In fact, while the world’s attention is focused on Geneva, more might be happening behind the scenes in Beijing. For years reformers have gingerly explored ways to relax some of China’s worst human-rights abuses from within the communist system. Now for the first time, say Western diplomats and advisers to Chinese leaders, authorities are mapping out substantive changes to the more unpalatable aspects of China’s justice system, including its infamous “re-education through labor” camps.
More than 230,000 citizens–including pro-democracy activists, Falun Gong practitioners and Tibetan monks–currently languish in the Chinese gulag. Their cases are decided by small, secretive panels that include uniformed police and agents of the feared Ministry of State Security. Prisoners can be sentenced for up to three years without trial. One Falun Gong devotee, sculptor Zhang Kunlun, was detained last July and dumped in one of these camps. Later freed because he holds a Canadian passport, Zhang says police beat him with cattle prods and shouted “[President] Jiang Zemin says Falun Gong is an evil cult!” Similar stories prompted U.N. human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson to call for an end to the controversial system during a recent visit to Beijing.
Chinese leaders began to re-examine the system long before Robinson’s trip, in large part because they can see the writing on the wall. Most officials now accept that change is inevitable once China accedes to the World Trade Organization and ratifies the U.N. covenant on civil and political rights: if the country is held to the standards enshrined in both, and that’s a big if, “we’ll have to play by the rules of the global game,” says Xing Bensi, a senior member of the Chinese Parliament and deputy of its law committee. Says a Western diplomat, “There is growing recognition here that as China joins the global community it will have to have a predictable system of law.”
At the same time, even mild concessions on human rights cost less internally and carry much greater weight abroad than other possible compromises–bending on the issue of arms sales to Taiwan, for instance. Beijing has several reasons to engender good will right now: to mollify a Bush administration that views China with suspicion, to win over the International Olympic Committee, which will decide in July whether to award the 2008 Games to the Chinese capital and to set the stage for a successful U.S.-China summit this fall. “It’s no longer a question of whether, but when to change the system,” says the Western diplomat in Beijing. “And the big debate is how thoroughly to change it.”
That question is roiling China’s bureaucracy. The labor-camp system grants immense powers to law-enforcement agencies like the Ministry of State Security, the police and the Ministry of Justice, which are reluctant to relinquish that clout. But reform-minded officials from China’s Supreme Court, legal academia, the Foreign Ministry and party circles–who fear leaving the door open to the kind of abuses that marked the Cultural Revolution–seek more legal guarantees for human rights. The moderates want to see legal amendments that allow courts, not security personnel using administrative fiat, to decide whether to detain an individual. They’re also considering the abolition of labor camps altogether, possibly in favor of “community service and other forms of punishment that do not amount to complete deprivation of an individual’s freedom,” says Liu Nanlai of the Center for Human Rights Studies, a government-backed think tank.
Still, even though reforming the labor camps has become a high priority for China’s law officials, changes to the system will likely be gradual. As always, leaders fear loosening the reins too much in a restive society. Freeing individual prisoners is always easier, and almost as effective in terms of international opinion. Last year more than 15 “counter-revolutionaries” were released from prison early. So far this year another four have been quietly set free, including Xu Jianxiong, who was jailed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and released last week. Activists also hope the United States and China will resume their dialogue on human rights, which was suspended in 1999. And the U.S. Congress recently authorized funding for joint legal programs with China–a small victory for reformers.
The limits to these changes are clear: authorities have no intention of re-examining Tiananmen, for instance, or releasing the chokehold on Falun Gong. With a critical leadership transition scheduled for next year, Jiang has an eye on the future as much as the reformers. Until he has established his proteges in positions of power, he won’t risk too many concessions. But after that, the groundwork being laid now could pave the way for some real change.
