Johann Hari

Remember the horrific story about the suicides and mass deaths in Chinese factories where they are manufacturing stuff for us that I wrote about last week? Well, Richard Littlejohn thinks they're hilarious. (You have to scroll to the end.) Really. He uses a football chant to describe young men and women hurling themselves to their deaths only to be caught by suicide nets: "Back of the net!"

He also argues that the safety record in Chinese factories is much preferable to the "'Elf N Safety" in British factories. We are talking about a system where 600,000 people are worked to death every year, and 50,000 fingers are severed every month (*), Yes: if only we got rid of the Elf N Safety Nazis here, British people could experience such freedom and liberation.

I assume, however, that Littlejohn wouldn't want to actually apply these standards to white people. As I've explained before, he is profoundly racist. No doubt he would concede that white British people having their bodies broken, or killing themselves to escape that fate, was tragic. But when it comes to people in Asia, it's a hilarious punchline. 

Imagine viewing such unbelievable human suffering, to manufacture your consumer goods, and laughing. Pity Richard Littlejohn: he is a diseased and damaged man.

(*) This figure has been corrected, I originally got it wrong. 

At first, this isn't going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide - the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft - so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: "We are like prisoners here."

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: "Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!" Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it's back to the dorm.

It's the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: "My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse... This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day." At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: "We're really livestock and shouldn't be called workers." They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, "to symbolize their improving life."

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations - corporations - to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here's just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: "When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn't even see his eyes."

So you might be thinking - was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse - and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting "there are no human rights here!" and "we want freedom!" The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" - by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn't enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this - and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn't a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude - or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent - but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To read his latest article for Slate, click here

I'm taking a short break, but in the meantime here's an article from May 2007 that, in light of the epidemic of suicides in the i-Pad factories in China, might be worth revisiting:

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids' market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: "Long live the company!" If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.

One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.

Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China's factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke - and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. "They don't care if I am crippled for life," she says.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed finally to allow Chinese workers like her - too late - some basic rights.

The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions. It would give them the right to a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the right to change jobs freely. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

This is not the first time big business has militated to prevent basic freedoms from being extended to China. Bill Clinton came to office promising "an America that will not coddle dictators, from Beijing to Baghdad", and at first, he acted on this rhetoric, issuing an executive order that decreed trade with China could only grow if China in tandem increased its respect for human rights. Enraged American business executives subjected him to nuclear-strength lobbying - so Clinton ditched his executive order after a year.

Ever since, Western governments have been justifying business with the Chinese dictatorship by saying our corporations and trade would inevitably and inexorably bring greater freedom to China.

But now the corporations that they claimed would bring freedom and democracy are in fact lobbying to crush freedom and opposing the plain democratic will of the Chinese people. As James Mann, the former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, puts it after years of observing the behaviour of big business in China: "The business communities of China and the United States [and, he might have added, Europe] do not harbour dreams of democracy. Both profit from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and both are content with it."

Their lobbying seems to have paid off. The (unelected) Chinese National People's Congress is due to vote on the new labour laws in the next month or so, but the proposals have already been massively watered down.

Scott Slipy, the director of human resources for Microsoft in China, bragged to BusinessWeek, "We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue."

It seems that Maoism is fine so long as its dictatorial urges are put to the service of Bill Gates and other billionaires, rather than one psychotic dictator.

These Western corporations are explicitly seeking a China where a tiny number of extremely rich people are free to organise, but the vast majority of poor people are physically prevented from doing so by the state.

Of course, these market fundamentalist economists claim this situation is in fact good for the Chinese people, because this system is the best way to enrich them. The obvious response is: let them decide. If they don't want to join trade unions, if they don't want workplace protections, nobody will force them. But give them the freedom to choose. Or are these economists saying the Chinese people are too stupid to know their own interests?

The American and European campaigns showing that we are not all willing to accept their serfdom and profit from it have already had successes. The European Chamber of Commerce has been shamed into retracting its initial opposition to the laws. After lobbying from trade unions and human rights organisations, Nike has now denounced the position of the American Chambers of Commerce to which it belongs and backed the law. The remaining Wal-Martian corporations need to be damned one by one - and subject to legal sanctions - until they relent and accept the rights of Chinese workers.

For the sake of millions of people like Lan and Meiren, we need to show these corporations that we refuse to shop until they drop.

It was a dark year, 2009, sealing a dark decade. It began with the world in economic free-fall and the Gaza Strip being bombed to pieces (again). We watched the vicious crushing of a democratic uprising in Iran, a successful far-right coup in Honduras, and the intensification of the disastrous war in Afghanistan. It all ended at Brokenhagen, where the world's leaders breezily decided to carry on cooking the planet.

But in the midst of all this there were extraordinary points of light, generated by people who have refused to drink the cheap sedative of despair. The left-wing newsman Wes Nisker said in his final broadcast: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." I want – in the final moments of 2009 – to celebrate the people who, this year, did just that: the men and women who didn't slump, but realised that the worse the world gets, the harder people of goodwill have to work to put it right.

Inspiration One: Denis Mukwege. The war in the Congo is the worst since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe: it has killed more than 5 million people and counting. As I witnessed when I reported on the war in 2006, the violence has been turned primarily on the country's women: one favourite tactic is to gang-rape a woman and then shoot her in the vagina. For years these women were simply left to die in the bush. But one man – a soft-spoken Congolese gynaecologist with a gentle smile – decided to do something mad, something impossible. With scarcely any equipment and no funding, he set up a secret clinic for these women.

He was told he would be killed by the militias for undoing their "work". The threats said his own daughters would be murdered if he didn't stop. Everyone thought he was mad. But he knew it was the right thing to do. He became the Oscar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, saving the lives of tens of thousands of women. In the midst of a moral Chernobyl, he showed that the best human instincts can survive and, in time, prevail. It is rumoured he was number two in the Nobel Committee's list for the Peace Prize. He should have won.

Inspiration Two: Liu Xiaobo. A year ago, a petition began to circulate in China demanding that its one billion citizens be allowed to think and speak freely. "We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes," it said. As if they were the Irony Police, the Chinese authorities promptly arrested the authors and many of its signatories. One of the most articulate and brave – Liu Xiaobo – was sentenced to 11 years in a re-education camp for "subversion".

The Chinese authorities believe human rights are a "plot" to weaken China. In fact, China will be immeasurably stronger when it stops persecuting its citizens when they try to develop their minds and defend each other.

Liu is not alone. Hu Jia is in prison for warning about China's hidden Aids crisis. Huang Qi is in jail for warning that the poor construction of school buildings in Sichuan – because the builders bribed the local authorities – meant hundreds of children died unnecessarily in the earthquake. There is a long list, and for every prisoner, thousands more are too frightened to speak. But these dissidents stand as models of the truly great nation China will be one day, when it stops persecuting these people and starts electing them.

Inspiration Three: Evo Morales and Malalai Joya. Although they were born thousands of miles apart, these two people embody what real democracy can mean. When Evo Morales was a child, the indigenous peoples of Bolivia weren't even allowed to set foot in the capital's central square, which was reserved for white people. Today, he is the President, and for the first time in his country's history, he is diverting the billions raised from the country's natural resources away from the pockets of US corporations. It is building schools and hospitals for people who had nothing, and poverty is being eradicated in a stunning burst of progress.

Malalai Joya is the youngest woman ever to be elected in Afghanistan, and she was swiftly banned from taking her seat because she kept speaking up for the people who elected her – against the violent fundamentalist warlords our governments have put in charge of the country. They keep trying to murder her, but she says: "I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice ... I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring."

She and Morales are authentic democrats, in contrast to the parody of it offered by Hamid Karzai and – too often – our own leaders.

Inspiration Four: Amy Goodman and the team at Democracy Now! It's not hard to despair of the US at the moment, when even the silver-tongued King of Change seems unable to get real healthcare and cuts in warming gases through his corrupt Senate, and he is ramming harder into Afghanistan. A large part of the problem is the atrocious US broadcast media. The TV news is one lengthy blowjob for the powerful, seeing everything from the perspective of the rich, and ridiculing arguments for progress. It serves its owners and its advertisers by poisoning every political debate with death-panel distractions and silence for the things that matter.

But there is one remarkable exception. Broadcasting from a tiny studio in New York, on a budget raised entirely from its viewers, comes Democracy Now! Every day, the hour-long broadcast – hosted by the wonderful Amy Goodman – tells the real news. While the nightly news fills up with junk and gossip, they calmly, cleverly explain what is really happening. For example, while ABC and NBC were fixating on Tiger Woods' genitals, Democracy Now! was in Copenhagen, explaining how the world's rainforests were being stiffed. They, at least, can tell the trees from the Woods. It is the best single source for making sense of the world that I know – and it is a model of what the American media could be if it treated its viewers with respect.

Inspiration Five: Peter Tatchell. Long before it was trendy to support gay equality, there was Peter Tatchell, taking huge risks for what was right. As one of the pioneers of direct action to oppose bigotry against gay people, he was never afraid to put his own body in the path of bigots. In 1999, he performed a citizen's arrest on the murderous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and was beaten so badly by his bodyguards he has never recovered. This year, he went to Moscow to defend the gay rights march there from viciously anti-gay police, and was beaten again. This year, he announced he had to withdraw from running as the Green candidate in Oxford East because the damage was so severe.

Almost unbelievably, some people who claim to be on the left have attacked Tatchell because he criticises homophobes who happen to be black, Arab or Asian in exactly the same way he criticises people who are white. (He tried to arrest Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger for war crimes just as surely as he tried to get Mugabe.) But the real racism would be to hold non-white people to lower standards, as if their bigotries were less real or less deadly. A person who chooses to persecute gay people is monstrous and should be stopped – whatever their skin colour, and whatever their culture. Tatchell has dedicated his life to that cause, and he deserves our endless thanks, not dishonest abuse.

What do they all have in common, all these people? When Mukwege built his clinic, they said he'd be dead within a week. When Tatchell said gay people could be equal, they laughed in his face. When Morales and Joya ran for office, they said people like them could never win. They dismiss Liu and Goodman now; but their arguments will win, in time.

They show that when the world gets worse, that's not a reason to slink away in despair. On the contrary: it's a reason to work harder and aim higher. As the essayist Rebecca Solnit says: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable." That should be the epitaph for these remarkable people – and for 2009.

Over the next three weeks, we will watch a slick propaganda parade of Chinese "sporting heroes". But we will not see China's true heroes in the glittering stadiums of Beijing – because they are in prison, or they have "disappeared." If you are indiscreet enough to ask after them, you will be instantly smeared as "anti-Chinese".

But what are these critics saying? Liu Shaokun is a young teacher in Sichuan Province. He watched his pupils die in the earthquake because their school was built using cheap substandard materials, by corrupt officials who pocketed the change. He took photographs to prove it and posted them on the internet. So he has been seized and indefinitely imprisoned without trial. Is he anti-Chinese?

Chen Guangcheng is a blind self-taught lawyer who exposed the government's policy of forcibly sterilising disabled Chinese women. So he has been jailed for four years. Is he anti-Chinese? Jiang Yanyong is a doctor who exposed the government's attempt to cover up the SARS outbreak, saving tens of thousands of Chinese lives. So he is under indefinite house arrest after a lengthy "re-education". Is he anti-Chinese?

Yet many of us want to believe we are being tolerant – and even anti-racist – by sticking our fingers in our ears when it comes to the conflict within China. Why? Because our silent societal taboo: we aid and abet the Chinese dictatorship every day. Through our government. Through our corporations. And – crucially – through our choices at the till. At some semiconscious level, we don't want the Chinese people to be allowed to speak and assemble and think freely – because it would mean we had to pay more.

Meet the young women crammed into damp dormitories in China's River Pearl Delta, and they will tell you why. These women – mostly teenagers, or in their early twenties – made most of the goods in your home. Like 200 million other young Chinese workers, they have made the epic journey from China's villages to its metastasising factory-towns, in search of a job. They live in their factories, sleeping on bunk-beds; they tell themselves they will do the job for a decade, then leave.

The China Labour Bulletin conducted a study of their lives. Ms Zhang, a 21-year-old woman who made artificial Christmas trees, was a typical interviewee. "We worked seven days a week, and we only had three days off a year," she says. "We worked overtime every night until 10 in the evening. The workshop was always filled with smoke. You couldn't see very far. When you entered the room, your eyes burned and watered, and you had difficulty breathing."

One night, Ms Zhang – exhausted and sore-eyed – was pushing plastic through an iron-roller when she felt terrible pain. Her hand was trapped. She was taken to hospital for extensive skin-grafts. Two weeks later the factory abruptly stopped paying for the medical treatment. They told her to get back to work. "I felt like jumping out of a window," she told the researchers. The skin on her hand is still peeling and painful.

"When you enter this factory," another young woman says, "you are under their control. If you get tired and want to stretch your neck or look around, you can't. They won't even allow you to look around!" If you do, you are docked the day's wages. To prevent workers from trying to seek out better factories, it's normal to pay two or three months in arrears. If you quit, do you get the backlog? Never.

The women were all worried that making our goods was wrecking their bodies. A 17-year-old explained: "We often come into contact with paint thinner. It stinks something awful, and you get pimples all over your face. We know it's bad for you to breathe in but what can we do?" She talked nervously about colleagues who had miscarried, and another who developed leukaemia. "I find it really hard to recover when I get sick these days. I've had a cold for a month now and it just won't go away. [One of my room-mates'] periods have stopped, and she's afraid it is because of the radiation from the electronic parts she has to handle."

Occasionally, inspectors from Western multinationals arrive – but the women are drilled to give false answers. Every month, 50,000 fingers are sliced off in Chinese factories; every year, 130,000 Chinese people die in them, while more than a million contract fatal diseases.

These women – and hundreds of millions like them – want to be able to band together and demand better conditions. But they are prevented, by law. Only one trade union is allowed in China – and it is controlled by the government and designed to suppress labour, not represent it.

If you try to organise independent of this bogus trade union in the workplace – to demand breathing masks, say – you are beaten, or put in prison. It is a strange hybrid: a Maoist police state, enforcing the most extreme model of capitalism.

Nonetheless, the Chinese people are kicking back: there are 87,000 workplace protests a year. Last year, there was a tumult in Chinese factories after a string of workers died of organ failure while doing 50-hour shifts. The panicked Chinese government was poised to make a major concession: they were going to allow the formation of elected trade unions in the factories.

It was startling: independent political organisations? Elected? In China? But it didn't happen – because there was panic from rich-world investors. Organised workers can ask for more safety measures, and better wages. Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others – acting through the American Chamber of Commerce – swiftly announced the laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", and muttered they might look elsewhere. European and American governments parroted the corporate line. Far from lobbying for freedom, they enthusiastically lobbied against it. So the Chinese dictatorship watered down the proposals, and the girls of the Pearl Delta factories are stuck. This isn't Chinese "culture" – it's our corporate culture's wet dream, forced on them.

Does this system work well for us in the rich world? If we can silence our consciences, yes, we get cheaper goods; communist suppression knocks pounds off your weekly shopping bill. But there is another price tag. All over the world, wages are artificially depressed because you are competing with a workforce that is prevented by a police state from asking for more.

And in the long term, there is a darker price still. The great true cliché of our age is that China is rising. (Cue the famous Napoleon quote, and on and on.) Do you want all that power in the hands of a sober government that is becoming steadily more accountable to its people – or a dictatorship that will look hungrily for foreign enemies to distract its people? Today – as we snuffle for the cheapest possible Chinese goods, and politely ignore the vanished Chinese defenders of human rights – we are all lobbying for the dictators to prevail.

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On the streets of London, the Chinese dictatorship has just learned with a painful jab that their Olympic Slogan – "One World, One Dream" – is true. In every city the Olympic torch sashays through on its world tour, its greeting is the same. Tibetans wave their banned flag and grieve for their freshly-slaughtered countrymen. Falun Gong refugees hold aloft pictures of their co-believers who have vanished into China's vast "re-education camps". Darfuris cry for an end to the massacres against them backed from Beijing. And ordinary people line the streets to support them. Yes, they all have One Dream: an end to human rights abuses.

But aren't the Olympics meant to be apolitical, one of the few places where we can gather and leave our ideologies at the door? Yes. But it is not the protesters who politicised the Olympics; it is the Chinese Communist dictatorship. As the leading Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng – who taught himself law in a shack in Shaanxi Province – explained last year: "The Chinese Communist regime sees the hosting of the Olympics as political. They are using it to prove to the Chinese people that the world is still acknowledging the party as a legal government, despite all the suppressive and bloody tyranny, and all the horrible crimes against humanity the Party has committed."

(Shortly after he issued this warning, Gao "disappeared", as so many Chinese human rights activists do. With this move, the Chinese government proved his point.)

The protesters are simply trying to stop the Chinese dictatorship from continuing to wave the Olympics as a bogus global seal of approval for their cruel rule. Now they are asking: how do we keep disrupting the 100-metres propaganda sprint that takes us up to August? Should there be a boycott of Beijing?

So far, the discussion has focused on one very narrow sliver of the Games: whether our political leaders should attend the opening ceremony. But this is looking in the wrong direction. Our politicians are not the people to take a moral stand on our behalf. Not only are many soaked in the blood of innocents themselves; worse, last year, they actually used their power to lobby hard against a major extension of human rights in China.

Here's how it happened. The Chinese government was being battered by industrial unrest, across the country's factories and mines. There were more than 300,000 industrial protests in 2006, because ordinary Chinese people were sick of being paid artificially low wages and seeing their colleagues lose limbs in shrieking machinery just to provide us with ultra-cheap goods. So the Chinese dictatorship decided – through gritted teeth – to allow ordinary Chinese citizens to form trade unions. It was an extraordinary gasp of freedom, allowing political organisations to be formed across the country.

Our governments panicked. The mighty business lobbies told them – in more polite language – that if Chinese workers are not lashed into submission, they will start demanding more wages, and to make their workplaces safe. That means lower profits for "our" businesses and higher prices at our tills. So the US and European governments lobbied the Communist Party hard against upholding this basic right. Our leaders stood up for unfreedom, and won. The law was ditched. We still get to shop until Chinese workers drop. How can those same leaders pop up a year later and posture about greater rights in China?

But one of the great things about the Olympics is that we aren't represented by our politicians. We are represented by ordinary citizens, who happen to be extraordinarily brilliant athletes. They are untainted by the fetid calculations of geopolitics and corporate corruption. They can speak for basic human values – if they choose to.

So far, the discussion of a sporting boycott has also stalled, because people assume there are only two options. Either we go along passively and smile into the Communist propaganda-camera, or we stay away until the distant day when China is a multiparty democracy with a First Amendment protecting free speech.

There is another way. Our athletes can offer the Chinese government a deal. We will happily take part – provided you meet three simple, practical conditions. Follow this checklist, and your international coming-out party will go swimmingly.

First: release China's 10 greatest human rights activists. Top of the list is the Chinese hero Hu Jia. He is a 34-year-old father rotting in jail because he campaigned for the rights of Aids victims, and against the environmental destruction spreading across the country. We're going to need Chinese allies like him in the years to come, as the Great Leap Backwards of global warming intensifies.

Second: invite the Dalai Lama to Beijing, and talk to him. Just talk. When I met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, he said he would do it. This is in China's interests too: the younger generation of Tibetans coming up behind him are less prepared to offer up the other cheek for a kicking. Israel has learned the hard way that if you react to largely peaceful protests against occupation – like the first Intifada of the 1980s – with beatings and bullets, you face rockets and suicide-bombers further down the line. China still has a chance to stop that shift – just.

Third: allow a real UN peacekeeping force into Darfur. Since 2003, the Chinese government has been covering at the UN for the genocidal Sudanese government, in return for full access to the country's oil. They will only vote for a peacekeeping force if the Sudanese government – the murderers – retains the right to veto the arrival of any troops. As the limping, bloodied people of Darfur told me last summer as they filed across the border, this Chinese clause makes peace impossible.

And finally, allow us to set up a website that breaks through the Great Firewall of China, explaining why we have laid down these conditions.

If the athletes of the free(ish) world unite behind these demands, there is a significant chance the Chinese government will meet them. The embarrassment of their multi-billion-dollar phallus flopping before the world may well trump the embarrassment of conceding on these three issues.

If we are going to ask the Olympics athletes to risk something they have worked their whole lives for, we have to offer them something hefty. A noble but ineffective moral gesture won't do it. But with this proposal, we can say – imagine: you could play a part in getting the Dalai Lama to Beijing, a proper peace-force into Darfur, and 10 heroic men and women into freedom, or go down trying. We have four months to persuade them this is worth making a stand for.

Before being sent to his dungeon, Hu Jia wrote, "When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You may not know that the flowers, smiles and prosperity are built on a base of tears, imprisonment, torture and blood." Ha was prepared to risk his life to tourniquet this flow of his countrymen's blood. Are we really not even prepared to take a calculated, calibrated risk with the Olympics?

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve had a tumultuous response to my article about whether we should boycott the Beijing Olympics. The most reassuring have been the Chinese whispers coming from within the country itself, saying they would gladly welcome pressure on the Chinese dictatorship from our athletes to release human rights activists. It's a useful reminder that critics of the Chinese Communist party aren't anti-China, as the dictatorial propaganda claims; we're on the side of the Chinese people, against their oppressors.

But I wanted to respond here to two points from readers that came up with surprising frequency.

The first was: “You are in favour of setting conditions for the Beijing Olympics, but not the London Games! Hypocrite!”

Actually, I think it would be a fantastic precedent if athletes pressured every Olympic city to improve its human rights record. If in 2012 Britain is still arming one vicious militia against another in Iraq, if we are still training murderous thugs in Colombia, if we are still letting US torture flights refuel on our territory, or if we are still sending refugees back to tyrannies to die, I’d love it if the Olympic athletes of the world threatened to stay away unless our government turns these policies around. Bring it on.

The second was: “You describe the persecution of the Falun Gong sect as a crime. But the Chinese government is simply practicing the kind of “militant atheism” you advocate in Britain. You attack religion, and so do they.”

I find this genuinely bizarre. I have never met an atheist in Europe or the US who is in favour of persecuting religious people. Not one. Every single famous campaigning atheist – Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Michel Onfray – is passionately in favour of the right to free speech and the right to assembly. This includes the right of all religious groups to say and do whatever they want, provided they aren’t trying to coerce other people.

We try to defeat faith through argument. We are entirely, utterly against suppressing it by force. Indeed, we consistently defend the rights of religious people to criticise us. (With some honourable exceptions, the religious are much more reluctant to defend our rights to criticise them: how many Catholics have spoken up in favour of abolishing the blasphemy laws, or Muslims in defence of the right for cartoonists to draw Mohammed? A few; not many. How often do you hear the religious scream for “respect”, when what they mean is: “Don’t say anything we don’t like”?)

As it happens, I think the Falun Gong have a lot of really ridiculous beliefs – about UFOs, blood transfusions, and many other things. Some are even harmful. But I passionately believe in their right to choose to practice these beliefs and argue for them – just as I have a right to mock them for it and try to talk them out of it.

I am opposed to religion – but I want to win a free and open battle of ideas, not crush my opponents with batons. Is that really hard to understand?

You can comment on this article, and read the comments of others, here.

I'm taking a short break, but in the meantime here's an article from the archives that - in light of the rash of suicides among workers in the Apple i-Pad factories in China - is newly relevant. It first appeared on 3rd March 2007 in the Independent:

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids' market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: "Long live the company!" If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.

One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.

Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China's factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke - and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. "They don't care if I am crippled for life," she says.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed finally to allow Chinese workers like her - too late - some basic rights.

The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions. It would give them the right to a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the right to change jobs freely. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

This is not the first time big business has militated to prevent basic freedoms from being extended to China. Bill Clinton came to office promising "an America that will not coddle dictators, from Beijing to Baghdad", and at first, he acted on this rhetoric, issuing an executive order that decreed trade with China could only grow if China in tandem increased its respect for human rights. Enraged American business executives subjected him to nuclear-strength lobbying - so Clinton ditched his executive order after a year.

Ever since, Western governments have been justifying business with the Chinese dictatorship by saying our corporations and trade would inevitably and inexorably bring greater freedom to China.

But now the corporations that they claimed would bring freedom and democracy are in fact lobbying to crush freedom and opposing the plain democratic will of the Chinese people. As James Mann, the former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, puts it after years of observing the behaviour of big business in China: "The business communities of China and the United States [and, he might have added, Europe] do not harbour dreams of democracy. Both profit from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and both are content with it."

Their lobbying seems to have paid off. The (unelected) Chinese National People's Congress is due to vote on the new labour laws in the next month or so, but the proposals have already been massively watered down.

Scott Slipy, the director of human resources for Microsoft in China, bragged to BusinessWeek, "We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue."

It seems that Maoism is fine so long as its dictatorial urges are put to the service of Bill Gates and other billionaires, rather than one psychotic dictator.

These Western corporations are explicitly seeking a China where a tiny number of extremely rich people are free to organise, but the vast majority of poor people are physically prevented from doing so by the state.

Of course, these market fundamentalist economists claim this situation is in fact good for the Chinese people, because this system is the best way to enrich them. The obvious response is: let them decide. If they don't want to join trade unions, if they don't want workplace protections, nobody will force them. But give them the freedom to choose. Or are these economists saying the Chinese people are too stupid to know their own interests?

The American and European campaigns showing that we are not all willing to accept their serfdom and profit from it have already had successes. The European Chamber of Commerce has been shamed into retracting its initial opposition to the laws. After lobbying from trade unions and human rights organisations, Nike has now denounced the position of the American Chambers of Commerce to which it belongs and backed the law. The remaining Wal-Martian corporations need to be damned one by one - and subject to legal sanctions - until they relent and accept the rights of Chinese workers.

For the sake of millions of people like Lan and Meiren, we need to show these corporations that we refuse to shop until they drop.

Whatever happened to the Labour government's lofty words on arms policy? Tony Blair declared unequivocally a few years ago: "We don't sell arms that could be used in human rights abuses. We have one of the strictest regulatory frameworks in the world." Although they might sell to dictatorial regimes, the Government would ensure they were used only for "legitimate purposes" and "not internal repression".

Tell that to the people of Aceh, a South-east Asian province that washed to the world's attention on Boxing Day and is now ebbing from our minds again. Three years ago, the heroic Indonesian human rights group Tapol took photographs of British-supplied tanks and weaponry being used by the Indonesian military to incinerate Acinese civilians, including children. Their crime? They had declared they want independence from an Indonesian government that has plundered, tortured and trashed their home-province for decades. And the British government's response? We kept on arming Indonesia to the hilt. So much for our "regulatory framework" and "strict rules".

It seems that our government has a neat policy for this battered chunk of South-east Asia. Cry for the people of Aceh when they are massacred by a tsunami - and arm their murderers when they are massacred by the Indonesian government.

And Britain's arms policy is just about to get worse. Since the gunning down of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the European Union has maintained a strict arms embargo against the Chinese government - until now.

The French and German governments are eager for better access to Chinese markets, and Tony Blair and Jack Straw - after a brief period of wobbling - are now backing them with full-frontal force. The crude Dick Cheney-style xenophobia against the French over the past few years has been disgusting - but that shouldn't inhibit us from criticising the role of the French government in this deal. Jacques Chirac argues in practice for the hardcore realpolitik of arming any tyrant, any time, anyhow - and Tony Blair is now backing his stance. Chirac has vandalised even the pitifully mild proposal that countries should have to declare what they are selling to the Chinese dictatorship.

Ah yes, the defenders of lifting the ban reply, but China is not what it was in 1989. It would be one thing to arm Deng Xiaoping straight after the massacre - but today, China is a modernising, prosperous country that will cave in to democracy sooner or later.

The people forced to mourn in secret for Zhao Ziyang last week would not agree. In 1989, he was head of China's ruling Communist Party - but he appreciated a democratic revolution when he saw one. He headed straight to Tiananmen Square to address the students and explain that their calls for democracy represented "the future of China". He was seized by the police and taken to Deng Xiaoping. Deng demanded to know why he was supporting the "counter-revolutionary" principle of democracy. "I have the people on my side," Zhao replied. Deng sneered: "Then you have nothing."

Zhao was never seen in public again. He died under house arrest in this supposedly "new" China. The country's dictators remain so terrified of the lure of democracy and its defenders that they ordered a total blackout on the news. Readers of Chinese newspapers and viewers of their TV bulletins know nothing of his demise - which gives you some idea of quite how free their press is.

Nobody should kid themselves: China remains a dictatorship. The political structures of Maoism remain, even as the policies they enact have (thankfully) changed drastically. Today, an incredible proportion of China's state resources is dedicated to persecuting the eccentric but harmless Falun Gong spiritual sect. Nobody knows for sure how many pro-democracy protesters remain held without trial, but most human rights groups believe it runs into thousands - and a crackdown is expected ahead of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Some Western apologists for the Chinese government (and lifting the arms ban) argue that the country's growing openness to Western corporations is evidence of greater freedom. This only shows how debased the idea of freedom has become, even in Europe. In fact, Chinese workers - forbidden to vote, join trade unions or defy their employers - are somewhat wealthier today, but scarcely more free.

The shock capitalism imposed on China by its dictators and by Western corporations - with none of the protections and restraints taken for granted in democracies - is provoking growing unrest even in the repressive climate of that country. Over 2 million Chinese people will be on illegal strike or demonstrations this month alone, even though they risk being jailed or beaten by the police. The cheap Chinese goods we all devour are so inexpensive precisely because their workers have a police state suppressing their demands.

But the biggest victims of the European Union's renewed arms sales will be the people of Taiwan, who might hear the crack and boom of European weapons attacking their homes very soon. Over the past decade, Taiwan has become a fairly sophisticated democracy, with all that involves: elections, a free press, trade unions and a gay rights movement.

The Chinese dictators find this unbearable. They claim that Taiwan is a "renegade province" that "belongs" to China, even though it broke away over 50 years ago and opinion polls show fat majorities of Taiwanese people do not want reunification.The real reason for the Chinese rulers' hatred of Taiwan is not just crude nationalism. No; the island just off their coast exposes the Chinese government's rationale for remaining in power to be a lie. Hu Jintao, China's current dictator, says that democracy is a "Western idea" not suited to "Asian values."

Taiwan shows that this is a self-serving fiction. If the people of Taiwan can choose their own government and exercise free speech, why can't China's? And their argument that China's economic development will be held back by democracy is also proven to be false: Taiwan is more prosperous than China. Enraged by these truths, the Chinese government announced last month might invade Taiwan if the country's elections produced a result they did not like.

So the loudest protests against the lifting of the embargo have come from Taiwan - but the Bush administration comes a close second. Of course, this US policy is not motivated by some benign desire to support democracy; if it was, they would not have supported an anti-democratic coup attempt in Venezuela just two years ago.

No - the Bush administration's concern is to diminish China's power and influence by any means possible. But the new European policy - backed by Blair - is motivated by motives just as base: greed. The divisions between Europe and America on this issue are those of raw geopolitical influence; neither side cares much for the people of Taiwan and China and their basic human rights. It's a startling reminder of how statecraft is detached from basic human morality.

Are we really happy to drag the European dream - a dream which should inspire the world, and offer a social democratic alternative to America - down to this? To arming men who jail democrats? Next time Tony Blair or the EU claims to have a moral arms policy, they should be drowned out by sad, cynical laughter.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can also be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

The campaign against the arms trade is at http://www.caat.org.uk/

Almost unnoticed in Britain, the people of Hong Kong have in the past fortnight led a dazzling crusade to resist the encroachment of Chinese communist oppression - and they have won. This is the best news
from China in nearly 15 years, and its implications for the 1.3 billion people trapped under the authoritarian system headed by Hu Jintao could prove to be immense.

The Chinese Communists have insisted since they seized power in 1949 that no amount of public pressure could sway them; the party is the sole custodian of Chinese interests, and any protesters were simply refusing to
see the wisdom of the party leaders. Remember Tiananmen.

The experience in Hong Kong reverses all that. Half a million people took to the streets to protest against the decision to impose a draconian internal security bill that would have repressed them almost as fiercely
as their cousins in mainland China. The Chinese government has withdrawn the bill. They have been forced by their people, for the first time, to lose face.

Consecutive Chinese governments - and their apologists in the West, such as Henry Kissinger and Edward Heath - have told us that the Chinese people do not want
democracy. They have claimed that "Asian values" preclude basic human rights, and democracy . This is not - to choose just one example - what the people of the Shao village in southern Hebei said when they rioted recently for the right to vote, only to be
attacked by 700 thuggish police.

In a concession to these internal calls for democracy, the regime has experimented with incremental, low-level elections. Jintao, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since last year, boasts that most Chinese villages now choose their own
leaders in competitive contests, but the evidence suggests that he is exaggerating. The best study we have by independent observers, headed by Kevin O'Brien
of the University of California, shows that at best 17 per cent of the village elections are free and open, and in the vast majority of cases, candidates are chosen by the local party branch or by unaccountable
officials.

Yet there is a substantial constituency in China that has a vested interest in resisting any democratic moves. Professor An Sen, of the University of Singapore, has shown how, as China grows more capitalist, class divisions are widening, pushing the rich from acquiescence towards outright support for
the regime. The rich Chinese - a comparatively small group - are becoming terrified of an increasingly disgruntled poor, who have no trade unions and no political voice and are increasingly resorting to the desperate tactic of hunger strikes as their only method of protest.

Sen explains: "Everyone knows that the large, poorly educated majority of Chinese have little hope of making it into the middle class, and that the rich will keep looking to the authoritarian state to safeguard their property." This is not an argument
against increasing capitalism in China, which is
infinitely preferable to the crazy Stalinist economics of the Mao era and has already lifted 250 million people out of poverty. But it is an argument that market economies, if not inextricably linked with democracy and the right to form trade unions, impose a
horrific burden on those at the bottom of the heap.

It has long been assumed that opening up the Chinese economy would inevitably lead to an opening up of Chinese politics. This was the main moral case for China's accession to the World Trade Organisation. Yes, capitalist economies - if they are to work at all
- require the development of organisations that are independent of the state, and this nudges a culture slightly closer to democracy, but only very slightly. There are other, countervailing, trends in China that
are pushing the culture in the opposite direction.

Since reform began in the early 1980s, Chinese politics has been primarily a battle between two factions: reformists and leftists. Reformists are democratically inclined students and intellectuals who
want to promote human rights and democratic
participation. Leftists are primarily Communist Party bureaucrats who take the system of Maoist China as their ideal and fight to retain the party's power and its grip on social life. The two broad philosophies competed until the mid-1990s for the patronage of the
party's leaders.

But worryingly, as the Chinese academic Gongqin Xiao has argued, both groups have been superceded by a new
class of "authoritarian technocrats", typified by
Jintao, who have no nostalgia for Mao but also have no interest in democracy. They seek instead massive extension of markets unhindered by democracy, and
believe that politics can remain solely the preserve of the Communist elite. This school brooks no dissent and does not see itself as competing with other philosophies. It is entirely unrepentant about the
occupation of Tibet; indeed, it believes that the
Chinese Communist Party has been especially generous to the Tibetans.

Gradual progress towards democracy instigated by the Communist Party would be by far the best route from here. Another, democratic, Chinese revolution, that
overthrows the party is appealing but unlikely.
Chinese culture is racked with a real fear of
instability, and the experience of post-Communist Russia - where life expectancy has plunged and mafia rule has spread - has made Chinese people extremely anxious about radical change.

The only available moral option for Western
governments - and it is an imperfect one - is to
encourage both reformers within the Chinese system and dissidents without. One of the most shameful moments in Blair's premiership was when pro-democracy demonstrators were hidden from view during President
Jiang Zemin's visit to Britain in 1998. He has a
chance to right that wrong now. When he visits China later this summer, he should make a point of calling for democracy, and he should go one step further and meet up with Chinese dissidents here in London before he goes.

None of us should imagine that challenging Chinese autocracy is somebody else's business. The Sars epidemic this year demonstrated that we are all vulnerable to the effects of injustice and suppressed
democracy anywhere in the world. The Nobel
prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has shown that famines are far less prevalent in democracies, because they have governments that are responsive to early warning signs. The same is true of the spread of
disease; democratic countries such as Canada detected and dealt with Sars much faster than China.

Indeed, it seems, according to the prevailing
theories, that the urban poverty that has emerged in China in the absence of democracy may have been a key
factor in the genesis of the disease. Sars was just a warning; if it had been a more deadly virus, we would all be paying the price for China's autocracy. The people of Hong Kong are not only helping the Chinese; they might just be saving our lives too.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Chinese president, Jiang Xhemin is about to embark on a state visit to Britain. He will attend a State Banquet at Buckingham Palace on 19th October, be a guest of honour at the Guildhall, host a banquet for the Queen on the 21st; and on the 22nd, he is to be welcomed to Cambridge University.

Xhemin's visit is intended to solidify Sino-Euro relations, diverting attention from the resolutions passed by the UN regarding China's violation of basic human rights. Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended his "softly, softly" approach in the past, announcing in 1998, "I do not intend to lecture or play to the gallery." This could possibly be influenced by China's threat to withdraw from negotiations with the UN should any nation interfere in her domestic affairs. The loss of harmonious relations with China in international trade would have huge economic reverberations.

Tianenmen Square Massacre - Tenth Anniversary:

The year of Xhemin's sojourn in Cambridge coincides with the tenth anniversary, this June, of the Beijing massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians. Tens of thousands of demonstrators were arrested in major cities and provinces around China. On the night of 3rd June 1989, heavily armed troops and hundreds of armoured military vehicles stormed into the city to clear the streets of pro-democracy demonstrators, firing at onlookers and protestors. Many were summarily shot and killed by soldiers in following days. Events were shown on television screens around the world and caused an international outcry. China has made no apology. Xhemin's stance is identical to that of Li Peng, the Prime Minister, who said in 1998 that "with regard to the political disturbances of 1989, the Party and the Government have already drawn the correct conclusion and this will not be changed in any way." The killings are seen by the Chinese government as the "suppression" of a "counter-revolutionary riot".

According to Chinese official sources, nearly 2,000 prisoners convicted of "counter-revolutionary crimes" are in prison today in China. Amnesty International record 241 prisoners to be still imprisoned in connection with the 1989 pro-democracy protests (and expect this number to be only a fraction of the true number). They consider the trials that condemned them to be unfair and in breach of international conventions on human rights.

Genocide in Tibet:

Tony Blair said at the time of the Kosovo war: "we cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed." Nowhere is ethnic cleansing more prevalent than in Tibet, the independence of which has been denied by Chinese authorities. "Over 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet" – The Tibet White Paper. The latest Chinese policy of population transfer has been described by the Free Tibet Campaign as "ethnic submersion and cultural genocide," and by Amnesty International as "one of the most disturbing crackdowns".

The Chinese Embassy deny that "population transfer" is underway, and assert that "freedom of religious belief" is encouraged, "protecting and developing culture and tradition" within Tibet. However, surveys find evidence of mass migration in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention. The government offers huge benefits to Chinese citizens who agree to migrate to Tibet. Their wage is 87 per cent higher than that of mainland China's residents.

The Chinese birth control programme does not officially apply to Tibetans, but in practice, fines of up to 8,000 yuan are imposed for unauthorised births; ration cards are withheld and parents can suffer pay cuts of up to 50 per cent. Sterilisation and abortions in advanced pregnancies are common. A TIN survey concluded that it was "unlikely" that these were all voluntary. The Eugenics law obliges parents of a child with a congenital defect to be sterilised, in both China and Tibet.

Protestors around the country, particularly those with Tibetan links, are jailed for years without charge or sentence. Reports of torture are common. The International Campaign for Tibet has found that prisoners are beaten with clubs, stripped naked and beaten; women are raped and have electric batons forced into their mouths and vaginas. The Independent in February 1994 reported on the first discovery of nipple laceration. In May 1992, a Buddhist nun was raped with an electric cattle prod. The security forces are alleged to have killed women in circumstances that appear to constitute extra-judicial executions, but they are cremated before outside authorities can demand post-mortems.

Amnesty International have voiced concern over the People's Republic of China and their "imprisonment of prisoners of conscience and…torture of detainees," not only in Tibet but also in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, in the west of China. The population there is predominantly Muslim. Thousands of people have been arbitrarily detained in the region over the past few years.

Both Tibetans and Muslims have suffered as a result of a concerted effort to purge the region's communist party committees of religion. The official newspaper Xinjiang Daily said: "Those party members who firmly believe in religion and who refuse to change their ways should make corrections, or be dismissed according to the seriousness of their case. In recent years, 98 religious party members have been dealt with." Mao Zedong affirmed that "religion is poison," and his philosophy fuels China's present campaign to promote atheism. Koranic study groups are being closed down and Mullahs (religious teachers) are being taken into police custody, detained for three months and released on condition of paying a fine. Some have been sent to "re-education through labour" camps. Torture methods employed against Muslims in the region, according to Amnesty, have included the exposure to extreme cold or heat; attacks using trained dogs; the extraction of fingernails; unidentified injections which cause mental imbalance and incoherence; the insertion of pepper, chilli powder or other substances into the mouth, nose or genital organs; and in the case of male prisoners the insertion of horse hair or wires into the penis.

Tibet's culture has been founded upon its monasteries, which have been desecrated by Chinese personnel. Presently, superficial rituals are allowed if supervised by Chinese police, but devotion is forbidden. Religious candidates must be approved by the Chinese government. The must demonstrate loyalty to the Communist party before their creed and accept that "spiritualism conflicts with materialism".

This suppression of religion directly violates the United Nations Declaration on Elimination of all forms of Intolerance and Discrimination based on Religion and Belief. The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has been repeatedly forced into exile and described by government officials as "not a religious leader…but a political leader engaged in divisive activities". The Dalai Lama protests that he promotes a demilitarized, "peace loving nation, adhering to the principle of ahimsa [non violence]". The Tibetan Panchen Lama was kidnapped in 1995, and is still the youngest political prisoner in the world. The Chinese refuse to release him, and have appointed a replacement of their choice.

Human Rights Abuses Across China:

Despite the recent signing by China of the two United Nations Covenants of Human Rights, Chinese people face being detained or arrested for seeking freedom of association. The visits to China by Bill Clinton and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, were heralded as triumphs for diplomacy and human rights 'dialogue'. International censure is receding, and the Chinese authorities once again have begun to crack down on dissidents and activists. Since October 1998, when China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, it is estimated that over 80 dissidents have been detained and at least 15 high profile dissidents have been given heavy prison sentences or assigned to "re-education through labour".

Policing of China and Tibet is oppressive, and conducted on a massive scale. There are 500,000 uniformed personnel in Tibet according to the Free Tibet Campaign, although the official Chinese figure is 40,394. Police presence is most marked at places of worship, monitoring monks and nuns strictly. On 8th October 1999 Namdol and Phuntsog Legman were arrested for "plotting or acting to split the country or undermine national unity" because they shouted such slogans as 'Free Tibet' for a few minutes. Each was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

"Merciless repression, remains in Tibet, the order of the day." This is the verdict of Human Rights On Tibet, Asia Watch, Washington DC.

Xhemin's visit has provoked many to question the morality of those in Cambridge University who will this week welcome the man responsible for withholding academic freedom to the extent that his own people are prohibited from reading unexpurgated texts of Shakespeare, Dickens or the great Chinese authors and dramatists. A University at the core of a democratic nation, one whose citizens enjoy basic human rights, seems an inappropriate venue to greet someone who is proud to represent a country responsible for torture, genocide and gross violations of human rights.