China’s guided "People’s Democracy” mocks human rights

"Pulling skeletons out of the cupboard” is the description of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) of the "First Whitebook of the Press Office of the State Council of China published on Wednesday. "The Whitebook underlines the absolute claim to leadership of the Communist Party, which is to be pushed through at all costs” criticised the GfbV Asia expert Ulrich Delius. In its description of the conditions in the country the pamphlet is like a fairy tale. The authors quite unabashedly pride themselves on the rights of giving ethnic minorities freedom of religion although religious repression against Tibetans and Uigurs has recently increased again.

"The State Office for Religions recommenced in April 2005 its campaign for re-education in Tibetan monasteries”, said Delius. Monks who had recently fled from Tibet reported that nuns and monks had again been sent away from several monasteries. 44 nuns from the monastery Gyabdak were called on to leave their monastery. They had refused to allow themselves to be photographed by state officials. 18 other monks had to leave the monastery of Sera because in re-education courses they did not support the policies of the Communist Party. Since the beginning of the re-education campaign in January 1996 more than 11,400 Tibetan monks and nuns were expelled from their monasteries.

In the Autonomous Region Xinjiang also according to the research of the GfbV the religious repression of the Muslim Uigurs continues. Thus believers were arbitrarily prevented in taking part in the pilgrimage to Mecca, religious books were burnt and mosques closed.

The clearest example of the strange understanding of democracy on the part of China’s rulers was the drastic intervention in the freedom of the internet, criticised Delius. "More than the freedom of information China’s power elite fears that the people could thanks to the internet decide to start mass demonstrations.” For this reason they installed 65,000 internet police to control the flow of information and suppress criticism. "But as long as China’s rulers are afraid of their own people it is false labelling for them to sell the policies of suppression as "democratisation”.