Are Human Rights Too Un-Chinese? : Repression: A murderous government imperils the world.

The Chinese leadership has committed a new blasphemy against universal human rights. They have used the distraction of the war in the Persian Gulf to intensify the repression of those fighting for democracy in China.

Wang Dan, the 22-year-old regarded as the foremost leader of the Tian An Men protests, whose face became familiar to millions of television viewers around the world in the spring of 1989, was sentenced last week to four years in prison for “instigating counterrevolutionary propaganda.”

Ren Wanding, an accountant and human-rights advocate, was sentenced to seven years. Liu Gang, a physics graduate student who organized the open-air “democracy salons” similar to teach-ins and who campaigned for freedom of the press and multiparty elections. He is expected to receive especially harsh punishment because he has not been “cooperative” since his arrest.

Because the true human-rights situation in China has been hidden for such a long time and because of the great differences between China and the West in race and language, and because of the long-term separation of East and West, it is quite easy to view China’s society and culture, and therefore its politics, as totally different from any other civilization in the world.

Some have even theorized, perhaps rationalized, that the Chinese don’t need universally recognized human rights, and that universal principles of human rights don’t fit China’s experience.

This theory of “uniqueness” has been widespread in China and the West for a long while. It is the very basis, in fact, for the double standard with which the United States and other Western countries view Chinese affairs.

Grounds for condemnation of Mikhail Gorbachev--such as repression in the Baltics--are ignored in China. China’s affairs, we are told, should be judged by “Chinese standards.” In this way, violence against and persecution of those striving for democracy in China become “understandable,” and rulers who slaughter the innocent become “acceptable.”

Thus, the actions of Chinese leaders are tolerated, or even encouraged in a disguised fashion--for example, through the revocation or relaxation of the kind of economic sanctions that were placed on South Africa.

But, if the Tian An Men movement proved anything, it was that the Chinese people want the same freedoms as everyone else. The Chinese do not have a value system different from the rest of the world.

In politics, double and multiple standards are shortsighted. More and more, the global village faces common problems: population, energy, the environment, global warming and deforestation. But, when a government exists that can be proud of the Tian An Men massacre, when a dictatorship still stands that refuses to apply universally recognized principles to control its own behavior, how can we possibly cooperate on other global problems?

There are examples throughout history which show that indulging a government that is proud of murder will bring about a global conflict sooner or later. And without the gradual improvement of the world’s human-rights environment, solutions to the problems of the global village cannot be guaranteed. In this sense, China’s human-rights problems are the world’s problems. China’s advocates for democracy need the world community’s help now. The place to begin is with condemnation of these trials.