If human rights are no longer important, it’s not worth shining a light on human rights abuses in and by China. At the risk of sounding repetitive, we opine once again that human rights abuses — particularly where they are most extensive — must command our attention until they stop.
China is about more than markets and environmental disasters, about more than aggressive military moves in the South China Sea and elsewhere. China is about communism. Totalitarianism. One party rule. Jail for freedom fighters. China is about suppression of what in this country are First Amendment rights. We do not even need to mention China’s coerced abortions and requirement to ask for the right to have children in order to highlight China’s human rights abuses.
Cases in point: China recently detained five Hong Kong booksellers — the type of people who deal in ideas, including ideas that the Chinese communist government finds offensive. Note: China bound itself by treaty in 1994 to do in Hong Kong what it reserves the right not to do on the Chinese mainland: respect human rights. Residents of Hong Kong expect their liberties by right, not by sufferance. However, not only in China per se, but in the former British colony of Hong Kong, with its tradition of human rights, China indulges in the charades familiar from the USSR. You, the detained booksellers, really left China voluntarily. Or some such transparent nonsense.
Keep this in mind every time you buy an item marked “Made in China.” You support a system that succeeds on the backs of semi-slave labor at worst, or under the suppression of civil liberties at best. Yes, China’s record on the environment is dismal, but it is the human environment, so to speak, that concerns us most.
The USSR has fallen. Communism has not. If we do not keep reminding ourselves of this fact, we shall never see the world’s largest conglomerate of human beings free. If free peoples do not object to Chinese oppression, who will?
The fight for freedom worldwide might be long and daunting. If anything, this makes it all the more necessary to keep coming back to it.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
