generalspeaking

Stifling Dissent

"They were conferring over lunch in a restaurant near the China-Vietnam border when several men speaking Chinese ordered them into a car."
"Beaten, blindfolded and gagged, my father and his two colleagues ere abducted into China by boat. They were left in a Buddhist temple in Guangxi Province for the Chinese authorities."
Ti-Anna Wang

"No government, whatever its pretensions and whatever its accomplishments can fairly call itself great if its citizens are not allowed to say what they believe or are denied the right to learn about events and decisions that affect their lives."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Ti-Anna Wang mourns her father's incarceration by the Communist state where -- fourteen years after his abduction from Vietnam where he was meeting with other human rights activists when a plot to entice them there served the Chinese regime's purpose to gain access to their critics -- her father Wang Bingzhang remains imprisoned at age 68.

Not that Mr. Wang ever engaged in actions other than to criticize the Chinese regime, but that in and of itself in their estimation represents a criminal offence. More recently, five men with connections to a Hong Kong publisher working on a biography of Chinese President Xi Jinping were abducted from within Hong Kong and taken to China. Abductions have taken place as well in Thailand, a sovereign nation.



One man whose presence was at first unknown held a Swedish passport, while another had a British passport, neither of which served to protect the men critical of the Communist regime from being illegally and violently abducted. The Swedish passport holder, Gui Minhal, kidnapped from Thailand made a televised "confession" agreeing that his return was voluntary since he felt responsible about being involved in a 2003 hit-and-run accident.

More recently a Chinese journalist boarded a train in Thailand en route to haven in Southeast Asia, when he simply disappeared. Li Xin's disappearance happened to be a state operation meant to convey to critics of the Chinese regime that they should not consider themselves free to embarrass the regime. Mr. Li was a dedicated human rights activist and columnist for the Southern Metropolis Daily.

He left China, according to his wife, in October. The regime had pressured him to inform on other activists. His attempt to win asylum in India having failed, he was in the process of removing himself to Southeast Asia when he was abducted. Wang Bingzhang's exiled life in North America hadn't saved him from abduction; he had been lured to a human rights meeting in Vietnam from which site he represented easy pickings.


As for the United States and its response to these Beijing-ordered abductions, imprisonments and silencing of human rights activists and critics of the regime, there is the noble sentiment of the Secretary of State, whose careful wording of censure had been designed to name no names. Neither the President of the United States nor his Secretary of State exhibited the 'conviction' of their 'courage'; diplomatic engagement must be maintained and upheld.

While China feels free to expel foreign reporters whose reportage is unpleasing, its own propaganda agents seek welcome in the West. Similarly, Beijing withholds visas to scholars that have not gained its approval, but comfortably dispatches party apparatchiks extolling the party line anywhere internationally that they can be useful to the Communist party.

And while the international community deplores China's crackdowns on dissidents, on journalists, on human rights activists, there are none among them that wish to disentitle their trade apparatus from pursuing closer business ties with the trade giant. So, Sweden and Britain and the United States may feel morally outraged by China's crudely vicious campaign to extinguish criticism from within, but the allure of business ties now wins all such controversial disagreements in favour of encouraging trade.

Labels: Abductions, China, Human Rights

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 02, 2016