Keep up pressure over "dying rooms", urges TV producer

ONLY international pressure will force a change in the treatment of Chinese orphans, the producer of the recent Channel 4 television documentary, Return to the Dying Rooms, has said in Dublin.

Speaking before the programme is shown on RTE tonight, Mr Brian Woods said the pressure must be sustained. "Otherwise western governments are telling China that it can do whatever it likes in relation to human rights."

While Mr Woods said trade and human rights were "not separate issues", he would not condemn the Government for seeking to improve economic ties with China while also condemning human rights abuses.

Ireland's £19 million export trade to China received a recent boost with Aer Rianta's new duty free contract for Beijing International Airport.

Last week in the Dail, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Joan Burton, said she was horrified by Return to the Dying Rooms. She said Government officials had visited two of the orphanages profiled in both the programme and the recent Human Rights Watch/Asia report, and had found conditions "austere but in line with conditions elsewhere in China".

The Minister also contacted the Unicef director, Ms Carol Bellamy, and a programme for training and improving care has been concluded with the Chinese government. The Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring, has raised the issue with the Chinese ambassador to Ireland, Ms Fan Huijuan, who has, in turn, launched a strong public defence of her country's treatment of orphans and dismissed the Channel 4 documentary as a fabrication.

Mr Woods, who works with the independent London based film company True Vision, made both the recent documentary and the original programme, The Dying Rooms, last year in China with Ms Kate Blewett. Both films were commissioned and funded by Channel 4.

The first was made undercover only, while the second identified the institutions. Both were inspired by a report on the treatment of girl children in China written by the Hong Kong based reporter, Peter Woolrich, of the South China Morning Post.

They filmed healthy baby girls tied to chairs, their legs splayed over makeshift potties, and unattended children. There was evidence that sick baby girls were put in a separate room in some orphanages and left to die.

Under China's one child policy, preference for male children has resulted in forced abortions and documented abuse of females, as recorded in the recent Human Rights Watch report.

The Chinese government responded with its own film, called The Dying Room& A Patchwork of Lies, which was shown to journalists recently in Dublin. The film disputes much of the content of the Channel 4 film and said that most institutions were well run.

"A lot of evidence we had on film but did not use contradicts the Chinese government assertions," Mr Woods said. He was shocked at the extent of the attempt to challenge the work. For instance, the Chinese claimed that the child, Mei Ming, (which means "no name" in Chinese), who died of starvation and neglect four days after being filmed in the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, was in fact a severely mentally retarded boy named Jian Xun who had vomited every time he was fed.

"This is just not true. And Mei Ming was, in fact, a girl."

Mr Woods said the films were not an attempt at "China bashing" and he expressed concern that the first film was "used" in the US by "pro life" groups. "These films are not about China's one child policy but about Chinese orphanages. We had to put the treatment of the children in context."

He said he did not think the treatment was part of official Chinese state policy. "I think that many people, including many politicians and officials in China, would be appalled if they knew what was happening. But they don't, and perhaps they never will. However, I am optimistic that there might be some change."

A fictitious charity, formed for the purposes of gaining access to orphanages to record the first film, is now an established body, the Dying Rooms Trust. It has already used some of the £100,000 collected to send two medical missions to China, and is setting up child sponsorship programmes.

Mr Woods said he had "no problems" with western adoption of Chinese orphans if lives could be saved, but it would not solve the larger problem in his view.

The Dying Rooms Trust account number in the Ulster Bank, Lower Baggot Street, Dublin is: 35772019, sorting code 98-50-20.