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do say: "China has always held to effect international protection of human rights". The international community should interfere with and stop acts that endanger world peace..." and so on. So they are using the phrases themselves. Of course the definition of what are actually human rights that the world should be involved in compared with domestically is a matter of dispute, of course, but the fact that they concede the point in my view is a step forward and makes it easier for dialogue with the Chinese authorities. Last year we asked for amounts of information which we were unable to receive. This year we got more information which I think is useful. It's already been reported in Beijing that for the first time we were given a figure of a number of so-called political prisoners, people in jail, convicted in jail serving sentences for political crimes, crimes against the sovereignty of the socialist state and so on. They gave us a figure, quite off the cuff, almost spontaneously and their estimate was, as of end of last year, 4,000. There were 4,000 convicted people serving sentences in China as of the end of last year for so-called crimes against the State, political activity, dissent and so
That figure, as far as we are aware, has never been before released. You can make your own judgement about whether that is a correct figure or not. It doesn't include detainees in laojiao or laogai because they make the point that nobody serving in laojiao or laogai is there for political activities. They are there for minor criminal activities.
on.
We pressed the case again about the use of capital punishment. Again at the central level we were flatly told in even more blunt terms that we weren't going to be told the number of people executed in China in 1991, that they do have the figure, there's a total figure for China, but we weren't going to be told that figure. It wasn't said as a sort of State secret but we weren't just going to be told.
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When we said: Well you do announce in various States, various Provinces, provincial papers, notices on street walls, announcing executions that if someone cared to go round and tally them all up, you'd get the figure"; they said: "Yes if you want to go and do that, go and do it, but we are not going to tell you the total amount".
In Xinjiang Province we did put the question to people, representatives of the local Supreme Court, and without much effort we were able to establish that last year in 1991 about 110 people were executed in that province, of whom 3 were executed for the so-called Baren incident, where there was fighting. They claim that wasn't of course a political activity they were convicted because the 3 people admitted that they had killed people in the fighting and therefore were dealt with as criminals. So, we found it a useful