China’s Human Rights Report: Autos, Autocracy

令人捧腹 调侃中共白皮书
信源：华尔街日报 (http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/09/27/chinas-human-rights-report-autos-autocracy/)

如果要美国的政治人物解释“人权”，你可能得到一长串的自由民主名词：言论自由，集会自由，人身保护令。 如果问一个中共政治人物，你得到的答案是……汽车所有权？

上周末发表的一份白皮书中，中共国务院新闻办公室声称，中共当局过去一年在保护人权方面取得重大进展。这份名为“2009年中国人权事业的进展” (Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2009)的白皮书提出大量的数据和论述，展现了中共对人权概念界定，成为令人捧腹的消遣。

拿汽车做为例子。尽管很少西方人认为汽车所有权是一项基本人权，白皮书把保护汽车所有权作为一种主要的广告。在第一节“人民的生存权和发展权”的 第二段指出，到2009年底，全国轿车所有权已达3136万，比上年增长28.6%，还说私人轿车增长更大，达到33.8%。在“人权的司法保障”一节再度提到这一点，声称放宽了驾驶证的身体条件，为残疾人驾驶汽车提供方便。

对于西方读者，这份文件不太像人权报告，更像是一个用数字和分析来美化包装的“国家整体进步”结论。

在第四节“经济、社会和文化权利”中，文件声称2009“电视节目综合人口覆盖率97%”。不过对于几乎所有电视节目来自依属中共当局的电视台避而不提。

另外，在“公民权利和政治权利”一节中，白皮书声称，“互联网得到广泛普及和运用”。指出有将近29％的中国人口上网，或3.84亿网民，却没有提到YouTube和Facebook这些颇受欢迎的互联网服务商被封锁，以及对网络新闻和论坛的审查。

西方的人权团体没有被这份白皮书打动。美联社报导，人权观察亚洲分部主任理查森（Sophie Richardson）称这份文件“从好处想是失去了一个机会，从坏处看是一个笨拙的粉饰。”理查森发现文件特别遗漏了对异议人士的迫害。

该白皮书开宗明义表示：“2009年是进入新世纪以来中国经济发展最为困难的一年”。接着便是描述当局在经济方面的努力及成就：四万亿人民币（5860亿 美元）刺激经济；粮食产量5.32亿吨；国内生产总值增长 9.1％。还有“2009年，国家安排就业资金420亿元，比上年增长66.7%；全国城镇新增就业1102万人，下岗失业人员实现再就业514万人；城镇登记失业率4.3%；应届高校毕业生就业率达到87.4%；以及还有外出农民工总量1亿4千5百万人，比上年增加492万人。”

一句话，人权的进步就是汽车、电视、电脑、工作机会以及粮食产量等数字的增加。

当然，在西方人眼中，这样的白皮书无异于一纸荒唐的黑色幽默。

~~~
* September 27, 2010, 3:12 PM HKT

China’s Human Rights Report: Autos, Autocracy

Ask American politicians to explain “human rights” and you’re likely to get the usual litany of time-worn liberal democratic abstractions: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus.

Ask a Chinese politician and you get…car ownership?

In an extensive whitepaper released over the weekend, China’s State Council Information Office argues authorities in Beijing have made significant progress in protecting human rights over the past year. Entitled “Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2009 (full text), the paper features a cornucopia of statistics and arguments that throws into stark, and sometimes amusing, relief the different ways Chinese and Western governments define the concept.

Take, for example, the automobile. While few Americans would consider car-ownership a fundamental right, the whitepaper gives it prime billing as a measure of rights protection. In the second paragraph of the first section, “The People Rights to Subsistence and Development,” it notes that car ownership increased 28.6% year-on-year to 31.36 million by the end of 2009, adding that private car ownership had grown even more quickly at 33.8%. The paper returns to the subject in a section on judicial guarantees of rights by highlighting a change to China’s driver’s license law that loosened driving restrictions on people with hearing and physical disabilities.

To the Western reader, the paper comes off less like a human-rights report and more like a summary–packed with numbers and rose-tinted analysis–of the country’s progress in general.

In Section 4 (”Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”), the paper happily notes that in 2009 television broadcasts reached more than 97% of the population. It neglects to mention, however, that virtually all of those broadcasts came from government-run TV stations.

Elsewhere, in a section on civil and political rights, the paper argues that “the Internet is given full scope in China.” While noting that nearly 29% of China’s population, or 384 million people, have access to the Internet, it fails to address blockage of popular online services like YouTube and Facebook or censorship of online news and discussion forums.

Human-rights advocates in the West are less than impressed. In an Associated Press report, Human Rights Watch Asia advocacy director Sophie Richardson calls the paper “at best a missed opportunity and at worst a clumsy whitewash.”

Among the omissions Richardson finds particularly galling is the persecution of dissidents like Liu Xiaobo, the author of a bold pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08 who was imprisoned last year on charges of subversion.

But China’s leaders have always argued that material rights should take precedence over political rights, a position the whitepaper makes clear on the very first line: “The year 2009 was the most difficult one for China’s economic development since the beginning of the new century.” From there, the paper goes on to document all the government has done in service of its subjects’ economic well-being: Four trillion yuan, or $586 billion, in stimulus; a record grain output of 532 million tons; 9.1% GDP growth. And then there’s this:

In 2009 China appropriated 42 billion yuan for the increase of job opportunities, a rise of 66.7 percent over the previous year. In 2009, 11.02 million new job opportunities were created and 5.14 million laid-off workers were reemployed in urban areas of China; the registered unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in urban areas; the employment rate of that year’s college graduates reached 87.4 percent; and the number of rural migrant workers totaled 145 million, an increase of 4.92 million over the previous year.

While Western leaders aren’t likely to accept car ownership, or even employment rates, as a measure of human-rights progress any time soon, numbers like this could take a little swagger out of the finger-wagging in Washington.

–Josh Chin