US rates China 'most improved'
on human rights
Straits Times. Feb 1, 1998
WASHINGTON -- China was more tolerant of dissent last year and
has emerged as the most-improved country in the State Department's annual
survey of human-rights conditions around the world.
The result on Friday is seen as a reflection of modest changes in China as well as the administration's determination to build more cordial relations with Beijing.
The report -- which one year ago lambasted Beijing for crushing dissent wholly in 1996 -- also said Beijing had kept its hands off Hongkong, which reverted to Chinese rule last July 1.
"There were positive steps in human rights, although serious problems remain," it said. "The government's response to dissent was somewhat more tolerant than in recent years."
On Hongkong, the report described it as still "a free society". Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck said: "I think the positive developments that I've noted are a reflection of, to a certain extent, the success of the administration's policy."
That policy stresses economic and strategic cooperation as a key to opening Chinese society and to greater personal and political freedoms eventually.
Mr Shattuck also said that Washington was consulting other governments on whether to back a resolution at the Human Rights Commission next month. Since 1990, China has lobbied intensively and successfully every year to kill the resolutions criticising its human-rights record.
The annual human-rights report is not designed to be a political document, but Mr Shattuck and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott used its release to argue on behalf of the administration's policies not just towards China but towards Bosnia, Iraq and the Asian economic crisis.
Mr Talbott said the sudden collapse of banks and industrial operations across Asia holds the potential for a popular backlash against the region's democratic trends of the past decade.
For that reason, he said: "We have strongly supported the efforts of the IMF to assist the troubled economies of Asia in regaining their equilibrium and implementing essential reforms that will promote greater transparency and openness."
On Iraq, where, according to the report, security forces maintained absolute control in an "environment of intimidation and fear", Mr Talbott said "regimes that rule by repression and violence at home are more likely to threaten their neighbours and world peace as a whole. President Saddam Hussein is exhibit A".
In Bosnia, where the administration is asking Congress to fund an indefinite extension of the US troop presence, Mr Shattuck said "history will mark 1997 as the turning point towards peace and justice". -- WP, AFP.