China, tyranny and democracy

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2023 (876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LIBERAL International, a global federation of liberal and progressive democratic political parties, just met in Ottawa before the national Liberal Party of Canada convention. On the agenda was the topic “Overcoming Political Oppression.”

Though the topic is general, each non-democratic country presents unique tragedies and possibilities of transition to democracy, not least China.

The scope of tyranny in China is vast. The Communist Party of China today victimizes and threatens a wide variety of communities — Taiwanese, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, practitioners of the spiritually based exercises Falun Gong, House Christians, human rights defenders, and democracy supporters in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China.

The global reach of the government of China allows the Chinese Communist Party to project its oppression abroad in a way that smaller tyrannies cannot. The economic and political heft of the government of China pushes many non-Chinese into silence in pursuit of financial or political interests.

In some tyrannies, arbitrary power is miles wide but an inch deep. Once a few people are gone, the power structure collapses.

The Chinese Communist Party has been around for so long and has so many perpetrators, dislodging them all, bringing them all to account, is a mammoth task.

The global significance of China also provides advantages in combating the oppression of its government which are not available in combating smaller tyrannies. Those who stand against human rights violations in many other countries are often, outside of these countries, met with ignorance, not just of the violations, but even of the names or locations of the regions or countries. That is not so with China. News about China attracts global attention.

Every tyranny engages in coverup. In a country as large as China, this coverup is largely ineffective, at least outside of China. It is hard to throw a blanket which covers completely such a large country. Inevitably, the truth gets out.

Replacing tyranny with democracy requires effecting not just replacement, but also continuation of the change. For China, where the spread of party violations has been so wide and long lasting, that continuation represents a particular challenge.

Meeting those challenges requires a vigorous system of accountability for violations not just after democracy has begun, but now. Accountability can mean simply detailed specific public accumulation of evidence about what has happened.

For China, there have already been, for instance, several research reports and a people’s tribunal judgment documenting, beyond any reasonable doubt, the mass killing in China of prisoners of conscience through extraction of organs, sold to transplant tourists and wealthy and well-connected Chinese. Spreading awareness of this abuse, which implicates state registered transplant hospitals and state prison and Communist Party detention systems that hold the victims until organ extraction, is bound to undermine the credibility of Communist rule in China.

Accountability can also mean prosecution. Canada and 19 other countries have, for instance, enacted laws criminalizing complicity in organ trafficking abroad. These laws can help combat the slaughter of prisoners of conscience in China for their organs.

Democracies are governed by people with the same capacity for wrongdoing as those who govern tyrannies. What distinguishes democracies from tyrannies is the ability to prevent or remedy those wrongs through an independent judiciary, a free press, a vocal opposition, and fair elections. Democracies do not need the help of outsiders to prevent or remedy their wrongs because their internal mechanisms can do so.

Tyrannies are beyond internal help because the tyrannies squelch that help. The only hope for preventing or remedying the wrongs of tyrannies is the voice of outsiders. That is generally true of tyrannies. But it is particularly true of China because of the breadth and depth of the Communist Party within China and also because of the global spread of party intimidation against Chinese nationals abroad.

Crimes against humanity, wherever the occur, are crimes against us all. Because of the size, penetration and global reach of the Communist Party of China, the work for democracy in China should, especially, not be left to Chinese alone. It should be the work of all humanity.

David Matas is an international human right lawyer based in Winnipeg. He is the co-author with the late David Kilgour of Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs.