According to Colin Mackerras, in his book Western Images of China, ‘the preoccupation of Western images with matters concerned with human rights and dissidents gained an added emphasis at just the same time that the general standard of livelihood of the Chinese people rose to an extent unprecedented in China’s history. This is not to deny the existence of human rights issues, but the focus they received in the Western media was both ironic and unwarranted by comparison with the improvements.’1
Randall Peerenboom, in his book China Modernizes, accounts for this irony by suggesting that the constant negative reporting on China by the Western media reflects a long-standing ‘bias against nonliberal democratic regimes,’2 noting that ‘UN resolutions for systematic government violations of human rights have overwhelmingly been meted out against a handful of non-democratic developing countries with poor civil and political rights records, even though they may do relatively better on other human rights measures and indicators of well-being, including physical integrity violations.’3 In 2002 for example, China, which received a Level 4 rating on the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International devised Political Terror Scale, was targeted for criticism for systematic human rights violations, while only Afghanistan among the eight countries with the worst Political Terror Scale rating of 5 was targeted.
But as Daniel Bell very wisely suggests, ‘Western-style liberal democrats should tolerate, if not respect, areas of justifiable difference.’7 Yet it is only by absorbing ourselves into the Chinese mind, into the Chinese way of seeing and doing things, that we will be able to recognise and to appreciate such ‘justifiable differences’ – thereby enabling us to make more rational, more reasoned, more enlightened judgements about the present human rights situation in China.
It is important to keep in mind the fact that the Chinese view human rights a little differently from most Westerners, and that’s not because they are inherently somehow less moral, but because their material realities and modes of living and relating to one another, as embodied by the Confucian culture, result in a different psychology and hence a different mix of values from ours.
‘One only needs to recall that the very concept of “rights” is a Western product,’ as Dingding Chen (a political scientist from the
This dream of ‘building a wealthy and powerful state’ has at least two implications for
‘The Government is justified in setting aside individual rights if it means that the collective good is promoted,’ argued one post-graduate student from
In short, the Chinese conceptualise human rights as being more collective in nature than individual, more social and economic than civil and political, more needs-based than rights-entitled, and more duties-oriented than rights-centered – and such values are consistent with the dominant tradition of Confucian humanism. Placed in these cultural and historical contexts, it becomes much easier to understand why the Chinese government has put so much emphasis on national development and economic rights. As Chen says, ‘it is not so much that the Chinese government uses developmentalism as an instrument to deflect international criticism, although this might be part of the reason. The more fundamental reason is that they indeed think this way, and their thinking is largely shaped by traditional Chinese culture.’11
Much can be learnt about the Chinese conceptualisation of human rights by examining for example, the motivations behind the implementation of the household registration system (hukou), which can be used to tie people to the place where their household registration is kept. Initially set up during the Mao era, the hukou system continues to provide the state with a mechanism with which to regulate population distribution, with one of the main aims being to prevent the emergence of large urban slums. Since the beginning of the reform era, the hukou system has been continually reformed to allow greater numbers of rural farmers to migrate to the cities in search of better work opportunities and higher incomes – although as Dorothy Solinger has pointed out, migrant labourers are not treated as well as urban citizens, since they are not entitled to all the rights that go along with an urban hukou in a given area. More often than not, migrants are ineligible for welfare, medical, educational and housing benefits, making them ‘secondary citizens’.12 Solinger is morally outraged, noting that the more economically developed areas of China have ‘drawn upon the country’s own domestic peasants to serve as drudges, in the process denying them the rights that international norms of justice decree should belong to all human beings.’13
To be sure, the legal discrimination against rural migrants does have negative social consequences: they are routinely subject to the scorn of urbanites and are often suspected of criminal activity, and a survey conducted in Beijing in 2002 revealed that ‘roughly one in four’ experienced problems getting paid, with 60 percent of respondents saying they regularly worked ‘over ten hours a day.’14
So what could possibly motivate what seems like a transparently unjust system? ‘One way of answering this question is to anticipate the likely consequences of economic development without the hukou system’, explains Daniel Bell. ‘Consider what happened when Tibet – for Han Chinese, the most remote, inhospitable, and hostile part of the country – was exempted from the hukou system.’15 To encourage economic development in Tibet, the central government exempted Tibet from the general rule that one must be a permanent resident of a given area to start a business there. ‘The result,’ says Baogang He, ‘was that Tibetan cities, Lhasa in particular, were inundated with so-called “floating population” of Han Chinese from other provinces.’16 This he says, resulted in the taking away of businesses from Tibetans, exacerbating tensions between the two groups.17
If the urban hukou is abolished in larger cities like Shanghai and Beijing, argues Ming Wu, ‘there will be a flood of labourers from the countryside’ which will lead to many ‘urban illnesses.’18 Daniel Bell agrees, arguing that the hukou system has prevented the emergence of large shanty towns and slums of the kind that ‘characterise the big cities of other developing countries such as Brazil, Mexico, India, and Indonesia,’ noting that the system consequently also helps to minimise crime and conflict.19 Not only this, adds Bell, but ‘the medium-sized and small cities of the less-developed western part of China find it easier to retain the talent that helps to develop their economies. In short, the disadvantages of the hukou system may be outweighed by the positive contribution of the system to the long term economic development of the country. Once the country attains the requisite level of economic development, the system can be abolished.’20
Indeed, already the system is no longer deployed as a ‘one size fits all’ solution: the levels of economic development vary greatly across
For the fundamentalist liberal, the hukou system is inherently unjust and is something that ought to be abolished. But for the Chinese, the need to regulate population distribution examplifies the strong utilitarian element in the Chinese conceptualisation of human rights – one that places collective rights over those of the individual.
If we were to look at
‘China was the world’s fastest growing economy over the past two decades, with per capita incomes rising threefold,’ says the report, ‘although growing inequalities have left Guizhou ranking alongside Namibia (ranked 125 on the index) whereas Shanghai is more comparable to Portugal (which ranks 25 on the index).’25
Indeed, as Curt Goering of Amnesty International pointed out in an interview he gave for NOW magazine, ‘there is a growing recognition of economic, social and cultural rights as rights: that the right to food, to housing, health care, employment and education, are rights every bit as important as the right to freedom of speech or the right not to be tortured or arbitrarily detained. There is a growing understanding of the interrelationship and indivisibility of rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural.’26
It is unfair however, as Randall Peerenboom suggests, to compare China’s human rights progress, both collective and individual (along with the performance of its legal system and government institutions) with the record of much wealthier countries, as empirical studies show that ‘rule of law, good governance, and virtually all rights including civil and political rights are highly correlated with wealth.’27 William Meyer for example, in his 1996 study titled ‘Human Rights and MNCs: Theory Verses Quantitative Analysis’, found that Gross National Product was the biggest contributor to political, social and economic rights.28 ‘Countries that enjoyed higher levels of economic well-being had somewhat consistently better human rights records than those that did not,’ concluded Neil J. Mitchell and James M. McCormick in their 1988 study on the ‘Economic and Political Explanations of Human Rights Violations.’29 Likewise, Geert Hofstede, in his 2001 study titled Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organisations Across Nations, found that wealth was the main factor effecting rights compliance,30 and Clair Apodaca, in her 1998 study, ‘Measuring Women’s Economic and Social Rights Achievement’, also noticed that higher Gross Domestic Product was associated with better performance on human rights indicators.31
‘When a society’s economic development is such that most people can read and write, then it is in a much better position to practice such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of the press,’ concedes the human rights journalist and China critic, Frank Ching. ‘The link between economic development – that is economic rights – and political rights should be obvious.’32 But of course far more is needed than high per capita literacy levels alone in order to make substantial gains in measurements of civil rights compliance, for as Doug Guthrie points out, economic development and the transition to capitalism requires a great deal of learning to take place, as people come to terms with new rules and institutions. ‘The assumption most often seems to be that, given certain institutional arrangements, individuals will naturally know how to carry out the practices of capitalism,’ with all of its Enlightenment institutions, such as a democratic system of government, a free press and a stable rule of law. ‘Completely absent from this view are the roles of history, culture, and pre-existing institutions, and it is a vision that is far too simplistic to comprehend the challenge of making rational economic and legal systems work in the absence of stable institutions and a history to which they can be tied to.’33 New institutions, says Guthrie, ‘must be set in place long enough to gain stability and legitimacy,’ which are processes that ‘occur slowly and over time.’34
Comparing China to much wealthier countries leads then to the unsurprising conclusion that China has more problems, and so what is more revealing, argues Peerenboom, ‘is how well a country does compared to the average country in its income class.’35 When one takes a closer look at the evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, it becomes clear that ‘China outperforms the average country in its income class on most major indicators of human rights and well-being, with the notable exception of civil and political rights.’36
The incidence of tuberculosis in
In
All of these health outcomes represent significant improvements for China, though as Randall Peerenboom has pointed out, ‘government spending as a share of total costs has decreased rapidly in the reform era as the state has sought to marketise health services’, with the result being that ‘access to medical care has deteriorated for those without personal or family resources.46 In 2005, government contributions to the public health system in China amounted to only 1 percent, with private out-of-pocket payments constituting more than 85 percent of total public health spending.47
It needs to be remembered however, as Minxin Pei points out, that on a per capita basis, China’s rural residents ‘receive only a third of the healthcare enjoyed by their urban counterparts.’49 In 2001, only 15 percent of the government's health budget was allocated to rural areas, even though rural residents accounted for roughly 70 percent of the population. ‘Consequently,’ notes
Recognising the seriousness of the problem, the State Council, in January 2009, passed a plan to introduce an 850 billion yuan package to reform the country’s marketised health care system with the aim of achieving universal health care by the year 2020. The plan, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, will provide 90 percent of the population with an adequate level of health insurance that will also subsidise the cost of medicines. Each person covered by the system will receive an annual subsidy of 120 yuan, starting in 2010, and ‘all revenue raised by public hospitals will have to be funneled to state coffers’ and ‘pricing standards for medical services’ will be set by the government in order to keep prices affordable.51
When it comes to education,
According to the Christian Science Monitor, in 1950 the earnings of
Despite the undeniable progress in improving women’s lives, the present picture remains mixed, as even Randall Peerenboom acknowledges: ‘The participation of women in political life is still low,’ he writes, ‘especially at higher levels of government; domestic violence still occurs frequently; and social ills such as female trafficking and infanticide remain problems.’60 The percentage of total political seats currently held by women is relatively high in China though, especially when compared to other Asian countries: 20 percent of the total number of seats that make up the National People’s Congress in China are held by women, compared to 9 percent of Thailand’s parliamentary seats, 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s, 8 percent of India’s, 11 percent of Indonesia’s, 13 percent of South Korea’s, 9 percent of Japan’s and 9 percent of Malaysia’s.61
China’s housing policy, as the Harvard researchers Mark Duda, Xiulan Zhang an Mingzhu Dong have observed, has ‘both welfare and home ownership components,’ with the state subsidising construction schemes with developer profit caps designed to help middle and lower-income families.65 Housing developers are also offered financial incentives to keep their housing prices affordable, with various tax-reduction and exemption programs on offer for those who are able to keep their profit margins below 3 percent.66 Between 1998-2001, new housing was provided for more than four million medium and low-income families.67
One of the parametres used to define the United Nation’s concept of adequate housing is the amount of living space available to the individual. A common measure of this is a country’s per capita square metre floorage space. By 2002,
Economic growth in
The Chinese central government has shown itself to be quite responsive to the problems associated with growing inequality, both in the countryside and the cities, as Randall Peerenboom observes, issuing a steady stream of legislation to improve social welfare, strengthening job training and creation programs, easing restrictions on migrant workers and reducing the tax burdens on farmers.71 ‘Perhaps more importantly,’ he says, ‘the government has given substance to the commitments and promise of these new regulations by increasing spending. For instance, the government spent some 70 billion yuan in 2003, an increase of almost 20 percent over 2002, on the “three-stage guarantee” for laid-off workers that provides a basic living allowance, unemployment insurance, and then a subsistence allowance if the person still cannot find employment. The government also allocated an additional 4.6 billion yuan to subsidise job creation. There were 29 million retirees from enterprises covered by welfare, an increase of 41 percent over 2002,’ and ‘nearly sixty million people have been covered by the rural old-age insurance scheme, and almost 1.4 million farmers received pensions.’72 As Peerenboom quite fairly points out, ‘although these increased expenditures will by no means put an end to the problems, and will benefit different groups disproportionately, with former state-owned enterprise employees better taken care of than others, they do demonstrate some level of commitment by the [Hu] leadership to pay attention to social justice issues.’73
Even when it comes to the issue of individual civil human rights, China has in fact shown a keen desire to conform to international standards and conventions, ratifying to date over twenty human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet despite it willingness to conform to international conventions, China continues to experience serious human rights problems, though it needs to be acknowledged that in most areas, the situation has been steadily improving over recent years.
Take
In 2005, the first visit to
In recent years, the issue of torture has become a subject of public concern and debate within
The Government’s willingness to acknowledge the pervasiveness of torture was confirmed when the Supreme People’s Procuratorate published The Crime of Tortured Confession (Xingxun Bigong Zui) in late 1997, including China’s first public official statistics on criminal cases of tortured confession – reporting an average of 364 cases per year between 1979 and 1989, upward of 400 cases per year for most years in the 1990s, and the admission that 241 persons had been tortured to death over the two-year period 1993-1994.
Following on from its recognition of the problem, the Government has undertaken a number of measures to tackle torture… In August 2003, the Minister of Public Security, Zhou Yongkang, issued a set of unified regulations on the standardisation of law enforcement procedures for public security institutions entitled “Regulations on the Procedures for Handling Administrative Cases”, including procedures defining police powers in respect of time limits for confiscation of property, legal means for gathering evidence, time limits on investigation and examination of suspects, etc. In 2004, the Ministry issued regulations prohibiting the use of torture and threats to gain confessions and initiated a nationwide campaign to improve policemen’s criminal investigation capacity…Practical measures to combat torture have included piloting systems of audio and video recording in interrogation rooms, strengthening representation during the investigative and pretrial phase of the criminal process by placing lawyers on a 24-hour basis in pilot police stations, designing interrogation rooms which separate suspects from interrogators, and placing resident procurators in places of detention and near public security bureaus to supervise law enforcement personnel.75
Although the central Government has made significant efforts to reduce the practice of torture, as noted above, ‘the effectiveness of these efforts is significantly hampered by the degree of localism inherent in policing and criminal procedure at the grass-roots level,’ says the report, ‘which impedes the effective implementation of central regulations, guidance, training, prohibitions, etc.’76
Even though the Ministry of Public Security does formally exercise leadership over nationwide public security work, it is important to realise that ‘local Party Committees enjoy substantial authority to interpret and implement policy in their regions including by exercising leadership over respective Public Security Bureaus. This results in localised and semi-autonomous police forces shaped by local power balances and economic resources, with accountability to local political leaders.’77 The Special Rapporteur also found that prison conditions, ‘were generally satisfactory’, although he did notice a ‘palpable level of fear’ when talking to detainees, and was struck by ‘the strict level of discipline’ exerted on detainees in different facilities. ‘Time and again,’ reads the report, ‘he entered cells and found all detainees sitting cross-legged on a mattress or in similar forced positions reading the Chinese Law or prison rules. According to information provided by detainees, such forced re-education, in particular in pretrial detention centres, goes on for most of the day.’78
The Special Rapporteur also expressed concern at the continuing number of executions carried out each year in
The question of religious freedom is another contentious human rights issue in
‘One indisputable cause of religious revival in
Mindful of a long history of religious movements toppling dynasties in the past, China, as Randall Peerenboom acknowledges, nevertheless ‘imposes restrictions on religious beliefs and practices’, recognising only the five religions mentioned above, and requiring all religious groups to register with the State Administration of Religious Affairs.85
According to the
The Commission also noted ‘an increase in reported detentions of unregistered Catholics’ in 2005, after the Regulation on Religious Affairs entered into force. In June 2007 for example, ‘the public security bureau detained Jia Zhiguo, underground bishop of the Diocese of Zhending, in
Uighurs in China’s north-western Xinjiang Province are also unhappy with Beijing’s restriction of their religious activities, though it is also true that many independence advocates in Xinjiang operate under the banner of Islam. ‘Working as religious clerics,’ notes Lai, ‘they condemn the Chinese Communist Party and the government, interpret the Koran as advocating an Islamic state and militant jihad, and propose independence as the best way to preserve local cultures.’91 As Nicolas Becquelin points out, Chinese official sources claim that explosions, assassinations and other violent acts in the 1990s totalled a few thousand, and that in 1998 alone, over seventy serious incidents occurred, resulting in more than 380 deaths.92
Political dissidents, religious movements like the Falun Gong, labour activists and Tibetan and Uighur separatists, all pose threats to China’s social and economic stability, and thus the government, as Randall Peerenboom appreciates, ‘must proceed with caution given the high potential for, and horrific consequences of, social chaos.’93 Most Chinese are in fact prepared to accept the need to sacrifice some human rights in order to safeguard other, more important ones. More pragmatic than dogmatic, there is an understanding, widely held, that sometimes a right may have to be sacrificed in the short term ‘in order to secure more of that right in the long term.’94 Interestingly, this way of thinking is not unique to China, or to East Asia in general, as the U.S. government’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks show: ‘When stable, Euro-America can afford to preach to developing countries struggling with terrorists about the value of civil and political rights and the importance of the rule of law,’ notes Peerenboom, ‘but when faced with threats, much cherished rights go out the window. If there is anything universal, it would seem to be disregard for human rights whenever there are real or perceived threats to stability or order.’95
Nevertheless, when using the pluralist standard of assessment endorsed by John Gray, we can see that traditional values, when widely adhered to by members of a particular society, do in fact very often affect the prioritising of rights. As Daniel Bell explains:
Different societies may rank rights differently, and if they face a similar set of disagreeable circumstances they may come to a different conclusion about the right that needs to be curtailed. For example,
Fundamentalist liberals in the West like to think that the individual rights they enjoy ought to be the rights of all, and so they claim their rights to be universal. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its emphasis on the civil and political rights of the individual, is not, however, in reality, relevant for all. As Daniel Bell very rightly points out, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘was formulated without significant input from
The Chinese central government has nevertheless shown some willingness to conform to Western norms by committing itself to improving the civil rights of its people, and so its efforts and achievements, where they occur, need to be acknowledged if further action is to be encouraged. It is important then, not to exaggerate the extent of
The reports produced by Western-based human rights organisations often depict the detention of political and religious dissidents in
If we examine the 2005 findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Civil and Political Rights, including the Question of Torture and Detention, we see that 314 cases of alleged torture were reported between the years 2000 and 2005, involving around 1,160 individuals.104 Of these, 66 percent were Falan Gong practitioners, 11 percent Uighur separatists, 8 percent sex workers, 6 percent Tibetans, 5 percent human rights defenders, 2 percent political dissidents, and the remaining 2 percent were people either effected with HIV/AIDs or were of unregistered religious groups other than the Falan Gong.105 Most of these abuses occurred in pretrial detention centres, like police stations, and were perpetrated by police and other public security staff – reflecting the Rapporteur’s findings that when torture does occur in China, it is usually at the local level, and ‘because the police are often under great pressure from above to solve criminal cases.’106 Without wanting to trivialise the severe harm caused to such individuals or to downplay the gross injustices they have suffered, it needs to be said, in the interests of gaining a realistic idea of the size and scope of the problem, that these 1,160 individuals make up only a minute percent of China’s total prison population of roughly two million,107 and an even smaller percentage of the country’s total population of 1.3 billion.
Despite ongoing human rights problems, China has, over the past twenty-five years, made significant progress in improving its human rights outcomes, outperforming the average country in its middle-income class on most major indicators of human rights and well-being, with the notable exception of civil rights – though even on this front, steady progress is being made, as is verified empirically by the sources discussed above. While it is true that China’s statistics are thought by many to be unreliable and so are often contested, it cannot be denied that genuine progress has been made, and on all fronts. Even the U.S. State Department notes that
NOTES
1 Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China, Oxford University Press,
2 Randall Peerenboom,
3 Ibid., p.169.
4 Ibid., pp.169-170.
5 John Lee, Will
6 Vaudine
7 Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: political thinking for an East Asian context, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2006, p.8., p.8.
8 Dingding Chen, Understanding China’s Human Rights Policy: The Limits of International Norms, now available online at: http://cosa.uchicago.edu/dingdingchen3.htm
9 Ibid.
10 Chris Richards, ‘Let us speak! Social debate is opening up
11 Dingding Chen, Understanding
12 Dorothy J. Solinger, ‘Human Rights Issues in China’s Internal Migration: Insights from Comparisons with Germany and Japan’, in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (editors), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.285-312.
13 Ibid., p.286.
14 Shen Tan, ‘Rural Workforce Migration: A Summary of Some Studies’, Social Sciences in China, (Winter 2003), p.91.
15 Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, p.314.
16 Baogang He, ‘Minority Rights with Chinese Characteristics’, in W. Kymlicka and B. He (editors), Multiculturalism in Asia: Theoretical Perspectives,
17 Ibid.
18 Ming Wu, ‘The Chinese Household Registration System: Cannot be Abolished in the Near Term’, Xin xi bu, November 2001, p.26.
19 Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, p.316.
20 Ibid., pp.316-317.
21 Fang Cai, ‘How the Market Economy Promotes Reform of the Household Registration System’, Social Sciences in
22 ‘CPPCC Deputy Suggests Implementing System for Standardising the System of Entering Beijing’, Xin jing bao,
23
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Interview with Curt Goering, NOW magazine,
27 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.11.
28 William Myer, ‘Human Rights and MNCs: Theory Verses Quantitative Analysis’, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 18, No.2, 1996, p.368.
29 Neil J. Mitchell and James M. McCormick, ‘Economic and Political Explanations of Human Rights Violations’,World Politics, Volume 40, No.4, July 1988, p.497.
30 Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organisations Across Nations, Sage Publications, 2nd edition, 2003.
31 Clair Apodaca, ‘Measuring Women’s Economic and Social Rights Achievement’, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 20, No.1, 1998, pp.139-17.
32 Frank Ching,
33 Doug Guthrie,
34 Ibid., pp.71-72.
35 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.11.
36 Ibid., p.20
37 Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: the Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Harvard University Press,
38 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.132.
39 World Development Indicators, 2008, The World Bank,
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., pp.98-100. In
42 Ibid., pp.98-100.
43 Ibid., pp.106-110.
44 Ibid., pp.18-20.
45 Ibid., pp.18-20.
46 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.132.
47 World Development Indicators, 2008, p.94.
48 Ibid., pp.94-96.
49 Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p.173.
50 Ibid.
51 Mei Fong and Jason Leow, ‘
52 Doug Guthrie, China and Globalization, pp.188-189.
53 Comments by the Chinese Government on the Report on the Mission of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education to the People’s Republic of China, UN. ESCOR Human Rights Commissioner, 60th Session, Agenda Item Number 10, at 11, UN. Doc.E/CN. 4/2004/G/16/(2003), p.3.
54 World Development Indicators, 2008, pp.88-89.
55 Doug Guthrie, China and Globalization, p.193.
56 Ibid., p.196.
57 Matt Perrement, ‘
58 ‘One in Five Chinese Entreprenuers are Women’, Xinhua News Agency,
59 Nick Otto, ‘Women in
60 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, pp.160-161.
61 World Development Indicators, 2008, pp.28-30.
62 Deborah Davis, ‘Urban Consumer Culture’, Michael Hockx and Julia Strauss (editors), Culture in the Contemporary PRC, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.176-177.
63 Si-ming Li, ‘Transition to homeownership: Implications for wealth re-distribution’, Fulong Wu (editor), China’s Emerging Cities: the Making of Urbanism, Routledge, 2007, p.146.
64 Xinhua News Agency,
65 Mark Duda, Xiulan Zhang and Mingzhu Dong, China's Homeownership-Orientated Housing Policy: An Examination of Two Programs Using Survey Data from Beijing, Joint Center for Housing, Harvard University, p.1.
66 Asian Market Research News,
67 Human Settlements Country Profile: China, p.2
68 Ibid.
69 World Development Indicators, 2008, pp.68-70.
70 Ibid., pp.68-70.
71 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.130.
72 Ibid., pp.130-131.
73 Ibid., p.131.
74 James D. Seymour and Richard Anderson, Old Ghosts, New Ghosts: Prisons and Labour Reform Camps in
75 Manfred Nowak, Civil and Political Rights, Including the Question of Torture and Detention, a report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, March 10, 2006, p.15.
76 Ibid., p.16.
77 Ibid., p.16.
78 Ibid., p.19.
79 Amnesty International Report 2004:
80 Amnesty International, ‘Death Penalty: Death Sentences and Executions in 2007’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/death-sentences-and-executions-in-2007
81 Hongyi Harry Lai, ‘The Religious Revival in
82 Ibid., p.54.
83 Ibid., p.57.
84 Ibid., p.56
85 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, pp.107-108.
86 Congressional-Executive Commission on
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., p.96.
89 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.109.
90
91 Hongyi Harry Lai, ‘The Religious Revival in
92 Nicolas Becquelin, ‘Xinjiang in the Nineties’, The China Journal, Volume 44, July 2000, p.87.
93 Randall Peerenboom, ‘Out of the Pan and into the Fire: Well-Intentioned but Misguided Recommendations to Eliminate All Forms of Administrative Detention in
94 Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, p.59.
95 Randall Peerenboom, ‘Human Rights and Rule of Law: What’s the Relationship?’, Georgetown Journal of International Law, Volume 36, No.3, 2005, p.935.
96 Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, p.61.
97 Ibid., p.68.
98 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1944,
99 Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes, p.97.
100 Ibid., p.98.
101 Ibid., p.98.
102 Ibid., p.99.
103 Ibid., p.98.
104 Manfred Nowak, Civil and Political Rights, Including the Question of Torture and Detention, a report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, March 10, 2006, p.13.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., p.15
107 Doug Guthrie, China and Globalization, p.243.
108 U.S. Department of State, ‘Background Notes:
COMMENTS
