IS THIS HOW THE CHINESE SEE AMERICA?

While we are telling the world about China’s human rights record, China is monitoring us and how it portrays us to its people is far from flattering. While some may argue that is only to be expected it is nonetheless important to know what more than one billion Chinese are being told by their government about America.
China likes to accuse the U.S. of having double standards on human rights issues and even now when China is finding favor with aspects of the Obama administration’s Afghan-Pakistan policy it has seized an opportunity to criticize us. That opportunity arose with the February 25 publication of the U.S. State Department’s 2008 Country Reports on human rights abuses across the globe. China knew it would receive its annual minus mark for its rights record and decided to hit back. Ironically, the State Dept. gave Afghanistan’s government, which America supports, a lower mark than China. Hamid Karzai’s administration, and is enemy, the Taliban, were condemned for creating a living hell for the Afghan people. The State Dept. issued the following indictment of the Karzai administration:
““Human rights organizations reported local authorities tortured and abused detainees. Torture and abuse included pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy.”
That terrible criticism of another country did not deter China from releasing its own report entitled, “Human Rights Record of the United States in 2008. It was published in “China Daily,” the country’s major newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party. The report was subdivided into sections, the first being “On Life and Personal Security,” which used FBI statistics and articles from newspapers like the Washington Post to point out that there were 1.4 million violent crimes and 17,000 murders committed in the U.S, in 2008. It also quoted a Washington Post report from September 2008 claiming that Americans aged 12 and over had experienced 23 million crimes of violence or theft. In a further attempt to show to the Chinese people that America was a violent society in which citizens were at risk of violence the report provided figures from the Christian Science Monitor showing that there were over 200 million privately owned weapons in the U.S. That section of the report ended by recalling the Christmas Eve 2008 killing of eight people in an L.A. suburb by a man in a Santa Claus outfit.
The report informed the Chinese people that in 2008 the FBI illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens at the request of the Bush White House and brand new technology was used in the surveillance program. The report also zeroed in on fact that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world:
“The proportion of U.S. prisoners to its population has hit a new high. The Washington Post reported on July 11, 2008 that the United States has 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation in the world. A report issued by the Justice Department on December 11, 2008, said that over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail, or on parole at the end of 2007, equivalent to 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents, or one in every thirty-one adults……….The rate of prisoners, higher than any period in U.S. history, was almost six times the world average,” said the report, also pointing out that a story from “The Economist” on May 10, 2008 stated that the U.S. was one of the few countries where felons were deprived f rights with some states not allowing them to vote.
It was clear the report’s authors, no doubt government-employed propagandists, had made great use of source material from U.S. media reports and federal documents. Capitalism, always a favorite target for Chinese communists, got special treatment with detailed figures showing how the richest fifth of Americans earned fifteen times more than the bottom fifth. Other figures were included to depict an America experiencing growing homelessness and poverty, with 23% of New Yorkers living beneath the poverty line. U.S. Department of Labor statistics were quoted to indicate increases in unemployment rates and a report from the New York State Labor Department was used to prove that workers were often ripped off. No mention was made of the fact that U.S. federal and local investigations were often responsible for exposing corruption and such issues were publicly reported, which was rarely the case in China.
The report made a big play about the tens of millions in the U.S. who lacked health insurance. It was claimed that one in five young American adults suffered from a personality disorder and that 25% of College-aged Americans with mental problems did not get treatment. Support for those claims came in sourced reports from a variety of outlets including the Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health.
Racial discrimination was featured with evidence attributed to federal bodies, including the U.S. Labor Department and the National Urban League. The purpose of that part of the report was to highlight the high unemployment rates among African Americans and their failure rate in high schools. Figures showing that black men were six times more likely to be jailed than their white counterparts were attributed to U.S. Department of Justice findings published on June 5, 2008. The treatment of Native Americans and the erecting of a Border fence were quoted as examples of how the basic rights of “indigenous” Americans were “infringed.”
“There is serious racial hostility in the United States. According to a Voice of America report, a research report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice at the end of 2005 shows that the U.S. reports about 191,000 hates c rimes each year,” the report further alleged.
In order to demonstrate that China kept a close eye on events here, reference was made to an ongoing case in Pennsylvania where two judges are accused of taking bribes to send thousands of juveniles to detention centers run by private contractors. No mention was made of the fact that those judges are being prosecuted.
A final section of the report focused on what it described as the U.S. violation of human rights in other nations. It accused private contractors like Blackwater of killing innocent Iraqis and quoted a U.S. Congressional investigation which found that Blackwater soldiers were involved in 196 shooting incidents in Iraq since 2005. An unusual paragraph, which dealt with the U.S. as the world’s major arms dealer, seemed somewhat strange given that China sells arms on a global scale.
“It’s (U.S.) arms sales greatly intensified instability across the world and severely violated human rights of foreign nationals. A report by the New American Foundation said arms sales reached $32 billion in 2007, more than three times the level in 2001. The weapons were sold to 174 nations and regions,” claimed the report.
The report concluded with criticism of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the questionable interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and other U.S. run detention facilities. For China, whose history of prisoner abuse, prisoner disappearances, secret trials and executions, is well known, the leveling criticism at the U.S. appeared almost absurd. But it has to be remembered the Chinese document was for internal consumption and for those nations who want to believe the worst about America. Whatever one might think of the report, especially given one’s tendency to dismiss it as clever propaganda, it is nevertheless a reminder that we are not perfect while we condemn others. Still, it should not be forgotten that our tendency is to announce to the world our failings and inadequacies, thereby inviting scrutiny and criticism. In contrast, China runs over student dissidents with tanks, sends people to labor camps if they question the system and prefers lies and obfuscation to freedom of expression and the truth.