'A brighter future beckons': China tries to get Xinjiang to join the party

The Guardian

Tom Phillips in Urumqi
Friday 9 October 2015 06.15 EDT

Yellow signs swing from lampposts urging citizens to “hold high the great banner of national unity”. Red banners hang from bridges imploring drivers to “unswervingly promote long-term stability”.

“The Party’s great policy is the root of our great life!” shouts another one of hundreds of posters lining the motorway into the heart of the mountain-flanked northwestern city of Urumqi.

As Beijing celebrates the 60th birthday of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region this month, Communist party officials have decked out the region’s cities and towns in a garish blaze of multi-coloured propaganda. 

Taxi drivers have been ordered to place Chinese flags on their vehicles while roundabouts and street corners have been decorated with animal-shaped flower arrangements.

“Tremendous changes have taken place in Xinjiang over the past 60 years,”boasted a government white paper marking the anniversary. “Today, Xinjiang is standing at a new starting point for development … A brighter future beckons.”

The energetic government celebrations are part of a concerted push to depict the troubled region as a place of economic opportunity not ethnic riots.

Performers attend the gala celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in Urumqi. Photograph: Gao Jie/Xinhua Press/Corbis

For decades Xinjiang, a vast region of snow-capped mountains and deserts, has been the setting for frictions and deadly explosions of violence between the native Muslim Uighur minority and a rising influx of Han Chinese migrants.

Now, Beijing – which recently lured British chancellor George Osborne to the resource-rich region – is fighting to promote a more dynamic image of Xinjiang, which president Xi Jinping has placed at the heart of an economic “pivot west” towards Central Asia.

“This is a big deal with a lot of time and effort being put into it,” James Leibold, a Xinjiang expert from La Trobe University in Melbourne, said of the festivities. “They need to demonstrate to a whole range of constituencies that Xinjiang is open for business and that Xinjiang is calm and normal.”

In fact, there is little normal about the backdrop to Xinjiang’s 60thanniversary, which comes amid growing ethnic tension and, many also suspect, bloodletting. 

In the capital, Urumqi, primary schools are fenced off by yellow and black barricades – installed after a May 2014 bomb attack that was blamed on Uighur extremists and led Beijing to launch a crackdown dubbed the “people’s war” on terror.

Armoured vehicles, flanked by soldiers with automatic weapons, sit outside mosques, public squares and amusement parks, partly the consequence of deadly ethnic riots in 2009 that claimed about 200 lives.

Uighur neighbourhoods are patrolled by teams of black-clad police carrying riot shields and wooden clubs.

“If anything happens you just yell and people will come. We’ve had a lot of rehearsals,” said Li Juntao, a security officer at a children’s amusement park where Tweety Bird rides and a mushroom-shaped merry-go-round are guarded by an APC manned with rifle-toting soldiers.

An armoured vehicle sits outside a children’s amusement park in Urumqi. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Li, a 46-year-old migrant from Henan province, insisted the security situation was under control, even if the government still felt it necessary to station heavily armed troops near children’s playgrounds.

“It’s quite safe here. As a matter of fact, the security in Xinjiang is quite good,” the father of two claimed.

China’s state-controlled press mirrors those claims, churning out story after story about Xinjiang’s rosy prospects to commemorate this month’s celebrations.

“Life in Xinjiang is getting better and better,” a recent headline in China’s official news agency Xinhua claimed, citing a French writer whom it said had recently visited.

A government report issued a barrage of positive statistics about the autonomous region’s bright outlook: in recent decades Xinjiang had built 175,000km of highway, 5,760km of railway track and 16 airports, it said. Half-a-million urban jobs were now being created each year.

Yet reports from Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Washington-based news service that produces some of the only reliable reporting on Xinjiang, suggest all is not well on China’s western frontier.

In the lead-up to this month’s festivities, RFA has reported on a coalmine massacre in Aksu in which at least 50 people died, a “knife and bomb attack” by a group of Uighurs on traffic police in which at least 18 people were killed, and the fatal shootings of at least eight Uighur men who had been deemed “suspicious” by police.

Nicholas Bequelin, an expert on the region who is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia, said, “There is a very serious ethnic problem in Xinjiang that is not being addressed but instead is being suppressed and concealed and is becoming more severe by the day.”

Police with riot shields guard a children’s amusement park in Urumqi. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Beijing blames much of the violence in Xinjiang on terrorist or separatist groups intent on breaking away from China.

But Bequelin said the killing was largely driven by “longstanding grievances” about the Uighurs’ exclusion from Xinjiang’s economic boom and the harsh restrictions placed on their lives by Beijing.

“The causes of discontent are the classic ones that have been there for decades and are just getting more serious: the sharp restrictions on religious freedom, the lack of any kind of political freedom, the very chequered human rights record, the politically motivated suppression of dissent, the conflation of any kind of dissent with terrorism and separatism, the influx of Han Chinese, an economic development model that marginalises Uighurs and rural populations in favour of urban and Chinese ones, and the systematic stamping out of the Uighur culture,” he said.

Yu Zhengsheng, one of China’s seven most powerful men, admitted the region was facing a “severe situation”, during a speech commemorating its anniversary. 

“We must clench our fists tight and take the initiative to crack down on violence and terror activities,” Yu said.

During a visit to Shache, a county in Xinjiang’s extreme west that witnessed one of last year’s bloodiest incidents, Yu praised locals for standing on “the frontline of terror”. “Different ethnic groups should be united together like pomegranate seeds,” he added.

The problem was that, despite Beijing’s propaganda drive, such ethnic harmony simply did not exist, said Leibold.

A propaganda mural in Urumqi reads: “Success comes from harmony, power comes from unity!” Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

“Is there such a thing as ethnic unity? No. Xinjiang remains a very divided society, tremendously divided, particularly among the Han and the Uighurs.” 

Leibold said the immense propaganda campaign underway in Xinjiang about ethnic unity was “really about trying to convince people that there is something that doesn’t exist really on a day-to-day basis.”

“You wouldn’t need to have that message of unity if there was unity.”

Government officials in Xinjiang declined to be interviewed about the region’s 60th anniversary.

But residents, many speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, painted a bleak picture of how relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese migrants had soured in the wake of the 2009 riots and the attack in Urumqi last year.

“It’s not harmonious at all. It is very bad,” said one taxi driver, who asked not to be named. “On the surface people won’t say anything but everyone knows the truth. Don’t be deceived by what you see on the surface.”

“Before the attacks in 2009 the relationship was OK. But that sowed the seed of hatred,” added the driver, the son of migrants from Sichuan province. “They killed many Han Chinese people in 2009,” he claimed. “One of my friends told me they killed a pregnant woman and threw her off a bridge.”

Guo Kaixing, a 22-year-old estate agent, tried to put a brighter spin on things. “It was a very rare case,” he said of last year’s bomb attack in Urumqi. “It was an attack by people who are against integration.” 

But Guo has seen Xinjiang’s troubles firsthand. In 1997, aged just four, he recalled witnessing disturbances in his hometown of Yining, a city near China’s border with Kazakhstan, which Uighurs call Ghulja. The still murky incident, which sparked a deadly crackdown, became one of the most notorious incidents in Xinjiang’s recent history.

“I saw people coming. My father threw me onto his bike and we fled,” Guo remembered. “My father said those people were very fierce.”

Police armed with wooden clubs patrol a Uighur neighbourhood in Urumqi. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

In the city’s Uighur quarter, residents preferred silence.

“I’m very busy at the moment,” said a tailor who was watching over an entirely empty shop.

Another Uighur grinned from cheek to cheek as he reeled off the party line. “National unity is very important,” he said. “I’m anti-separatism.”

Leibold said draconian security restrictions meant it was impossible to gauge whether the security situation in Xinjiang was deteriorating or even improving as a result of Beijing’s crackdown and attempts to co-opt disaffected Uighurs.

By pumping huge resources into Xinjiang it was possible Beijing had achieved an uneasy short-term stability, he said.

“Xinjiang is not Chechnya. It is certainly not Syria. The question is whether that will work in the long-term … and a lot of that depends on the ability of the party to stay in power. If something were to happen in Beijing and you had a situation of political instability, well then we’d really see violence in Xinjiang on an unprecedented scale.”

Bequelin said that as Xinjiang completed 60 years, the Communist party appeared to have more control over the region than ever before.

“China has cemented its control over Xinjiang very significantly in the past decade… [but] the methods that China is employing to assimilate Xinjiang are leaving a lot of dead bodies on the ground.”

Suspects in Xinjiang Mine Attack Sought Explosives: Guard

Radio Free Asia

2015-10-08

Alleged “separatists” who orchestrated a knife attack which left 50 people dead and injured 50 others at a coal mine in northwestern China’s troubled Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had sought to steal the facility’s explosives, according to local security guards.

The attack occurred on Sept. 18, when a group of knife-wielding suspects set upon security guards at the gate of the Sogan Colliery in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) prefecture’s Bay (Baicheng) county, before targeting the mine owner’s residence and a dormitory for workers.

When police arrived at the mine in Terek township to control the situation, the attackers rammed their vehicles using trucks loaded down with coal, sources said, adding that at least five officers were killed in the incident, including a local police chief.

Twenty days after the attack, nine suspects remain on the run amid tight security in the region.

On Thursday, Tuniyaz Mollaniyaz, an explosives depot guard at a nearby mine in Terek, told RFA’s Uyghur Service that the attackers had targeted Sogan’s dynamite cache, but came away empty-handed.

“According to my boss, the attackers planned to rob the Sogan explosives depot, but that day it was empty,” he said, adding that mines are often forced to wait for clearance from county authorities before they can stock dynamite.

“The attackers could not get what they wanted, so they stormed the dorm and residential units … My boss said that their initial plan was to attack the county police and military after they got the explosives.”

Mollaniyaz said that his guard unit and others overseeing explosives at the more than 20 coal mines in Terek township had been ordered to ramp up security, as local authorities have yet to apprehend the suspects.

“After the incident, the explosive materials from all of the mines were transferred to county control, but even though the depots are empty, we are still guarding them,” he said.

Units of six guards were monitoring the depot at his mine on 12-hour shifts, Mollaniyaz said, adding that they had been provided with spears while on duty, instead of the rubber batons they usually carry.

Operations at the township’s mines have yet to resume since being suspended in the wake of the incident, he said, while students remain exempt from classes at the local primary school, which has been serving as a base of operations for the ongoing manhunt.

Police and military security remains heavy on the streets of Terek, and helicopters used in the search operation have recently expanded their flight patterns to beyond the mountains where the suspects were believed to be in hiding, he added.

“It seems that the longer [the authorities] are unable to track down the suspects, the more anxious they become,” Mollaniyaz said.

“Yesterday, our boss warned us that the suspects had not been captured yet and that we should remain very vigilant.”

Search expanded

Kasim Akniyaz, a security guard at the Terek township office of revenue, confirmed to RFA that authorities had expanded their search for the suspects, who were previously believed to be located in an inaccessible ravine.

“Before, the soldiers were only searching the mountains, but now they have extended their operations to include the valleys and farming fields in neighboring areas,” he said.

“They are also making us join the search patrols, but they never provide us with updates on the situation.”

According to Akniyaz, authorities were also pressing experienced herders into the search to take advantage of their knowledge of the area’s intricate mountain passes.

He said 30 of the 50 who died from the attack are believed to have been killed on the scene, while the other 20 succumbed at a nearby hospital.

Around 10 of those killed were police, 10 were security guards at the mine, and seven or eight were managers, while the rest were workers, he added.

The ‘three evils’

China has vowed to crack down on the "three evils" of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism in Xinjiang, but experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from Uyghur "separatists" and that domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence that has left hundreds dead since 2012.

Uyghur groups in exile say such attacks are likely expressions of resistance to Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs complain of pervasive ethnic discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression by China’s communist government.

Rights groups accuse the Chinese authorities of heavy-handed rule in Xinjiang, including violent police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people.

Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by Shohret Hoshur. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

A Lesson in Hope: The School for Refugee Children | Journal

Why Did Britain's Chancellor Visit Xinjiang?

In the last few years, Britain’s approach to China has been badly in need of a dash of imagination. On the whole, China policy in the U.K. has appeared to be run by people for whom grinding bureaucratic calculations take priority over any long term strategic vision. The oddity of this situation is that British politicians evidently don’t buy much into what their officials tell them. For example, in the 1990s, the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, was famously suspicious of what foreign office mandarins were telling him. The fact that we now know they were busy betraying him behind his back to Beijing shows his instincts were right.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s adventures with China show the same pattern. He lectured then-Premier Wen Jiabao on a visit to London about human rights, and then went full out by meeting the Dalai Lama in mid-2012. Cameron may have calculated that with the 2012 Olympics on the horizon in London, the Chinese would still need to send high level representatives to the U.K. This gamble proved wrong and Britain was placed in a diplomatic deep freeze for almost 18 months. Officials probably counseled Cameron against both outbreaks of boldness, but he marched on ahead, regardless. Fundamentally, the most striking issue of U.K. policy on China is the extent to which politicians clearly don’t trust what their key China specialists tell them. That’s the only conclusion one can make from watching their actions.

When Britain’s chancellor (in effect, its finance minister) George Osborne visited China in August, he only reinforced this impression. Osborne rammed home his key message that trade and economics are the core lifeblood of the relationship by standing in the Shanghai Stock Exchange to broadcast support for the market after its recent travails. But it was his imperial style descent, albeit for a few hours, on Xinjiang, the restive region in China’s northwest, that most raised eyebrows.

It is now clear that the British Treasury rather than the Foreign Office runs China policy. Under its new bureaucratic masters, the U.K.’s China policy has become steely, self interested, and, to some degree, very consistent. Britain joined the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank earlier this year, despite irritating their key ally the United States in doing so. Osborne’s sojourn to Xinjiang was also high risk. No other British minister has ever visited, and very few foreign emissaries have made the trip. Taking a trade delegation to such an area basically conveys one point: no matter how intense the concerns about human rights and security, trade has to go ahead when it comes to China.

Amoral foreign policy has been a unique specialty of the U.K. for centuries. But there is a more forensic point that needs to be made here. Attacking Osborne’s Xinjiang visit for moral reasons only gets lost in ideological and values battles. The greatest issue with this visit is that even on its own hard-nosed, pragmatic terms, it is hard to make sense of it.

If Osborne is sending the message that British companies should look to make good returns in an area like Xinjiang, then he needs to answer a few follow up questions. Is there a network of deeply grounded expertise in the U.K. on the business and investment environment in Xinjiang? Are there people who can advise prospective companies looking to do business there about the very particular political, economic, and social challenges of controlling risks to their investment in this region? Is he proposing that British companies partner with Chinese energy companies in exploiting Xinjiang’s energy resources, and if he is, what precise terms will be at the heart of this cooperation? Chinese energy companies don’t need capital. Is it technology they are after, and if so, can British technology companies in this sector broadly trust the intellectual property regime in China? Did Osborne’s visit deliver some credible general protections here that will then help British companies in their specific business opportunities in Xinjiang?

The British government is at the moment very consistent on China policy. That is no bad thing. And the politicians at least are showing some imagination. That is welcome too. But there are still issues. Osborne could have visited many other places to signal the opportunities for, for instance, service sector developments in China – Xi’an, for instance, with its educational and tourist sectors, or even Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, with resource and environmental demands the U.K. might play into. Going to Xinjiang was provocative, but also irresponsible.

Why should British companies expose themselves to the real risks of lack of British knowledge of the business environment there, the lack of investment predictability and protection, and any number of other variables? Will Osborne compensate them for the strong likelihood of commercial losses and litigation? Osborne’s officials need to give him more appealing, better advice, for sure – but he also needs to listen to it. At the moment, the evidence is that neither is happening.

As it is, there is the sneaking suspicion that Osborne went to Xinjiang not for commercial reasons, but to pander for political favor in Beijing. And that leads us to the depressing conclusion that it is not just British business and expertise that is for sale in China – so is British government policy.

CECC Chairs Announce Release of 2015 Annual Report

The CECC Chairs see a disturbing deterioration in human rights and rule of law conditions that pose a direct challenge to U.S. national interests and U.S.-China relations.  In the report’s recommendations, the Chairs identify a need for a top-down reformulation of U.S. human rights diplomacy with China.

(WASHINGTON, DC)— Chairman U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Cochairman U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) today issued  the 2015 Annual Report of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC).  The report provides detailed analysis on 19 human rights and rule of law issue areas and offers specific recommendations on ways to make progress on these issues in the broader U.S.-China relationship. The full report can be accessed on the CECC’s website (www.cecc.gov). 

“It has been another punishing year for human rights in China, as this report documents so well.  President Xi has presided over an extraordinary assault on the rule of law and civil society using repressive and retrograde policies that threaten freedom advocates in China and challenge both U.S. interests and U.S.-China cooperation and goodwill.  U.S. leadership on human rights is needed now more than ever.  We must not compromise on the need for fundamental freedoms or shy away from those who seek them.  Clearly, our long-term strategic interests depend on the advance of human rights and the rule of law in China,” said Chris Smith, CECC Chair. “This report also details the brutality and human costs of China’s coercive population control policies, a failed social experiment entering its 35th year.  The ‘One-Child Policy’ is hated by Chinese families, condemned by the international community, and the potential economic, security, and societal consequences are dire.  The United  States could play an important role in helping to end this horrific policy—once and for all.” 

  “As the findings of this report make clear, human rights and rule of law have suffered a devastating blow since President Xi Jinping came to power.  By nearly every possible measure, China today is more repressive and more brutal—this is true for the disappeared human rights lawyer, the imprisoned Christian house church pastor, and the silenced Tibetan songwriter,” said CECC Cochair Senator Rubio.  “Millions of Chinese people yearn for the same basic rights that we as Americans enjoy, but their aspirations have been met with intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and even death.  These realities must not be sidelined in the context of broader U.S.-China relations.  There is both a moral and strategic imperative to prioritize advances in human rights and democratic governance.  A government that does not respect the rights and basic dignity of its own people cannot be assumed to be a responsible actor in the global arena.” 

In a letter to President Obama and Congressional leaders, the Chairs cited the unique bipartisan structure of the CECC, with Commissioners from both parties in Congress and the Administration, and identified 10 areas for more focused legislative and executive action, including, civil society development, human trafficking, press and Internet freedom, ethnic minority rights, Hong Kong, religious freedom, and efforts to reform China’s coercive population control policies.

Both chairs commended the capable, professional, and detailed work of the CECC’s research staff in this important, congressionally mandated undertaking, now in its 14th year.

The text of the letter transmitting the 2015 Annual Report can be found below:

October 8, 2015

The Honorable Barack Obama

The President

The White House

Washington, DC 20050

Dear Mr. President:

    The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (“the Commission”) was created by Congress in 2000 to monitor and report on human rights and the development of the rule of law in China and to provide bipartisan recommendations to address these issues within U.S.-China relations. We transmit to you a copy of the 2015 Annual Report, in which the Commission details a marked deterioration overall in human rights and rule of law conditions in China, continuing a disturbing trend since 2013.

      The Commission plays a unique role in informing U.S. policy toward China. The Commission’s structure, consisting of a bipartisan group of Senators, House Members, and senior-level Administration officials, is intended to foster cooperation between the legislative and executive branches and promote bipartisan attention to human rights and rule of law within China.

      Given the strategic and economic interdependencies of the U.S.-China relationship, and the importance of rights protections for advancing U.S. interests, the report concludes that principled U.S. leadership in advancing human rights and rule of law should remain a cornerstone of U.S. policy toward China and integrated, whenever possible, as a critical component of all U.S. government interactions with the Chinese government, most especially at senior levels.

      Based on developments this past year, the report identifies the following areas that we believe Congress and the Administration should focus on in the coming year:

Rule of Law. Despite its claims to the contrary, the Chinese government is not moving toward a rule of law system, but is instead further entrenching a system where the Chinese Communist Party utilizes law to strengthen its own power and crush dissent. Lawyers who accept politically sensitive cases continue to face disbarment, the closure of their law firms, physical violence, intimidation and widespread detention. The government and Party issued a series of far-reaching new security laws during the past year that could provide the basis for an even broader and more severe crackdown on expression and on ethnic minority groups, expanded control of the Internet, and greater restrictions on international businesses that operate in or trade with China. The report recommends that U.S. government officials frequently and publicly raise political prisoner cases and work to ensure that Chinese rights advocates are included in international forums and dialogues. Given the scope of this year’s detentions and disappearances of human rights lawyers and rights defenders (several of whom are featured in the report), and the ongoing use of torture in detention, the report recommends that the Administration consider introducing a resolution on China at the next session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Civil Society. Authorities expanded a crackdown on civil society organizations and further impeded the work of domestic rights-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly those receiving international funding. A draft Overseas NGO Management Law was issued that has the potential to adversely affect a wide range of charitable, educational, and other organizations that operate inside China. The report recommends continued support for civil society development in China and calls for the creative expansion of funding for NGOs, particularly in areas where China has made some recent commitments, such as projects to promote women’s rights and efforts to curb torture and wrongful convictions.  Furthermore, the report recommends that the Administration develop a unified and multi-lateral response to China’s draft NGO law and the suppression of rights-based civil society actors.

Population Control. Authorities continued to use coercive population control methods as well as incentives, including job promotions, for officials who meet birth-limitation targets to implement the one-child-per-couple policy, now in its 35th year. Despite gaining international acclaim for slightly modifying the policy in 2013, the policy overall has fostered official abuse and corruption and exacerbated a sex ratio imbalance biased toward the birth of boys. The report recommends the Administration undertake proactive bilateral and multi-lateral discussions to end all birth limitations and address potential social, humanitarian, and human trafficking problems that result from China’s imbalanced sex ratios. In addition, the report recommends cooperative efforts to implement the provisions of the Girls Count Act (P.L. 114-24) into foreign assistance programs for China.

Religious Freedom. The report notes government campaigns against church buildings and religious symbols were prompted by growing concern over the popularity of Christianity in China. The report also notes harassment of Catholic clergy and Falun Gong practitioners and continued efforts to control the leadership of Tibetan Buddhism and restrict the religious practices of Uyghur Muslims. The report recommends expanded U.S. leadership on international religious freedom, through coordinated multi-lateral efforts and consistent bilateral interactions on the strategic and economic value of promoting this fundamental freedom. The report also recommends that the Administration use existing law to restrict entry visa access to individuals complicit in severe religious freedom violations.

Human Trafficking. China remains a country of origin and destination for the trafficking of men, women, and children, as defined under the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. Men, women, and children are reportedly trafficked within China’s borders for commercial sex exploitation and forced labor, including in the construction, manufacturing, brick-making, and home care industries. The report recommends that the Administration should use existing laws and policies to prevent goods made with forced labor from entering the United States from China and that federal procurement contracts go only to businesses that can certify that they have inspected their supply chains and made significant efforts to prevent human trafficking. The report also recommends cooperative efforts between the Congress and the Administration to ensure that the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has sufficient resources and status to effectively combat modern-day slavery and ensure that its Trafficking in Persons Report’s “Tier Rankings” and country summaries accurately reflect current conditions.

Internet & Press Freedom. Authorities continued to rein in media, opinion-makers, and Internet and social media users critical of government policies by shutting down popular chat site accounts, requiring real-name registration of accounts, and blocking services that allow Internet users to circumvent China’s “Great Firewall.” Foreign journalists continued to report harassment, surveillance, and restrictions on the free flow of news and information. The report recommends greater public expression, including at the highest levels of the U.S. government, on the issue of press and Internet freedom; the expanded distribution of proven technologies to circumvent Internet restrictions in China; and the inclusion of the freedom of cross-border information as part of negotiations for the U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty or future trade negotiations with China.

Commercial Rule of Law. The report notes little progress in China’s compliance with international trading obligations. During this reporting year, there were record trading deficits in China’s favor and U.S. exports to China decreased. U.S. and other foreign businesses faced significant difficulties in the past year due to the weak rule of law, lack of government transparency, and preferential treatment for state-owned enterprises. Foreign businesses faced discriminatory monopoly investigations, intellectual property theft, and draft laws that will require the transfer of technology and encryption keys for information technology firms seeking a share of the Chinese market. The report recommends ensuring that concrete improvements in policies that violate China’s existing international trade obligations are a condition for progress in any U.S. trade-related negotiations with China.

Ethnic Minorities. The report notes deteriorating conditions in ethnic minority areas, from increased violence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to harsher security measures and efforts to control Tibetan Buddhism in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In addition, as Tibetan self-immolations continued, the Commission observed no sign of Chinese interest in resuming the long-stalled dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives. The report concludes that the Chinese government can best promote stability by respecting ethnic minorities’ right to maintain their language and culture and to practice freely their religion and urges the Administration to address these issues at bilateral security dialogues and any exchanges with Chinese military or police officials. The report also recommends that Congress and the Administration urge the Chinese government to allow the free flow of information regarding incidents of violence in ethnic minority regions; allow journalists and international observers access to those areas in line with international standards; and ensure that U.S. counterterrorism cooperation arrangements do not endorse the Chinese government’s suppression of Chinese citizens.

Hong Kong.  The actions of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments during the past year continue to raise concerns about the future of the freedoms, autonomy, and rule of law that distinguish Hong Kong from mainland China and underpin Hong Kong’s financial reputation and prosperity. Given the important economic interests the United States has in Hong Kong, and China’s international commitments to protect a “high degree of autonomy” in Hong Kong, the Commission’s report recommends that the Administration continue to issue annually the report outlined in Section 301 of the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992.  In addition, the report recommends that the Administration and Congress work together to determine whether to reconsider continuing separate treatment for Hong Kong, allowed under the Act, if elections for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017 are not conducted by universal suffrage according to international standards. 

Areas of Potential Progress. The report recommends that Congress and the Administration acknowledge and further inquire with Chinese officials about areas of potential progress noted in the report, including initiatives and legislation that may protect the rights of victims of domestic violence, upgrade environmental protections, and potentially improve some criminal and administrative legal procedures.

      The report contains numerous other recommendations, including advocating the use of the Commission’s extensive Political Prisoner Database, with information on over 1,300 currently detained political and religious prisoners. The Commission and its staff stand ready to assist the Administration and the Congress in any way to carry out the report’s recommendations or further explain its findings.

Sincerely,

Christopher Smith                                                                                             Marco Rubio

Chair                                                                                                                     Cochair

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