China: No one is safe — Political repression and abuse of power in the 1990s
Published by Amnesty International
March 1996, 121pp, $12
Reviewed by Eva Cheng
No one is safe provides considerable information on how bad the human rights situation is in China today. Through an exposition of the legislative framework which Beijing pretends it is operating within, as well as details of human rights violations in a range of sectors and minority groups, the picture of a very repressive regime is presented.
What also comes through compellingly is a picture of real people in struggle. It tells how courageous many activists are in braving the repressive machinery, in spite of physical — often brutal — and emotional suffering. The book is useful though far from exhaustive: inevitably, given the nature of the subject.
A striking observation is the extent to which the Chinese government still tries to justify and rationalise its repression. Moves in recent years to provide legal rights against abuse of power are nothing but paper which can be overridden by new or existing laws upholding the state's rights of arbitrary repression.
For example, the State Security Law of 1993 seems to address specifically the help that activists have been getting from outside China. The provisions give the government further power to prosecute for acts that are in its judgment "harmful to state security", which can mean anything. The law also specifically makes it a criminal offence to have contacts with or receive financial support from any organisations, within or outside China, defined as "hostile to the People's Republic of China government and socialist system characterised by the people's dictatorship ..."
Such provisions add to an already large range of excuses to prosecute. Just to name a few: the State Secrets Law against revealing any "matters that affect the security and interests of the state"; the Criminal Law which makes a "counter-revolutionary" crime of any acts that are "committed with the goal of overthrowing the political power of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system" (read the Communist Party). Many of these "crimes" are punishable by death. There are provisions, and they are used, for summary execution, to rule out the possibility of appeal or redress. Long periods of imprisonment are the norm.
But existing legislation also allows imprisonment even without the token acts of criminal proceedings. This is done by way of "administrative detention" — sentencing people to labour camps.
"Shelter and investigation" cases allow Beijing to detain people without charge for up to three months merely on the suspicion that they may be involved in a crime. "Re-education through labour" is a punishment imposed for three years, renewable, and applied to people considered to have "anti-socialist views" or those whose "crimes" are "too minor" to be prosecuted under the Criminal Law.
In line with Amnesty International's practice, No one is safe does not attempt to explore the structural and political causes of such human right abuses. One has to find the answers elsewhere.