Friday, Feb. 18

MIRO CERNETIG
China Bureau
Friday, February 18, 2000

Beijing -- The thousands of jailed pro-democracy leaders, falun gong enthusiasts and others deemed criminals by China's communist regime would surely disagree with the assessment, but Beijing released a glowing report on freedom in the country yesterday, ruling that everything is fine.

"The situation of human rights in China has seen tremendous changes," the report concludes, explaining that Western views on the subject don't fit with realities on China, where most people's lives are slowly but steadily improving.

Instead of concentrating on dissidents such as the falun gong adherents arrested in Tiananmen Square in recent months, making headlines around the world, the report takes the collective view.

China is a developing country, it says, where anyone who destabilizes the government threatens to cause luan -- chaos. As a whole, 1.3 billion Chinese are better off and enjoy more freedom than ever as well as a greater chance of getting a full meal each day, the report says.

According to the report, China's ninth in as many years, life expectancy in China has doubled to more than 70 over the past 50 years and the number of poor has shrunk from 250 million in 1949 to 42 million today. A peasant is called poor if his or her income falls below $159 (U.S.) a year.

"China cannot copy the mode of human-rights development of the developed Western countries," the report's authors wrote, echoing the regime's view that in the Middle Kingdom, the majority's right to a secure living must come ahead of individual rights.

That theme is one Beijing has repeatedly expressed since 1989, when most of the world condemned the regime for sending in the army to massacre student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

The release of the report was carefully timed.

The head of the World Trade Organization, Mike Moore, was in Beijing yesterday to help secure China's entry into the global free-trade body. Resistance to China's entry is particularly strong at the moment in Washington, where protectionist forces fearing China's low-cost labour economy are trying to hold up its entry.

Human-rights groups say that about 5,000 people have been jailed since last April, when 10,000 members of the falun gong sect marched on Beijing trying to win recognition for their sect's blend of Buddhist, Taoist and New Age philosophies.

Now eclipsed by the falun gong arrests is the continuing crackdown on the China Democratic Party. Hundreds of pro-democracy activists have been detained.