine at the end of the 1950s that killed over 20 million people, and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution which devastated millions of lives. It admits that as a developing country "there is still room for improvement with regard to the levels of China's democratic and legal construction, the degrees of social civilisation and people's living standards". It concludes that China "must guarantee human rights in the country's laws and systems".
But nowhere are the civil rights of individuals addressed. It refers obliquely to this omission by arguing that to promote human rights, China "cannot copy the mode of human rights development of the developed western countries, nor can it copy the methods of other developing countries". It does not spell out why, but the answer is obvious: Beijing will not tolerate any challenge to the party in power.
The paradox is that while China takes ever harsher measures against dissidents to maintain the Communist Party in power, it can be confident of defeating any censure motion in Geneva. The US is preparing to table a resolution critical of Beijing's record but it will not get backing from any EU country.
This is because EU member-states have taken a decision "in practice" not to support any non-EU resolution at Geneva. And the EU will not table its own resolution because it cannot get consensus. France in particular, the first country three years ago to support dialogue rather than confrontation, will not go back on its decision. So national debate in member-countries, including Ireland, on a response to China's human rights record has effectively been stifled.
Pressure on the EU to drop its faith in dialogue alone to change things - a policy praised by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in 1998 as having "the potential to yield very positive results" - is unlikely to succeed. On February 10th a coalition of non-governmental organisations - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Campaign for Tibet, Human Rights in China, Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) and the FIDH (International Human Rights Federation) - called on the EU to back the resolution condemning China's record.
They claim the situation in China has deteriorated markedly over the past 12 months, citing the crackdown on Falun Gong and sentences of up to 18 years for labour, political and spiritual activists and Tibetan religious leaders. They also accuse the Chinese leadership of cynically manipulating events and the law to escape censure while continuing political oppression, including signing two UN rights covenants.
In January, the European Parliament voted 177-2 to support a censure motion, which the EU is likely to ignore. China's response was a furious statement from a committee of the National People's Congress that "without exaggeration, China ranks among those countries whose human rights situation can be counted as the best in the world".
Another example of the Chinese attitude to international condemnation may have been provided inadvertently by the security officer who seized the $25,000 for Tiananmen victims from Mr Lu. "We Communist Party members aren't afraid of being cursed at," he told Mr Lu, according to the US-based Human Rights in China. "Your friends in the United States might make noise in the media for a short while, but just for a short while. In the end, as always, Americans will still want to do business with us."
The White Paper, 50 Years of Progress in China's Human Rights, can be found at http://www.china.org.cn