RELIGION IN CHINA TODAY
by David Kilgour
Der Autor:
David Kilgour, geboren 1941 in Winnipeg, ist verheiratet und hat vier erwachsene
Kinder.
Nach dem Abitur im Jahr 1958 studierte er bis 1962 Wirtschaftwissenschaften
an der Universität von Manitoba und bis 1966 Jura an der Universität
von Toronto sowie von 1969 bis 1970 in Paris.
Als Anwalt arbeitete er in einer Kanzlei sowie für die Staatsanwaltschaft
der Stadt Manitoba.
Von 1972 bis 1979 war er Mitarbeiter im Justizministerium und verfassungsrechtlicher
Berater der Regierung von Alberta.
Als Mitglied der Liberalen Partei wurde er später Staatssekretär für
Lateinamerika und Afrika sowie für Asien und den pazifischen Raum.
Er reiste durch über 75 Länder. Als internationaler Botschafter setzt
er sich für Länder wie Burma, Vietnam, Simbabwe und Ruanda ein und
arbeitet zur Verbesserung der Menschenrechte mit internationalen NGO´s
in der ganzen Welt zusammen.
Seit April 2005 ist er ein unabhängiges Parlamentsmitglied.
Das Referat
The topic this afternoon is the government treatment of the practising members
of the estimated 300 million Chinese indicated by a widely-reported opinion
survey as self-identifying as “religious”. I’ll not deal here
with other persecuted communities in the Middle Kingdom, including Tibetans,
Uighurs, democrats, journalists, human rights advocates (such as Gao Zhishen),
and internet users. Nor will I deal with religious oppression in regimes protected
by the government of China in the UN Security Council, such as Sudan, Burma/Myanmar,
Zimbabwe and North Korea.
My own respect for the peoples of China and their long history, culture, scholarship
and myriad other accomplishments is deep. During two years as Canada’s
Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific in 2003-2003, I visited various regions
of China and this only increased my admiration. It was also my good fortune
to represent in Canada’s national Parliament for almost 27 years some
of the approximately one million Canadians of origin in China, who are evidently
now the best-educated ethno-cultural community in our country.
Here in Europe, permit me to give tribute to Will Hutton, who recently published
an excellent book on China, The Writing On The Wall-China and The West In The
21st Century. It argues convincingly that the new century can belong in large
measure to China, but only if new leaders there embrace economic and political
pluralism, including democratic governance, restored private ownership of land,
independent courts and the rule of law, and the basic freedoms of any well-functioning
civilization.
Hutton concludes, however, that unless China modernizes in such important spheres
its internal problems in such areas as social inequality (greater than both
the UK and US for example), unemployment, widespread corruption, pollution of
the natural environment (twenty of the 24 most polluted cities on earth are
in China) and general societal discontent, could bring an early end its export
successes of recent decades, thereby derailing much of the world economy. He
wants the democratic world to assist the next generation of leaders in Beijing
(Like many, Hutton has little confidence in President Hu as a reformer.) to
avoid collapse. The key is governance reform because approximately two thirds
of the world’s countries are now democratic and China’s one party
state is increasingly out of sync with its trading partners.
Case of Falun Gong
The essentially totalitarian form of government still operating in China explains,
for example, what has happened-and continues to occur- to the vital organs of
thousands of members of the Falun Gong spiritual community across China. The
government itself estimated the movement to comprise about 70 million Chinese
nationals as of 1999. As Hutton, who unfortunately does not deal with the organs
issue in his book, points out, since 1949 other terrible things have been done
regularly to the population of China by their own government. During Mao’s
period alone, an estimated 70 million Chinese citizens perished as a direct
or indirect result of inhuman policies such as the “Great Leap Forward”
and the “Cultural Revolution”.
As the Matas-Kilgour report, “Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations
of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China (available on the internet
at organharvestinvestigation.net) explains in detail, in mid-1999 the government
of Jiang Zemen declared a savage internal war on the Falun Gong community. He
no doubt feared its rapidly growing popularity across China as a spiritual-exercise
movement deeply-rooted in the qigong, Confucian, Buddhist and Taoism traditions
of the country. Practitioners are peaceful and non-political, but their values,
including “truth, compassion and forbearance”, clearly conflict
with those of Jiang’s political party and its ideological origins in the
Europeans Marx and Lenin. As one Chinese farmer put it, “Karl Marx does
not sound like a Chinese name.” Similarly, Jiang’s party made it
illegal to teach authentic Confucianism anywhere in China, but the government
is now setting up Confucian institutes in numerous centres around the world.
‘Carnivore Capitalism’
A second key factor leading to organ snatching was the ‘dog-eat-dog’
market economic model introduced by Deng Xiaoping after he became paramount
leader in the late 1970s. The unofficial national goal soon became “get
rich by any means”. When many hospital budgets across China were cut by
Beijing, the temptation for them, the military and medical professionals to
profit from the sale of organs of Falun Gong “enemies” to foreigners
and wealthy Chinese nationals soon evolved out of the persecution underway since
mid-1999.
Consider the statement of the ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon, which is appendix
18 in our revised report. She was told by him that he was paid the equivalent
of hundreds of thousands of US dollars for removing corneas from about 2000
Falun Gong practitioners between 2001 and October of 2003. In the years since
the persecution began, Matas and I have found approximately 41,500 transplantations
across China which are unaccounted for by the executions of convicted criminals,
voluntary donors and brain dead accident victims.
Falun Gong No Cult
I might add here that the Government of China’s Big Untruth, i.e., that
Falun Gong is an “evil cult”, reminds one of the messages the government
of Rwanda broadcast through its party media about the Tutsi community before
the terrible events between April and June of 1994. There has been such a stream
of propaganda against Falun Gong in the entirely government-controlled media
across China since mid-1999 that many Chinese nationals and even some outside
China unfortunately appear to have accepted the Party line.
Permit me to say that I spoke about the dangers of cults at a conference at
the University of Alberta a few years ago, the text of which is available on
my website (david-kilgour.com). A better source on the subject is Professor
David Ownby of the University of Montreal, who is cited in our report and did
specific research on Falun Gong. He concluded that Falun Gong is by no means
a cult, adding:
- Falun Gong practitioners in North America are well-educated and tend to
live in nuclear families. Many work with computers or in finance; some are
engineers.
- Falun Gong Practitioners do not have financial obligations to their faith
community; as well, they do not live in isolation and are law-abiding.
Ownby’s conclusion accords with that of many independent observers,
including David Matas and myself. In the 70 or so countries where it exists,
there is only one, China, where its practitioners appear not to be considered
good citizens and exemplary members of their respective civil societies.
European Experience with Totalitarianism
The topic this afternoon should ring loud bells for many Europeans at this
conference, especially Germans living in the former German Democratic Republic,
who survived both Adolph Hitler and the GDR “democrats”. No German
needs to be told that Hitler in fact despised all religions, although at times
he pretended otherwise about some of them. In hindsight, except for a rather
small of leaders such as Dietrich Bonnhoffer (sp?), the naivete of Christian
denominations during the earlier years of the Third Reich was breathtaking.
After 1945, their determination never again to be co-opted by governments of
any stripe forged a realism that contributed much to the toppling of a number
of dictatorships across Europe after 1989.
Professor Robert Manne in Australia has written well about this period in his
recent book, Left, Right Left-Political Essays 1977-2005. Manne, whose family
fled Hitler’s Europe for Australia, makes some points which seem relevant
to the subject matter. Noting that 1917-91 is now a completed chapter of Marxism-Leninism
in Europe but not in parts of Asia, Manne continues:
“…communism was for the European countries over which it
established its hold and almost unmitigated calamity. In the Soviet Union
since 1917 and in the Eastern Europe since 1944 communism caused the death
of tens of millions of innocents; perpetuated one or other form of economic
misery or hardship over the generations; alienated peasants and farmers from
the soil; turned the most straightforward aspects of daily life-like shopping
or medical care-into drudgery, adventure or worse; made talk of democracy
a form of cant disguising vicious personal dictatorships or immobilist gerontocracies;
perverted a radical version of the ideal of equality into a cover for the
class rule of a privileged strata of party bureaucrats, the nomenklatura ;
stifled national self-determination for scores of ethnicities from Central
Asia to Central Europe; destroyed all concept of the rule of law; injected
fear and then cynicism into the soils of generations of Soviet and East European
subjects; turned art into propaganda; and confronted artists with the choice
between self-exile or hackery. Apart from its capacity to extract high proportions
of gross domestic product for the armed forces, to win Olympic medals and
to maintain large masses of people in attitudes of submission over long periods
of time, it is difficult to credit communism with any cultural achievement.”
George Orwell
Manne’s book of essays is also eloquent on the subject of George Orwell,
who was probably the greatest writer in English on totalitarianism. It quotes
from Animal Farm the most famous line Orwell ever penned, which captures so
well the betrayal of the people by the Russian Revolution: “All animals
are equal but some are more equal than others.”
Orwell, of course, cared deeply about both genuine human equality and freedom.
He wrote scathingly about “party hacks” and what he termed “sleek
professors”, who were willing to trade freedom for one or another cause.
In 1946, he wrote:
“For some years passed, orthodoxy – at least the dominant brand
of it – has consisted in not criticizing Stalin, and the resulting corruption
has been such that the bulk of the English intelligentsia has looked on at torture,
massacre and aggression without expressing disapproval .. In five years, it
may be as dangerous to praise Stalin as it was to attack him two years ago.
But I shall not regard that as an advance. Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot
a new word.”
China Rights Forum
In the current issue of an important publication, China Rights Forum, published
by the NGO Human Rights in China (www.hriChina.org),
there is a list of the known persons in China by category, who will still be
in prison during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Among those imprisoned for
religious reasons, consider the breakdown:
- Falun gong-68
- Protestants-39
- Catholics-26
The list, which helps illustrate the government’s real attitude towards
religions, no doubt, understates the number of persons in all categories, especially
the Falun Gong. They are mostly in forced labour camps (which are not prisons
for this list), working up to 16 hours daily to make a range of products for
export, including Christmas decorations, chopsticks, gloves and garments in
complete violation of World Trade Organization rules. David Matas and I learned
a good deal about this side of China’s exports as we traveled to about
30 national capitals over the past six or so months, speaking to as many possible
of the Falun Gong victims who managed to get out of both the camps and China.
Secretly executed Religious Leaders
Google “Chinese government secretly executed”. Some of these should
relate to three Christians killed secretly in prison in western China in late
November 2006: Xu Shuangfu, Li Maoxing and Wang Jun. Xu led a church with evidently
more than 500,000 adherents across China. Their lawyers said they were convicted
by confessions obtained by torture.
If anyone thinks that persecution of religions has diminished in recent centuries,
permit me to point out that the last century was undoubtedly the worst in recorded
history for brutality directed at believers. One estimate of the number of human
beings of all nationalities who died prematurely for their faiths between 1900
and 2000 is a staggering 169 million, including: 70 million Muslims, 35 million
Christians, 11 million Hindus, nine million Jews, four million Buddhists, two
million Sikhs and one million Baha’is.
Too many of these victims died in inter or intra-faith violence, but most by
far perished at the hands of totalitarian regimes, which detest all religions
mostly because believers’ deepest loyalties lie elsewhere. Stalin, Hitler,
Mao and other dictators had murdered untold tens of millions of their own citizens.
Religious Liberty Indivisible
One researcher on the persecution of religions in China suggested several
years ago that there were probably as many Christians attending services there
each week—mostly in secret—as were doing so openly across Europe.
The constitution of China says its citizens ‘enjoy freedom of religious
belief” (art. 36), although those outside the so-called “patriotic
churches” are not permitted to practise their faith.
China’s government in fact considers all spiritual communities to be misguided,
deviations and mistakes in accord with the dialectic materialism of Karl Marx.
Enter, for example, “Chinese government persecution of Christians”
on Google.com and read some of the truly appalling entries. Replace “Christians”
here with any of a host of other targeted religions in China, such as Muslims,
Buddhists, Falun Gong etc and you will be equally dismayed.
Conclusion
Human dignity today is indivisible around our shrunken planet. All faith communities
and other members of civil societies everywhere should be fully united on issues
like the ones religious communities have faced daily for too long across China.
If all of us in open societies around the world don’t unite on such matters,
some of the world’s remaining 40 or so dictatorships will only repeat
the terrible ravages of the last century.
Here are three specific ways we can demonstrate our concerns about basic religious
and other freedoms in China:
- Let’s all of us resolve to use fully the window provided by the August
2008 Olympic Games in China to push hard on members of our respective national
Olympic committees, sports federations, potential event sponsors and possible
spectators in Beijing to demand that the killing of Falun Gong prisoners of
conscience for their organs and other abuses of religious practitioners cease
in China now.
- Bilateral relations between China and any self-respecting government should
be based on fundamental human values as well as commercial considerations.
A democratic China with the rule of law and human rights should be the goal
of all peoples around the world. International peace and security would be
much enhanced if China would join the democracies.
- Unfortunately because human rights across China are now worsening rather
than improving as its government pledged when it bid for the Olympic Games,
some are already calling it the “Olympic Shame”. We should all
do our utmost to raise religious liberty issues with Chinese visitors to our
respective countries, including the thousands of students studying in the
West, in the months leading up to August, 2008.
Thank you.
