8 Nov 91
FE/1224 C1/2
Third, authenticity. The state provides guarantees in terms of system, laws and material means for the realization of human rights. The various civic rights prescribed in the Constitution and other state laws are in accord with what people enjoy in real life. China's human rights legislation and policies are endorsed and supported by the people of all nationalities and social strata and by all the political parties, social organizations and all walks of life.
As a developing country, China has suffered from setbacks while safeguarding and developing human rights. Although much has been achieved in this regard, there is still much room for improvement. It remains a long-term historical task for the Chinese people and government to continue to promote human rights and strive for the noble goal of full implementation of human rights as required by China's socialism.
In order to help the international community to understand the human rights situation as it is in China, we present the following brief account of China's basic position on and practice of human rights.
1. THE RIGHT TO SUBSISTENCE - THE
FOREMOST HUMAN RIGHT THE CHINESE PEOPLE LONG FIGHT FOR
It is a simple truth that, for any country or nation, the right to subsistence is the most important of all human rights, without which the other rights are out of the question. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person. In old China, aggression by imperialism and oppression by feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism deprived the people of all guarantee for their lives, and an uncountable number of them perished in war and famine. To solve their human rights problems, the first thing for the Chinese people to do is, for historical reasons, to secure the right to subsistence.
Without national independence, there would be no guarantee for the people's lives. When imperialist aggression became the major threat to their lives, the Chinese people had to win national independence before they could gain the right to subsistence. After the Opium War of 1840, China, hitherto a big feudal kingdom, was gradually turned into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. During the 110 years from 1840 to 1949, the British, French, Japanese, US and Russian imperialist powers waged hundreds of wars on varying scales against China, causing immeasurable losses to the lives and property of the Chinese people.
-The imperialists massacred Chinese people in untold numbers during their aggressive wars. In 1900, the troops of the eight allied powers - Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, France, the USA, Italy and Austria - killed, burned and looted, razing Tanggu, a town of 50,000 residents, to utter ruins, reducing Tianjin's population from 1m to 100,000, killing countless people when they entered Beijing, where more than 1,700 were slaughtered at Zhuangwangfu aione. During Japan's full-scale invasion of China which began in 1937, more than 21m people were killed or wounded and 10m people murilated to death In the six weeks beginning from 13th December, 1937, the Japanese invaders killed 300,000 peopis in Nanjing.
SWB
-The imperialists sold, maltreated and caused the death of numerous Chinese labourers, plunging countless people in old China into an abyss of misery. According to incomplete statistics, more than 12m indentured Chinese labourers were sold to various parts of the world from the mid-19th century through the 1920s. Coaxed and abducted, these labourers were thrown into lockups, known as "pigsties", where they were branded with the names of their would-be destinations. During the 1852-58 period, 40,000 people were put in such “pigsties" in Shantou alone, and more than 8,000 of them were done to death there. Equally horrifying was the death toll of ill-treated labourers in factories and mines run by imperialists across China. During the Japanese occupation, no less than 2m labourers perished from maltreatment and exhaustion in north-east China. Once the labourers died, their remains were thrown into mountain gullies or pits dug into bare hillsides. So far more than 80 such massive pits have been found, with over 700,000 skeletons of the victims in them.
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-Under the imperialists' colonial rule, the Chinese people had their fill of humiliation and there was no personal dignity speak of. The foreign aggressors enjoyed “extraterritoriality" in those days. On 24th December, 1946 Peking University student Shen Chong was raped by William Pierson, an American GI, but, to the great indignation of the Chinese people, the criminal, handled unilaterally by the American side, was acquitted and released. Imperialist powers exercised administrative, legislative, judicial, police and financial powers in the "concessions" they had set up in China, turning them into “states within a state" that were thoroughly independent of the Chinese administrative and legal systems. In 1885, foreign aggressors put up a signboard at the entrance of a park in the French concession; in a blatant insult to the Chinese people, it read, "Chinese and dogs not admitted”.
-Forcing more than 1,100 unequal treaties on China, the imperialists plundered Chinese wealth on a large scale. Statistics show that, by way of these unequal treaties, the foreign aggressors made away with more than 100bn taels of silver as war indemnities and other payments in the past century. Through the Sino-British Treaty of Nanking, the Sino- Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, the International Protocol of 1901 and five other such treaties alone, 1,953 million taels of silver in indemnity were extorted, 16 times the 1901 revenue of the Qing government. The Treaty of Shimonoseki alone earned Japan 230m taels of silver in extortion money, about four and half times its annual national revenue. The losses resulting from the destruction and looting by the invaders in wars against China were even more incalculable. During Japan's full-scale war of aggression against China (1937-45), 930 Chinese cities were occupied, causing 62bn US dollars in direct losses and 500bn US dollars in indirect losses. With their state sovereignty impaired and their social wealth plundered or destroyed, the Chinese people were deprived of the basic conditions for surviva!.
In face of the crumbling state sovereignty and the calamities wrought upon their lives, for over a century the Chinese people fought the foreign aggressors in an indomitable struggle for national salvation and independer %. The Tiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Boxes Movement and the Revolution of 1911 which overthrew the