Human rights in China have deteriorated sharply, according to Amnesty International, which described Beijing's crackdown on peaceful dissent in 1999 as "the most serious and wide-ranging" in the last 10 years.
"Thousands of people were arbitrarily detained [by police] for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association or religion ... in apparent attempts to intimidate or silence them", says Amnesty's China Human Rights Report for 1999.
"Some were sentenced to long prison terms under draconian national security legislation and after unfair trials; others were assigned without trial to up to three years' detention in 're-education through labour' camps. Torture and ill-treatment were widespread. Thousands of people were sentenced to death and many executed", the report states. It adds: "In the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang those suspected of nationalist activities or sympathies continued to be the targets of particularly harsh repression".
The report's details on political dissidents are short, but it does outline actions against members of the China Democratic Party (CDP), including the jailing of more than 20 members of the group during 1999. The arrests started shortly after the group's first attempt to register with authorities in July 1998 in Zhejiang province, where it was founded.
However, CDP members weren't the only ones affected. Amnesty notes that "a broad range of people" were also targeted and detained for "promoting reforms". One was writer Peng Ming, a leader of both the China Development Union (a network of mainly dissident intellectuals) and the China New Development Strategy Research Institute. He was assigned to 18 months of "re-education through labour" in February 1999 for allegedly "buying sex", charges his family claims were trumped up.
Peng was said to have been leading weekly discussions in Beijing on reform issues. There was no elaboration on either the content or the orientation of such discussions.
Of the thousands arrested, killed or injured in the clampdown on the 1989 Tiananmen protests, according to Amnesty, many remained unaccounted for. Others were imprisoned "after unfair trials"in which they were convicted of "counter-revolutionary" offences which have not been crimes under Chinese law since 1997.
Not only has Beijing refused to review these cases, says Amnesty, it continues to restrict the freedom of those who were released, closely monitoring their activities.
The report provides only a sketchy picture of the repression faced by labour activists. "Many demonstrations by unemployed workers protesting at the failure of the state to provide social welfare and against government corruption" were repressed, the report claims, adding that any attempts to organise workers outside the official channels remained a target of suppression. "They, like other political prisoners, were sometimes singled out for particularly harsh treatment, including beatings and denial of medical care."
The report says many cases showed a blatant disregard for basic procedures to ensure a fair trial, including proper access to legal representation. The problem is particularly serious for political defendants, it notes, whose lawyers were often pressured by the authorities, whose trials fell short of international standards and whose verdicts and sentences all decided before the trial.
Torture and ill-treatment of "criminal suspects" is common, and prison conditions remain harsh, the report points out.
Zhang Lin, a pro-democracy and labour rights activist, held in Guangzhou for "re-education through labour" since November 1998, was required to work 14 hours a day despite being in poor health and was beaten when he tried to protest. He was "tortured at least six times, as a result of which he twice attempted suicide. He was beaten by other inmates acting on orders from the guards, stripped of his clothes and dragged on the ground for long distances, and had his head forced under water. In July, he went on hunger strike for six days to protest against his treatment."
According to the incomplete records available to Amnesty, at least 1720 death sentences were passed and at least 1077 executions were carried out in 1999, bringing the total known death sentences in China in the 1990s to 27,120 and the total known executions to around 18,000.
Even these numbers are "only a fraction of the true figures". Death penalty statistics remain a state secret in China and execution is sometimes carried out within hours of sentencing. Appeals, even when possible, are rarely successful, says the report.
There is no way to establish how many people have been executed for political offences, but the report claims that in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, "Scores of Uighurs, many of them political prisoners, were sentenced to death and executed".
In Xinjiang, it goes on, "Torture of political prisoners to extract information or coerce them to sign confessions was frequent and systematic. Some particularly cruel methods ... were reported ... for example, the insertion into the penis of horse hair or of a special wire with small spikes which fold flat when it is inserted but extend when it is pulled out".
The report also points out the arrest in 1999 of thousands of followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, including the detention of hundreds of them in "re-education through labour" camps. Last month, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in China reported the recent death of two more Falun Gong followers in Chinese custody, bringing to 21 the total death toll of members in custody since the group was banned in July 1999.
In a related development, a small group of activists in Hong Kong staged a sit-in protest on July 8 outside the Liaison Office of the Central Government in the Special Administration Region to demand the release of all political prisoners in China. The group has staged 18 other protests, roughly one a month since January 1999. Leung Kwok-hung, a leader of the group April 5 Action has been a key participant.
In early June, a vigil in Hong Kong to commemorate the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre drew 45,000 participants. The 1999 vigil drew 60,000.
BY EVA CHENG