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Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2001

"The various kinds of unwarranted accusations levied by the United States against China under the pretext of so-called human rights questions are completely without reason and driven by ulterior motives," China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told reporters. "We demand that the U.S. side immediately change its track and return to the correct approach of dialogue."

Chinese state media Tuesday was filled with denunciations of a U.S. State Department annual human rights report that detailed increased abuses by Chinese authorities that have mainly targeted religious and political dissenters.

"The bottom line is the government strives to suppress any activity that they perceive as a threat to the government," the State Department's current human rights chief Michael Parmly said in a press conference.

The State Department report detailed practices of torture, extrajudicial killings, police beatings and general crackdowns against ethnic and religious minorities by Chinese authorities.

Unwanted criticism was delivered in Beijing as well from United Nations rights chief Mary Robinson, who is currently in China for a two-day seminar on judicial punishment.

"The concept of using forced labor as a punishment is against the accepted international human rights principles embodied in many international instruments," Robinson told Chinese officials and judges at the seminar.

China's long-entrenched "re-education through labor" program is often the focus of criticism and, according to human rights groups, more than 250,000 people are currently in labor camps where they can be sent without trial under Chinese law.

Chinese officials attending the seminar with Robinson dismissed her pleas for an end to the practice, but another official across town gave a different view of the labor camps.

"In our work of re-education through labor, the authorities treat those people receiving re-education like teachers treat students, like doctors treat patients and like parents treat children," Liu Jing, head of the State Council Office for Prevention and Handling of Cults, told a news conference concerning government dealings with the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

The State Department report focused a lot of attention on Beijing's crackdown on Falun Gong, saying the banned spiritual group was singled out for much harsher treatment in 2000.

At least 100 members of the group died in police custody, and many more were imprisoned or sent to re-education through labor camps, the report said. In most cases the bodies of those beaten to death in police stations were often cremated before the victims' families could examine the bodies.

Hundreds of Falun Gong members have also been sent to psychiatric hospitals and forced in some cases to ingest medicine against their will, the report finds.

China banned Falun Gong 19 months ago, calling the group an "evil cult" and Tuesday's press conference by Liu pledged to "completely eliminate the Falun Gong cult."

The release of the State Department report coincided with the announcement that the United States would sponsor a resolution next month at the U.N. Human Rights conference in Geneva condemning China.

The resolution would mark the ninth time in 11 years the United States has sponsored or co-sponsored a resolution against Beijing on these grounds.

China also lambasted the U.S. planned resolution, saying that it was "doomed to fail and with ulterior motives."

When asked what the ulterior motives were, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang refused to elaborate, but expressed the Chinese government's view of the current situation at home.

"The Chinese government has all along respected the universal principal of human rights, all along in accordance with the specific conditions of China," Zhang said. "The level of human rights and fundamental freedoms enjoyed by the people has been raised to unprecedented levels and it is at the best time in history."

The release of the human rights report and the U.N. conference in Geneva have become annual rituals in Sino-U.S. relations, the two normally being forced to agree to disagree, but many China watchers are now speculating as to whether the new Bush administration will push for a change this year.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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