Selected Human Rights Issues
Under Xi’s leadership, China has further restricted and suppressed civil society, religious groups, human rights defenders, speech, and academic discourse. The government has enacted laws and policies that enhance the legal authority of the state to counter perceived ideological, social, political, and security threats. It has closed much of the space that had previously existed for limited social activism, such as that relating to environmental issues, women’s rights, and gay rights. In 2021, the government widened the tightening of freedoms to include some relatively non-political entities, such as tech giants, private education companies, and social media influencers.
The Department of State’s annual report on human rights practices states that in 2021, “[PRC] authorities continued to impose ever-tighter control of all print, broadcast, electronic, and social media and regularly used them to propagate government views and CCP ideology.” The PRC government oversees one of the most extensive and stringent internet censorship systems in the world, which includes blocking major U.S. news and social media sites and censoring domestic social media platforms. In 2021, PRC authorities blocked Signal, a U.S.-based messaging app popular with Chinese social activists, dissidents, and journalists. PRC internet platforms have censored online criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and disseminated pro-Russian views and misinformation about the war. An online video (“Voices of April”) compiling audio recordings of people describing the severe 2022 Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown in Shanghai circulated widely before authorities blocked it.
According to the Department of State, “[PRC] law grants public security officers broad administrative detention powers and the ability to detain individuals for extended periods without formal arrest or criminal charges” and police target lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, religious leaders and adherents, and former political prisoners and their family members for arbitrary detention or arrest. The nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation has compiled over 7,600 cases of political and religious prisoners in China as of June 2022. PRC leaders long have asserted that human rights standards vary by country, and that a country’s human rights policies are an “internal affair.” In 2021, the PRC government released a white paper on China’s democratic development that emphasized “material and cultural prosperity” when referring to human rights.
Religious and Ethnic Minority Policies
In 2016, Xi Jinping launched a policy known as “Sinicization,” by which China’s religious and ethnic minorities are required to “assimilate” or conform to majority Han Chinese culture as defined by the CCP and adhere to “core socialist values.” The PRC government has implemented policies in Tibetan areas, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia requiring that nearly all primary school courses be taught in Mandarin rather than in minority languages. Since 2018, new regulations require religious organizations to obtain government permission for nearly every aspect of their operations, submit to greater state supervision, and register all clergy in a national database. The government has continued to pressure unofficial Christian congregations to register with the state and to persecute practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual exercise. The State Department has designated China as a “Country of Particular Concern” for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (P.L. 105-292) in every annual designation list since the law’s passage.
Authorities have carried out coercive assimilation and employment in Tibetan areas, including by “forcibly resettling and urbanizing nomads and farmers, weakening Tibetan-language education in public schools, and weakening monasteries’ role in Tibetan society,” according to the Department of State. The PRC government insists that Chinese laws, and not Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions, govern the process by which lineages of Tibetan lamas are reincarnated, and that the state has the right to choose the successor to the Tibetan spiritual leader, the 87- year-old 14th Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India.
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