Speech at the Subcommittee on Human Rights, European Union
I have been invited by Madam Helene Flautre, the Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights of the European Union, Directorate-General for External Policies of the Union to attend the human rights hearing. However, due to some visa complications, I was unable to attend the meeting in person, but to submit a speech in writing.
Yes, I was prepared to fly over to the other side the world to give a ten minute speech at the human rights hearing.
Why am I willing to travel that far just to give a ten-minute speech? This is because for me, as a jurist who upholds justice and a writer who had to leave my homeland and live in exile in order to publish books I have written about the miseries of the Chinese nation, I have an unshakable responsibility to expose the adverse human rights situation in China.
As I only have ten minutes to speak, I cannot expound, prove and go into analytical details, so I can share some conclusive views, which I draw from my real life experience of nearly half a century when I was living in China.
The Chinese Communist bureaucratic clique established a one-party dictatorship with violence of state terrorism, and it completely denies the principle of the “sovereignty of people.” The dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is a police state, in which people are deprived of any political right to vote. The monopoly of state power by the Chinese Communist clique directly violates the values of contemporary law, and it is illegal in every sense. The political system in China now is in essence a private ownership of the state power by the Chinese Communist system.
During the last half a century since the establishment of the state power by the Chinese Communist Party, in order to maintain its autocratic rule, it has carried out relentless political persecutions, causing countless human rights disasters, and the loss of tens of millions of Chinese people’s lives by unnatural causes as a result. Facts of the past and the present have proven that the Chinese Communist clique is a criminal clique guilty of the most serious crimes against humanity in history. They have committed crimes of enslaving people, crimes of murder, crimes of genocide and crimes of large-scale torture, etc.
Under China’s Constitution, it states that the Chinese people must take Marxism and Leninism as their guidance under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. This indicates that the Chinese Communist clique has combined the total control of the minds of the Chinese people with its secular dictatorship, reviving a new guise of extreme autocracy of the middle Ages where politics and religion were one the same. In Europe, the burning bodies of countless thousands of people condemned by religious trials of the Inquisition illuminated the darkness of the Middle Ages; in China today, people are still being imprisoned, tortured and murdered for pursuing freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. The eight-year-long political persecution against Faun Gong practitioners, starting from the end of last century and to date, constitutes the most miserable human rights disaster in the world today. The economic reforms carried out by the Chinese Communist clique can never achieve a free market economy as believed by some. This is because a fair free market economy can only be established on the basis where people enjoy equal legal rights, and yet, the laws made under a one-party dictatorship inevitably constitute evil laws, where the nature of these laws is to maintain the elite rights of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy. The laws of a dictatorship will never acknowledge the equality of legal rights of the people.
The economy established by the Chinese Communist Party is a market economy for the elite class with power, and such a market economy for the power elite class is centred on the corrupt dictatorship and driven by the practice of trading power for money. The economy of the power elite class can only lead to the extreme discrepancy in terms of wealth and power, creating an elite class of the Chinese Communist Party and the paradise of those unscrupulous merchants and entrepreneurs affiliated with the ‘party.’
The economic development in contemporary China is based on the slave labour of 90 million peasant labourers. These people are engaged in over-intensive labour every day, with a daily pay equivalent to only 1.5 US dollars. Even such a meagre payment is often pocketed by the bosses. These working people have no way of protecting their interests due to the deprivation of their right to take industrial action and the right to establish trade unions.
I have attached an incomplete list of the coal mining disasters in China between 2000 and 2007 at the end of the speech (appendix 1), from which people may gain some further understanding of the serious bloody exploitation within China’s economic development. The Chinese working people are steeped in misery. I predict that China’s economic development at the expense of its enormous inequality permeated with the blood, tears and misery of its working people is paving the way for an unprecedented social crisis.
The violent dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is not only the last Bastille of the Communist autocracy, but also a political fulcrum of the dictatorship states and terrorism in today’s world. The Chinese Communist regime was used to instigate the Khmer Rouge to murder millions of Cambodian people; it was used to form and alliance with Milosevic who was guilty of crimes against humanity; it was used to cheer and praise the dictator and tyrant Saddam Hussein. Right now, according to the information I have, the Chinese Communist dictatorship is also the main political and economic supporter of the evil regime of North Korea, and it continues to provide multiple secret support to some major international terrorist forces. The Chinese dictatorship is not only the source of the misery of the Chinese nation, the root cause of the human rights disasters in China, but also the common enemy of the whole of humanity. At this very moment, the Chinese Communist regime is trying to interfere with the independence of the Australian legal system, in the attempt to obstruct the legal procedures of the court in handling the lawsuits filed by local Falun Gong practitioners against Chinese high-ranking officials who have engaged in atrocities against humanity. (See appendix 2). A few days ago, BBC reported that a former leader of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, was arrested and would be tried for crimes against humanity, and yet, the Chinese Communist bureaucratic clique that instigated the Khmer Rouge to commit those atrocities is still using its autocratic state power to create large-scale human rights disasters. Sometimes, history is so unjust; however, I believe history will be just in the end.
In 1989, the sky in Beijing was stained red with the blood of students and citizens; yet, next year the Olympic Games will be held in the same city where the massacre took place – why is it that history continues to be so cruel towards the Chinese people? The Olympics will certainly attract the world’s attention. However, shouldn’t the attention go beyond the cheering crowd waving flowers and focus first and foremost on the enormous human rights disasters that are taking place right now in China? The cheering and flowers above these human rights disasters will only bring shame and disgrace to the Olympic spirit.
I’m a speaker for the miseries of China, and I will keep speaking out until the sufferings of the Chinese nation come to an end. Once an Australian friend asked me, “What do you need me to do for China?” I said to him, “I have no right to require you to do anything for China. I can only tell you the facts. I believe that when people learn the facts, they will follow their conscience and do what they should do.” Now, respectful members of the European Union, I hold the same confidence in you.
Lastly, please allow me in the name of freedom to express my sincere gratitude to you for your concern about the misery of China.
About Yuan Hongbing
Mr. Yuan Hongbing, a law professor formerly at Beijing University where he chaired the Department of Criminal Law, was previously jailed in China for promoting democracy. In 1994, Prof. Yuan was charged with the crime of “Attempting to Overthrow the Socialist System”, imprisoned and then released to internal exile in Guizhou Province on condition that he never set foot in Beijing again. He was allowed to return to teaching, taking up a position at Guizhou Normal University, where he became Dean of the Law School. During his period of exile in Guizhou, Prof. Yuan wrote a number of books. Three of his books were published overseas: Elegy and Freedom at Sunset, both of which relate the sufferings of Mongols under Chinese Communist rule, and The Golden Holy Mountain, depicting Communist cruelty against Tibetan culture and religion.
