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country to meddle with it.
During your meetings with Chinese officials was the delegation ever told by them that this is an internal affair of China's?
Senator Schacht: Yes, that was a consistent sort of opening-line. In any formal meeting, in the presentation you'd go through the opening ten minutes of a meeting where that would be put as the official position. I must say it was my impression that it was put with a lot less steam and force this time than it was 15 months ago when we were in China. And once the formalities were over you'd then got the next hour of discussion about specific issues of human rights in China that were domestically oriented and we went on with a very detailed discussion. That's one of the significant differences from last year. Formally, they will say, we didn't concede that it is other than a domestic issue but once the dialogue started with them, with their officials, it did go on as though they had conceded. And I must say, we actually quoted, whenever any of their officials got a bit, shall we say forceful: "This is purely a China matter", we would quote them the second last paragraph of their own document, which would then lead to a further discussion about where the line is between what is a domestic and an international issue, which brought on further dialogue.
Question: Would you say the human rights situation in China is improving?
Senator Schacht: I can't say that it's improving for individual prisoners at all because we just don't have any evidence of that. What I do say is improving is the willingness of senior Chinese officials to take seriously the debate and acknowledge that this issue is not going to go away.
Mr MacKellar: I think some of the changes in the legal area are encouraging.
Senator Schacht: They are encouraging, yes. You see one of the things the economic reform is doing is, you can't have open-market reform, market economy, without a decent detailed legal system with due process, for commercial reasons. And when you start reforming for the commercial area it then flows that some of that reform will be dealing with personal human rights issues. So the economic reform is going to, in my view, lead to the other changes indirectly. And they know that themselves, that despite all the comments, you can't fence-off the economic changes from ultimately, in my view, a more pluralistic attitude about the way society is run and to allow dissent. We put to them that you want a modern technologically advanced economy, you can't go around expecting well-educated, well-trained technologically-based employees to not think about other
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