Olympic Torch Ignites Protests of Chinese Policies

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: No, actually, I don't. I think that if you look back at the record, I don't know how much we can take credit for, how much really stems from our own patient engagement with China, versus things that the Chinese have done themselves to change the way they govern themselves.

But anyone who was familiar with China in the 1980s and goes back to China now, would be bowled over by the changes. I don't mean, simply, changes in the standard of living. The degrees of freedom that the average Chinese enjoy now, and how they live, and what they see, and what they do, in whom they marry, in where they travel, and what they think -- are fairly fundamental.

The political system has remained a one-party, authoritarian system -- no question about it. But in the 1980s, that party could reasonably be called a Communist Party.

Now, if that Party were called by, in terms of what it actually does, it would be called The Chinese Bureaucratic Capitalist Party. There's almost nothing Communist about it anymore, it's a development-oriented, authoritarian party.

Are there still a lot of problems? You bet. But I think that it has changed enormously, generally in good directions.

I think we have generally played a helpful role in that, because we have generally stopped short of simply standing off and hectoring and lecturing the Chinese, and humiliating them in public, rather than engaging them and trying to -- through a variety of means -- to have a subtle and positive influence on them.

MARGARET WARNER: Sophie Richardson, how do you, and Human Rights Watch analyze it, in terms of the degree of personal and political freedom in China today, as compared to, let's say, even 15 years ago?

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: Well, certainly I think some of the improvements that Ken has just cited in -- there are no better ones than a degree of personal freedom about where you want to live, or what you want to do for a living, or who you want to marry -- there's certainly been progress in that respect.

But there are other important areas, and some of them -- ones, you know, obligations that the Chinese government has freely undertaken -- where there's been a pretty impressive lack of progress.

And part of the difficulty, we think, is that a failure to make greater progress, for example, on instituting a real rule of law, isn't just problematic, as far as protections of civil and political liberties, but they're problematic for, you know, the prospects of China being a better security partner or trading partner.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you mean?

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: Well, in the sense that, if you have an independent, functioning legal system or a free press -- you know, which are basic human rights, and which are very much, I think under siege in China, at the moment -- you know, you're not only going to get better defense of people's ability to speak their minds freely and not be persecuted for it, but you're also going to have in place the systems that, for example, prevent, you know, tainted food or lead-painted toys get into the international commercial stream.

These are mechanisms that aren't just used for protecting, you know, free speech, but also have consequences in other realms that are important -- not just to the U.S. -- but other countries around the world, with respect to their relations with China.

MARGARET WARNER: What is the status in regards to freedom of press and freedom of personal expression on political issues?

Ken Lieberthal?

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: The press is relatively free to do things like denounce corruption, denounce inattention to major issues, denounce inequality that has grown tremendously in income distribution in China, and so forth.

The major constraint on the press is they're not allowed to criticize high-level leaders by name. To do that will get them in deep, deep trouble.

And they are not allowed to say that the fundamental direction of the top leadership, say, right after the recent meeting of the legislature -- was dead wrong. But, within that broad constraint, they are allowed to engage in lively debate, and to raise a lot of very tough issues.

And for anyone -- again, all of these things are relative, you know, no society changes overnight. For anyone who knew China in the 1980s or early 1990s and looks at the Chinese press today, they would be, simply, blown away by the amount of diversity in the press, and the frankness with which it raises a lot of issues of concern to everyday Chinese.

Let me stress that does not mean that China enjoys full press freedom and it does not mean that they don't have a long way to go in opening up the political discourse in the Chinese press.

But the movement has been in a reasonably good direction.

MARGARET WARNER: Sophie, what examples can you give us of limits on personal expression or personal dissent?

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: Let me give you two of the cases we've looked at over the last year. There was a bridge collapsed in Southern China last year, and a number of journalists went off to cover this event, and a number of them -- they were from different domestic press outlets -- and a number of them were interviewing some of the people who had been, either been victims in the collapse, or had witnessed some part of the story.

And the local police, not wanting this kind of expose, not only broke up the meetings, but actually arrested the journalists, including one from The People's Daily, which is, you know, the special Party paper.

And more recently, we have seen the case of Hu Jia -- who has become a very prominent government critic over the last couple of years -- and most recently criticized the government over its hosting of the Olympics, given its lousy human rights track record.

He was sentenced last week to three and a half years in prison on charges of inciting state subversion. And not only is he going to be suffering this penalty, his wife and baby daughter are under house arrest, and presumably will remain there as long as he's in prison.

So, there's still a long way to go with respect to guaranteeing press freedom and individual rights to speak their mind.

MARGARET WARNER: And do you consider, Ken Lieberthal, the Hu Jia case unusual? Or is, in fact, that what happens to people who sort of question the priorities of the leadership, and especially involving the Olympics?

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: Generally speaking, people who question the top leadership personally, or who do things that look like they're heading toward -- in a serious way -- heading toward organizing others to protest against leadership, run into the kind of repression that Sophie just referred to.

And that obviously is unacceptable, but it's a reality of present-day China.

People who criticize all kinds of other aspects of what goes on in China, including, for example, Chinese policy toward Japan, or Chinese toleration of policies that produce enormous income inequality, or Chinese corruption among officials and that kind of thing -- the Chinese web is full of that kind of criticism.

Hu Jia's postings were generally on the Web, not in the regular print media. Even the print media are full of a lot of these things, and op-ed pieces and that kind of thing.

So, again, this is a matter of a system that still is capable of significant failures. But, in broad terms, for the people living there, it is a system whose general movement has been in the right direction. So, it's really a glass half full or half empty kind of problem.

And I think actually, Ken Lieberthal, if I could come back to you first on that -- China calls the Tibetan protesters, both in Tibet and also elsewhere, separatists, or "splittists," as they call it. People say that they really are trying to create an independent Tibet and split up China.

What's your analysis of, really, what's at the root of this tension between Tibet and China, and to what degree it really is about independence, rather than autonomy as the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, says?

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: Those are several questions.

First of all, what's at the root of it, I think is Chinese have proven themselves to be, really, very insensitive, on balance, to Tibetan religious and cultural priorities.

And here, I've talked to many Chinese over many years in China about Tibet -- I have yet to find one, frankly -- I'm sure that person exists, but I haven't bumped into the individual -- who regards Tibet as other than backward, superstitious, relatively feudal, and thinks the Chinese are doing anything other than raising Tibet up to the level of Chinese civilization.

So, there is a real, kind of, problem of perception there. We tend to see Tibet as something like Shangri La, and the Chinese tend to see Tibet as a poor, backward area that they are helping out by helping to modernize its culture.

You've got a fundamental difference of kind of what the nature of the problem is, there.

In terms of the issue of independence for Tibet, frankly, there are no good methods available to find out the division of thinking among people in Tibet on that issue.

But I am sure -- I've visited Tibet several times -- I am sure that if you took a poll of Tibetans, you would find 100 percent of them ardently want the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, and to hold a position of honor and authority in Tibet.

Whether they combine that with a notion of independence, I don't know.

If you look at the Tibetans outside of Tibet, clearly the community is split. The Dalai Lama confirms time and again -- and I have spoken with him, and heard him say this privately, as well as publicly, and I believe him fully -- that he does not seek independence for Tibet, but does think that Tibetan cultural and religious autonomy is of fundamental importance, and would be good for China, too.

There are others in the exile community -- especially the younger Tibetans -- who tend to think that the only real solution for Tibet is independence.

So, I think there's a division in the exile community, and I just don't know the situation on the independence issue among Tibetans who actually live in Tibet.

MARGARET WARNER: Sophie Richardson, what does the sort of international community of protesters, the ones we are seeing protesting outside of Tibet -- seek to achieve there? And is there unanimity, is there agreement on what the aim is?

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: I don't think there is absolute unanimity on, sort of, every last aspect of the debate.

I do think that there are very strong feelings across the community that the Dalai Lama should be allowed to return, that Tibet should be granted a far greater degree of autonomy than it actually has, or alternatively, to actually have the autonomy law that exists actually be upheld.

I think it's very hard not to see the protests of the last six weeks in terms of anything other than long-term deprivation of rights.

And here, I really do mean the full spectrum of not just civil and political rights, and the opportunity to participate in how that region is run, or whether people can practice their religion freely. But I also think we're talking very much about social, economic, and cultural rights, too.

You know, to the extent that the formula in the rest of the mainland has been giving people a greater degree of control over their individual lives, and the right to, for example, move around and make more money, in exchange for not demanding more political rights -- well, that formula really hasn't played out in the Tibetan autonomous region, where a lot of the benefits of economic development have not accrued to Tibetans, but rather have accrued to Chinese citizens who moved to the region from other parts of the country.

And I think that, again, that's part of the reason why you see such a strong response now.

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: Well, the Chinese in recent years have opened up Tibet a lot to economic development.

They've poured a fair amount of investment resources in it, and they've upgraded the infrastructure quite a bit. I think they probably felt that the Tibetans would be grateful for all of that.

The reality is, as Sophie very accurately said, that the major beneficiaries of those investments to date have been ethnic Chinese who have gone to Tibet and other provinces, because they suddenly see economic opportunity available there.

My sense is the Tibetan culture is not nearly as commercial and competitive as Chinese culture is. So, if you open it up, not surprisingly, the Chinese go there and seize the opportunities of the Tibetans -- A) Tibetans see more and more Chinese where before, Tibetans were there, and B, they see the Chinese as gaining the wealth that they -- the Tibetans -- now see right in front of them, and probably resent not having access to.

MARGARET WARNER: And aren't this -- may I just ask you, are the Tibetans discriminated against inside Tibet? Or is it more, what you said, that's simply not -- they aren't as commercially minded, and so they aren't participating in the opportunities?

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: Well, it's a little hard to tell -- you do not see signs saying, "Tibetans need not apply." But if you look at educational levels, and just simply business capabilities, I think the dice are overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the Chinese.

It's almost, frankly, in some ways -- and I don't want to overdraw this analogy -- but, you know, when Alaska became much more interesting to people from the Lower 48, they ran up there -- and if you look at the Alaskan economy, is dominated not by Eskimos, but by people from the Lower 48, and, you know, who have gone there recently, or awhile ago.

It's just a cultural difference -- who is more attune to taking advantage of the kinds of opportunities that are suddenly made available, whether it's from oil money in Alaska, or from building a railway from North China all the way up to Tibet in China.

And here, I think the Tibetans are just simply not going to be the ones that win in most of those instances.

SOPHIE RICHARDSON: Well, I'd like to just offer up an example that underscores how this isn't just sort of a cultural difference or one of a mindset.

We did research last year on the policy of forcibly relocating Tibetan nomads into, sort of prefabricated settlements, more urbanized areas. And the nice-sounding logic to this was to make them -- give them greater proximity to State services.

But not only were the services completely unavailable in the areas they were moved to, they were obviously taken out of the one way of life they knew, the one way of sustaining themselves.

And the only employment opportunities that were nearby, tended to be on infrastructure projects, such as mines. The only kinds of jobs that were available to the Tibetans were the very low-end ones -- essentially manual labor -- and from which there was no way to sort of move up the economic chain of command.

And so this was not at all cultural, this was people who had been denied their right to their way of life, who had been put in other circumstances where they were quite systematically discriminated against, and who had no way of really improving their circumstances, because they weren't allowed to challenge these decisions, and they weren't allowed to move back to rural areas.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Ken Lieberthal, is the current Chinese government completely hostile to the idea of any greater autonomy for Tibet? Something that could represent some sort of a compromise here?

KENNETH LIEBERTHAL: I think that remains to be tested. Hu Jintao, the current head of China, was in charge of Tibet in the late 1980s, and he's the person who imposed martial law in Tibet when there was unrest back then.

So, I have not seen any serious evidence that he is very sensitive to issues of Tibetan culture, and to the kind of benefits of greater autonomy that the Dalai Lama would argue for.

I would hope that they could see their way clear to a different view, because I think everyone would be better off -- the Tibetans and the Chinese -- but I frankly can't tell you whether that is in the offing or not.