We actually do have a lesson from history on this one. It is simple.
The police state apparatus will crumble in time. It can only exist
because the citizens allow it for good or bad reasons. When they
ultimately object, the institution will blow away.
We just saw it happen in Egypt.
In China's case, it became astonishingly corrupted to divert labor
and bodies into private hands. The leadership is now trying to
distance itself from the activities of what is called internal
security while a facade of due process roots out the evil.
In the meantime, those in leadership outside the targeted cadre is no
longer supporting those policies as this shows. It is really easy
not to arrest someone or even to thwart such an arrest.
Chinese Regime
Labor Camp Reforms Bring Panic, Puzzlement, Hope
January the Chinese
Communist Party announced that its sprawling network of concentration
camps—known as “re-education through forced labor”—would be
abolished. Or halted. Or reformed. Like many major, politically
sensitive policy changes in China, the details are still unclear, and
this has left officials inside the system scrambling to respond, and
observers of it puzzling out the implications.
The system of forced labor, called laojiao in Chinese, has been a
workhorse of the communists’ repressive apparatus since 1957, and
currently holds from hundreds of thousands to millions of prisoners.
The estimates are best guesses by human rights researchers because
the regime does not publish statistics. Chinese people can be sent to
up to four years of forced labor, without access to a lawyer or any
judicial proceedings, for something as minor as ridiculing a Party
official online, or for the spiritual beliefs that they hold.
Given the centrality
of the system to the Communist Party’s stated goal of “maintaining
stability,” the idea that it’s going to be abolished has led to
the obvious lines of speculation: Will it be a case of, as one
Chinese dissident put it, “different broth, same medicine?” Will
they instead use the Party-run judicial system to punish enemies of
the state? Or is this really a sign of reform?
“Their control,
monitoring, intimidation, and persecution will be the same.” —
Zhong Weiguang, columnist
Panic
The responses from
inside the Party indicate uncertainty about all of the above.
According to
interviews conducted by The Epoch Times, officials in Chongqing, a
major city in the southwest, are in a state of panic as they try to
figure out how the new guidelines will impact them personally.
Members of the vast
security apparatus in that city have particular reason to be
concerned, given that thousands of people are believed to have been
wrongly sentenced to forced labor under the watch of Bo Xilai, the
now-deposed Politburo member. A large part of his “smashing the
black campaign” was based on the idea of labeling political enemies
and others as “mafia elements,” seizing their assets, and packing
them off to the southwestern equivalent of Siberia. When those men
are released, they may seek retaliation against those that put them
away.
Phasing It Out
In Guandgong Province,
long a vanguard of enterprise and experiment, the response has been
more measured. The Party Committee there announced that it would stop
using its forced labor system within the year. Labor camps will not
receive new detainees, and those currently locked up will serve out
their terms.
In Yunnan, a province
further from the center and with a strong local identity, officials
announced that they would stop sentencing people to forced labor for
three kinds of offenses: “endangering state security, disruptive
petitioning, and smearing the images of state leaders.” Those
currently detained will still serve out their sentences, and after
that, the camps will presumably close.
Renee Xia, the
international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a rights
group based in Hong Kong, said in a press release that it was too
early to be optimistic about the shifts. “There may very well be
[intra]-Party disagreement and conflicts over the fate of RTL at the
top, which cast a shadow on Yunnan or Guangdong’s plans to move
ahead with changes,” she said.
“The most important
thing is the resistance from citizens, that is the most basic power
for social change in China.” — Huang Qi, Chinese dissident
Prison Instead
Yet another category
of response by Chinese officials was anticipated by the more
pessimistic dissidents and political commentators: that cadres would
simply switch to other instruments of persecution. That has already
started to take place against practitioners of Falun Gong, according
to an early report on Minghui.org, which carries first hand accounts
of persecution from China. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice that
has been persecuted since 1999, after then-Party leader Jiang Zemin
became fearful of the popularity of its traditional moral teachings.
According to the
Minghui article, heavy prison sentences have been handed down in some
regions—the author counts 75 cases during one week of January
alone. In this scenario the Party has simply switched to using the
judiciary to attack its declared enemies, a process that carries
little more protection than the arbitrary system of forced labor.
‘Same Medicine’
These developments are
not surprising to Zhong Weiguang, a columnist and researcher of
totalitarian regimes based in Germany. “The form and name of
re-education through labor might be removed, because it doesn’t
look good. They can temporarily not use it. But their goals, their
control, monitoring, intimidation, and persecution of the people
under the dictatorial rule of the Party will be the same.”
Without broader
political reforms in the Party’s rule, he cannot take the
announcements seriously, he said. In the meantime, he sees the
exercise as simply one of propaganda.
Zhong has lived
outside China for several decades now, though he keeps a close eye on
developments. Dissidents and civil rights lawyers inside the country
take the general point on board: that the Party will of course
continue to repress people. But they have a sober and long-term view
of what will be really required for change in China over the long
term.
The Fruit of Effort
Huang Qi, who founded
one of the first human rights websites in China, Liusi Tianwang, or
June 4 Heavenly Net, indicated that there is more behind the policy
than a mere public show.
“At the current
stage, after over a decade of collective protest, it can be said that
the laojiao system has already reached its end point. It’s in the
face of protests and discontent that they take measures to abolish
it,” he said.
International pressure
has played a small role. “The thing that really has a decisive
impact are the millions of citizens, including our Falun Gong
friends, and their years of resistance,” Huang Qi said.
The fact that the
regime has been forced to respond to social pressure “is of course
a sign of social progress,” Huang Qi says. He sees it as one part
in a long campaign of resistance—that, while the system may be
replaced by something else, they will also resist the new
incarnation. The key is that the shift is a signal that popular
pressure changed the official course.
“The most important
thing is the resistance from citizens, that is the most basic power
for social change in China,” Huang Qi said.
A Sign of Progress
Zhang Jiankang, a
civil rights lawyer in Shaanxi Province, took a similarly long-term
view to the development. “In the early years,” he said,
“‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ became ‘subversion of state
power’. They just updated the name, though the content is the same.
However, getting rid of the name ‘counterrevolutionary crimes,’
on the surface, is still progress.” It shows that the Party has had
to budge in the face of popular resistance.
The natural
consideration for observers is whether the announcements will have
unintended consequences, opening the door to other kinds of reform
that will eventually lead to greater freedoms or even democracy in
China.
“China moving
toward the rule of law is a trend that no group can stop,” says
Huang Qi. He said it requires China’s people—including
journalists, lawyers, scholars, petitioners—to “keep resisting.”
“Under that
continuous supervision and resistance, I believe that the Chinese
mainland will walk toward democracy and human rights. … Only by
pushing hard can we get a China that is moving toward human rights.”
Editor’s Note: When
Chongqing’s former top cop, Wang Lijun, fled for his life to the
U.S. Consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6, he set in motion a political
storm that has not subsided. The battle behind the scenes turns on
what stance officials take toward the persecution of Falun Gong. The
faction with bloody hands—the officials former CCP head Jiang Zemin
promoted in order to carry out the persecution—is seeking to avoid
accountability for their crimes and to continue the campaign. Other
officials are refusing to participate in the persecution any longer.
Events present a clear choice to the officials and citizens of China,
as well as people around the world: either support or oppose the
persecution of Falun Gong. History will record the choice each person
makes.
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