Dong Yunhu, an important political figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in developing its human rights propaganda, was put under investigation for alleged “serious violations of Party discipline and Chinese law,” reported the CCP’s
Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.The anti-corruption agency announced the investigation of 60-year-old Dong, head of Shanghai delegates in the CCP’s rubber-stamp legislature, on July 12.
Two days earlier, Mr. Dong was in a forum at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Mr. Dong has a major in philosophy and served in several posts in the Central Party School of the CCP since 1986, including director of Human Rights Research Office of the Marxist-Leninist Institute, and deputy director of the Marxist-Leninist Institute.
In the wake of the bloody massacre of the student protest on June 4, 1989, the CCP “intensified and institutionalized its repression of the democracy movement in 1990,” “thousands remained detained without charge, often in abysmal prison conditions and often subject to torture,” according to a Human Rights Watch
report.
In response to the world’s criticism of its heinous human rights record, Mr. Dong was one of the first CCP scholars tasked with engaging in publicizing Chinese human rights and drafting CCP’s brainwashing propaganda.
In November 1991, CCP issued its first white paper on human rights.
Along with signing numerous treaties and interacting with various international human rights institutions, the regime attempted to the international community that China’s human rights stance moved closer to internationally accepted standards by
2009.
By
2011, the regime established nearly 50 institutes for studying human rights in China since the first were set up in the early 1990s, the regime claimed. At the time, Mr. Dong was the deputy head of the CCP’s Publicity Department under the State Council, and he claimed that protecting human rights was a key part of “socialist core values.”
According to the CCP’s
definition of human rights issued by the State Council Information Office in 2021, Chinese human rights are ensured through its “multi-political party system under the leadership of CCP,” “the regional ethnic autonomy subject to the unified leadership of the regime,” and “institutions of grassroots democracy” under the guidance of local CCP branches.
In other words, human rights are protected under the discretion of the ruling regime centered on the CCP.
However, evidence and testimonials have over and over again proven the CCP’s disregard for human rights and the repressive totalitarian system “deprives citizens of their rights on a sweeping scale and systematically curtails freedoms as a way to retain power,” as
documented by the U.S. State Department.
Attacking Western Human Rights
Mr. Dong also worked as the chief editor for the Chinese Yearbook on Human Rights, touting the CCP’s achievement of laws and regulations, and theoretical research in promoting Chinese human rights.
With a pen name “Ren Yanshi,” he also published multiple research articles criticizing the human rights issue in the United States, such as “A Comparison of Human Rights Between China and the United States,” “The U.S. Human Rights Records,” etc.
Between 2011 and 2015, Mr. Dong led the propaganda department of Tibet.
In
2014, Mr. Dong vowed to “seal the internet” to stop separatists as Tibet’s propaganda department head, “to cut off Tibetan separatist propaganda from infiltrating and destroying all manner of communication,” Reuters reported.
“Offenders must be punished hard and swiftly, public security and cultural market administrations must investigate and prosecute them with awesome power,” Mr. Dong said in a meeting in February 2015, according to Human Rights
Watch.
In August 2015, he was transferred to Shanghai and served as the director of the propaganda department.
This January, he was just promoted to lead Shanghai’s legislative body as the secretary of the Party group.
Xia Song contributed to this report.
