Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  Each time Ding Zilin manages to identify a victim’s family, she has a hard time getting them to talk. She asks if they would be willing to admit that one of theirs was missing and whether they actually saw the body or if it was buried furtively by soldiers. Security agents closely watch everything she does. After she leaves a victim’s family, plainclothes policemen descend on them. They do not reveal their identity, nor do they state the purpose of their visit. They just barge in, interrogate, intimidate, and harass the family.

  By the Year of the Rooster, Ding Zilin has managed to collect just eighty-nine names, listed in a brochure published in Hong Kong along with photographs of the missing—dead or alive—whenever available. This is the beginning of a memorial that will be built sometime in the future. The plight of Chinese parents is comparable with that of the mothers of those missing in Argentina and Chile. But while the mothers of Buenos Aires and Santiago enjoy worldwide support, Ding Zilin is waging a lone battle with little Western help. She is trying single-handedly to provide material assistance to parents of victims who have no other recourse, a particular problem for worker and peasant families that lost their head of family or eldest son. Ding Zilin is trying to collect money for them in China, but she gets very little. Do the Chinese lack compassion? She tries to find an excuse for them: perhaps they fear getting caught in a spiral of repression. With the destruction of old religious solidarity networks and the idealization of material success, the Communist regime has created a new, mean-spirited society. Aid has come from abroad. Even the modest contributions from overseas Chinese, however, were enough for the authorities to charge Ding Zilin and her husband with smuggling foreign currency and to sentence them to two months’ imprisonment. Ding Zilin redistributes the proceeds to needy families. Security agents then try to convince them that their benefactor skims off a large part of the money she receives from abroad. Sadly, this smear campaign has put Ding Zilin on the defensive, forcing her to justify her actions.

  The French president Jacques Chirac was among the many foreign heads of state to visit Beijing in the Year of the Rooster. He pleaded for lifting the West’s embargo, imposed after the Tiananmen massacre, on the sale of arms to China. “The page has been turned,” Chirac said, to justify this about-face. Not true: as long as Ding Zilin has not collected the names of all the victims and performed their funeral rites, the page will not have been turned, and the Chinese state will not be a normal state.

  Family planning, another name for state intimidation

  In her Beijing office, Madam Hao Lina is dismayed. Some obscure peasant from Shandong Province, Chen Guangcheng, has just shattered the national birth-control program’s humane image, which China has been trying so assiduously to cultivate. To make things worse, the self-taught, thirty-four-year-old Chen has been blind since the age of nine.

  The elegant Madam Hao, the international director of the Family Planning Commission, is one of the few women in China to occupy a high government position. She had nearly succeeded in winning over foreigners, if not the Chinese themselves, to China’s crusade against the population explosion. Under her influence, people forgot the compulsory sterilizations, abortions under duress, and beatings inflicted on wayward parents during the Eighties. The Americans, because of their pro-life, anti-abortion stance, were the only ones to keep condemning the Chinese family-planning program. As a result, coercion has become less brutal. The single-child principle applied uniformly thirty years ago has been relaxed in certain cases. Taking into account the widespread preference for boys, the Party has made some concessions. The single-child norm now applied only to large cities like Beijing and Shanghai and densely populated provinces like Sichuan. Elsewhere, couples can have a second child if the first is a girl. The rule has been relaxed even further in sparsely populated areas, where people are allowed to have two children even if the first is a boy; ethnic minorities can have three. And Tibetans can have as many children as they like.

  Coercion is a thing of the past, we are told. Instead, the government is relying on persuasion, doing all it can to encourage people to practice contraception. Now there are only financial disincentives to discourage people from having too many children. Madam Hao announces proudly that once they reach sixty, every single-child parent in rural areas gets a monthly pension of sixty yuan. When it comes to fines, however, she is evasive. She is aware that local authorities fix them as a means of extorting money from peasants.

  Within the space of thirty years, she says, family-planning “education” has brought down the average number of children per family from 5.9 to 1.8, comparable with the European average. This means the Chinese population will start declining from 2033 onward. “Family planning has kept the population down to 1.3 billion; otherwise it would crossed the 1.6 billion mark,” she points out. The 300 million fewer births have supposedly accelerated economic growth by 4 percent per annum. Madam Hao’s statistics are precise but not necessarily accurate. They are more in the nature of victory bulletins. Official figures are rarely accurate, especially population statistics. Western demographers put the average number of children per couple at about 2.3. Though difficult to prove, it is quite possible that population growth has not slowed down at all—contrary to the global trend of declining populations resulting from women’s education, the expectation of economic betterment, and declining infant mortality. India’s demographic situation is comparable with China’s, even though India gave up coercion way back in 1975. It is equally hard to prove that these “300 million” fewer Chinese have hastened the pace of development, for these unborn Chinese would have grown up to be generators of wealth.

  But this was not the purpose of our meeting at the Planning Commission’s Beijing headquarters. The irksome Chen Guangcheng was the subject at hand. Hao Lina launched into China’s population policy, knowing full well that it was Chen Guangcheng I wanted to talk about. The Chen affair had been internationalized, and this was the only reason that Madam Hao had consented to meet me.

  In September, the blind peasant had taken a train to Beijing, accompanied by his wife, who acted as his guide. He was headed for the petitions office, along with a few human rights activists and an American journalist. Before he could reach it, the police intercepted him. Though his complaint was perfectly legal, no one had been willing to register it in his hometown of Linyi. Of course, what he had to say was explosive. Before Madam Hao got wind of it, the news was splashed across the front pages of the American press. Chen had done a survey in his city. He discovered that 7,000 mothers with two children each had been forcibly sterilized during the past three months and that several hundred others had been forced to undergo abortions even though they were eight months pregnant. The city’s hospital staff admitted to immersing fetuses in boiling water to make sure they did not survive.

  Madam Hao expressed her regret for the unfortunate incident. She had gone personally to Linyi to investigate the truth of Chen’s findings. She announced a reeducation program for the local family-planning agents. “They did not understand the law,” she said. She added, for my benefit, that the affair had been blown out of proportion. There had been fewer than 7,000 sterilizations, and not all of them were forced. The figures had to be seen in perspective. In relation to Linyi’s 100,000 annual births, what happened seemed to be nothing more than a “regrettable lapse” on the part of the local authorities.

  Madam Hao was lying. The Party has never been concerned about the truth. The Linyi affair was not a “regrettable lapse.” On the contrary, it brings out the full horror of China’s family-planning program in the villages, as well as our ignorance. The Linyi episode is extraordinary only because we got to hear about it. The municipal authorities had published an order directing that forced sterilizations and abortions be carried out. As justification for such an extreme step, they pointed to an unhealthy Linyi trend of producing three children. Worse still, pregnant mothers were changing their village to avoid checking. If Beijing learned that the quota had been excee
ded, the local representatives’ political careers would be on the line. So they had to strike hard. The Linyi police and private militias hired by the Party tracked down pregnant women and women with two children. Parents and neighbors who failed to report them were jailed, beaten, and fined a hundred yuan a day. Entire villages found themselves besieged, cut off from the rest of the world until they handed over the guilty. Husbands who resisted their wives’ kidnapping were badly beaten. Herded to a hospital like sheep, the hapless women were summarily anesthetized and operated on in far from hygienic conditions. The Party cadres heaved a sigh of relief: Linyi had met its population quota, and their jobs were safe. They had not reckoned with the blind peasant.

  Chen spent several years familiarizing himself with China’s emerging legal system so that he could help peasants assert their meager rights. His farm became a center for legal counseling. Villagers weighed down under the burden of fines and other extortion came to him for advice. After the sterilization scandal, the foreign media had feted the local activist, much to the embarrassment of Madam Hao. How was she to get rid of him?

  Chen had to be silenced. This is China’s time-tested method for dealing with troublemakers. He was put under house arrest on his farm. Human rights activists from Beijing wanting to ascertain his safety are chased away and beaten by the local militia. For all Hao Lina’s professed indignation, no action has been taken against those responsible for the forced sterilizations and abortions. Madam Hao is hoping that the matter will die down and be forgotten by both Chinese and foreign observers. “Aren’t the French and the Chinese both committed to limiting world population and preserving our natural resources?” she says with a sudden smile.

  I cannot support Madam Hao and what she is doing. To my mind, China’s family-planning program serves no purpose other than to reinforce the Party’s control over the people. There is nothing to prove that the draconian methods have been effective in checking China’s population growth. What are visible are bureaucratic extortions and suffering parents. The preference for boys has led to female feticide and gender imbalance on an unprecedented scale. Forcible birth control will also give rise to an increasingly aging population. What will old parents do with no children to look after them? Retirement benefits prop up the aged in Europe and Japan, but a poor country like China is totally unprepared to deal with the situation. The single child is also a social problem. Only sons tend to behave like little emperors. Their social insertion is a question that has the Chinese perplexed.

  Finally, family planning does not address the central question of women’s position in society. Caught between their husbands’ and in-laws’ demands to bear sons and the dictates of the family-planning agents, Chinese women are in a bind. It is not easy being a Chinese man in the Year of the Rooster; being a Chinese woman is even harder.

  The solitude of the abolitionist

  In October, 2,000 schoolchildren from the city of Changsha were invited to witness an extraordinary event, the trial of six drug smugglers. All six received the death penalty and were executed soon afterward. Every year, as the National Day approaches, such dramas are enacted to remind people of the Party-State’s omnipotence.

  The Chinese are not against capital punishment, at least for murder. But were the six Changsha men really drug smugglers, or was it a trumped-up charge? How many executions take place every year? This is a state secret. Humanitarian organizations outside China put the figure between 3,500 and 15,000. In comparison, in the United States about fifty people are sentenced to death annually, nearly the same as in Singapore, even though America has a much larger population. In China, figures are never revealed, just as judgments and the grounds for decisions are never published. Magistrates can choose among sixteen crimes punishable by death: murder, tax evasion, panda hunting, antique-smuggling, conspiring to overthrow the government.... With the grounds for indictment so varied, judges have a great deal of latitude with respect to the law but none vis-àvis their political mentors in the Party.

  How many of the so-called political criminals actually took up arms in the course of their resistance to tyranny? How many Tibetans and Uigurs are sentenced in camera without a lawyer for supposedly conspiring against the unity of the Chinese nation? In a country where corruption is widespread and tax evasion the norm, why are some gunned down while others prosper? What is the purpose of the killings? Are they meant to serve as an example for schoolchildren, or is the Party settling scores with some rebellious faction?

  Capital punishment in China is not only arbitrary but also lucrative. Dead men make some people rich. Just before the execution—not after—the condemned person’s vital organs are removed and then sold. Thanks to transplants and the demand for living cells that may help the aged live longer, there is a thriving market for the organs. Once the organs have been removed, the victim is hastily stitched together before being shot or incinerated. Accounts of organ harvesting abound.

  The trade doesn’t stop there. In the summer of 2005, an exhibit of human bodies, coated with plastic after the skin had been removed, traveled to several American museums of natural history, as well as to Taiwan, to help medical students study anatomy. It emerged that the bodies had come from China. This recycling of dead bodies aroused indignation in the United States. The Chinese government was tight-lipped. The exhibit was withdrawn and the indignation proved short-lived. Both in Europe and the U.S., the general feeling is that a Chinese body is not worth a Western one.

  Europeans seem ever ready to protest capital punishment, but their protest is halfhearted. The French media and intelligentsia have an annual petition ritual. It’s the fashionable thing for Paris’s literati to sign a text condemning the death penalty—in the United States. However abhorrent the practice may be, the fact is that the death sentence is not given frequently in America. It exists because of a democratic consensus and an independent judiciary. I, too, belong to the band of signatories. Over the years, I have tried hard to get the text to condemn China as well. So far, I have been unsuccessful.

  Why China? they ask me. Perhaps all those who are shot down and dismembered really were guilty, they think; capital punishment, unacceptable in the United States, might be good for the Chinese; the death sentence could act as a deterrent to stem China’s widespread violence. Does that mean that the Chinese government is legitimate in killing its subjects, whereas the Americans are not? Are we suggesting that a Chinese life is not worth an American life and that human rights do not apply to the yellow race? That is not the real issue, say some. We would do better to respect the cultural characteristics of the Chinese than to impose our ideas on them—even though the Chinese constitution does refer to human rights now. Between the sinophiles on the one hand and the America-bashers on the other, good sense has been thrown to the winds. Why blame the Chinese?

  He Weifang is Chinese and an abolitionist for capital punishment. He opposes capital punishment in China for the same reasons as in the West: the state does not have the right to kill, and the death sentence does not dissuade criminals. In China, an additional problem arises: the police and judges are incompetent and corrupt, subservient to the Party and ready to be bought off. He Weifang has been teaching law at Beijing University for forty years. His struggle is cautious and solitary, for abolitionism does not generate much enthusiasm. Perhaps his caution comes from the experience of his forefathers, all intellectuals. His idealistic grandparents plunged into the Communist revolution only to see it degenerate into tyranny. His parents believed in the Cultural Revolution, which turned into a civil war that took their lives.

  So, immune to political violence like many Chinese, He Weifang prefers to teach. Yet explaining to his students and readers of his website why the death penalty should be abolished is not simple. In fact, it is illegal to advocate banning it. The Party is willing to tinker a bit with capital punishment but not to repeal it. He Weifang must act obliquely. He draws attention to the most blatant legal errors and to executions performed without
sufficient proof. He points out a procedure for the review of cases at the national level, which could improve matters because the Supreme Court judges are less incompetent and slightly more independent than local magistrates. Still, He Weifang does not trust them entirely. Unlike in the West, he says, a Chinese judge is never the guarantor of the separation of powers. He just ensures the selective application of the law. The law does not apply to the state; it is the state that lays down the law. And justice is meted out sparingly to its subjects. In such a system, no judge can afford to contradict the Party-State.

  He Weifang has an uphill battle convincing even the most liberal Chinese about the universality of law and human rights. It is true, he admits, that the notion of law comes from the West and has no roots in classical China. But that does not make it any less universal or less applicable to China. The Party does concede this in principle, stating at the same time that there are two approaches to human rights. The Chinese approach favors material rights—the right to feed and clothe oneself. The Western approach, with its emphasis on abstract rights like the freedom of information or the freedom to associate, is good only for affluent nations. To impose Western standards on China is to take part in an imperialist conspiracy against Greater China—a chauvinistic argument that appeals to many Chinese taken with the idea of national dignity. He Weifang is fighting the propaganda machinery almost single-handedly to deny this moral relativism. He manages to convince small groups here and there, students and people who read his articles on the Internet. He has to measure his words; otherwise, he could end up losing his chair and the influence he derives from it. The road to reform is narrow, if it exists at all.

  This serene, smiling professor, with his understated heroism, makes one feel small and humble. As travelers to China, slightly ashamed of our own helplessness, we can only listen carefully. Cocooned in Western comfort, can we be of any use to people like him? All we can do is stand firm against the communist campaign to lure Western leaders by proffering enticements. It is our duty to see that the next Paris or New York petition against capital punishment targets not only the United States but China as well.