From Chinese Human Rights Defenders

In China, workers protesting unpaid wages, workplace illnesses and unsafe working conditions encountered police brutality, censorship and detention;

Villages, towns, and markets in Xinjiang are empty, as millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been forced into internment camps as part of the Chinese government’s counter-terrorism campaign;

Thousands of migrant laborers and their families have been evicted from cities, with officials referring to them as the “low-end population” because their residential status at birth marked them for life;

Petitioners traveling to Beijing found themselves blocked from boarding buses or trains, sometimes identified by facial recognition or other surveillance tools, despite no known criminal charges against them.

These workers, Uyghurs, families, petitioners, underpaid teachers, and unemployed veterans are among the millions of Chinese prohibited and punished by the authoritarian state from organizing, demonstrating, going on strike, running in local elections, or speaking freely. Their stories poke gaping holes in the “success” story of “human rights with Chinese characteristics” that the Chinese government is selling to the world.

The values and principles underpinning the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by member states of the United Nations seventy years ago, on December 10, is under intensified assault today by powerful authoritarian governments and nationalist leaders. Spearheading an aggressive campaign that is threatening to distort, weaken, and demolish the very core of the human rights principle—that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms… without distinction of any kind”—is the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping. On the 70th anniversary of the UDHR, it is more important than ever to stand up for the universality and integrity of human rights.

Since a major speech by Xi Jinping at the UN in Geneva in January 2017, the Chinese government has actively advanced this campaign through aggressive tactics in influencing and weakening UN human rights mechanisms. The government made the further claim at a recent UN review of China’s human rights that “there is no universal road for the development of human rights in the world.” In place of the principles of universal and indivisible human rights, the Xi government wants to globalize “human rights with Chinese characteristics.”

The Xi government has been pushing UN member states to take a “win-win cooperation” approach, which, once adopted, would practically silence any criticism of its human rights violations in China and violations committed in its operations to replicate the “China model” in many parts of the world, e.g., through the Belt and Road Initiative.

The “China model” that Xi Jinping is promoting today as a “shared destiny of common humanity” has left a trail of serious human rights abuses and numerous victims in China. These so-called “human rights with Chinese characteristics” have little to do with human rights enshrined in the UDHR, but has everything to do with systemic discrimination entrenched in Chinese society and the ruthless suppression on civil and political liberties by the government.

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