China Says U.S. Distorts Facts in Report on Rights

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China Says U.S. Distorts Facts in Report on Rights
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/world/asia/27china.html?ref=world

By MICHAEL WINES Published: February 26, 2009

BEIJING — Chinese authorities reacted caustically on Thursday to an annual State Department report on global human rights that called China’s respect for rights not only “poor,” but also worsening in its persecution of ethnic minorities and dissidents.

The state news agency Xinhua called the report’s section on China groundless and irresponsible, saying it “willfully ignored and distorted basic facts” about human rights conditions and the nation’s ethnic, legal and religious systems. “The report turned a blind eye to the efforts and historic achievements China has made in human rights that have been widely recognized by the international community,” the Xinhua statement said. It called the annual report an American pretext for interfering in the domestic affairs of other nations.

The State Department document was issued just days after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her first official visit to China, said publicly that American concern over China’s human rights practices would not impede cooperation on strategic issues like the economic crisis and global warming. Human rights groups and some others expressed dismay at her remarks, which they said undercut the United States’ ability to influence China’s human rights policies and its treatment of dissidents and other persecuted individuals.

At the release of the report on Wednesday, Karen B. Stewart, the State Department’s senior human rights official, said that the document’s pointed criticism of China’s record neither ran counter to Mrs. Clinton’s remarks nor was likely to damage cooperation between the nations.

As for China’s reaction, she said, “I think we’ll have a full dialogue with the Chinese on all areas” of policy.

While sharp, China’s reaction did not significantly differ from its reaction to the human rights assessment delivered by the Bush administration a year ago. Xinhua’s five-paragraph statement largely repeated, sometimes word for word, its 2008 response.

The government — in keeping with its practice since 2000 — also followed with its own sharply critical analysis of the United States’ human rights record, which was published by Xinhua. The report criticized the United States for a host of ills that it said impeded human rights, including “widespread violent crimes” and the wealth gap in the United States, as well as arms sales overseas and the “trampling” of the sovereignty of countries including Iraq.

The State Department document mentioned China, Russia, Zimbabwe, Egypt and a handful of other nations in its introduction as states where human rights conditions had deteriorated during 2008. It said Russia had “continued a negative trajectory” in domestic rights matters and accused Zimbabwe of a campaign of terror against the government’s political opponents that has led to the torture, disappearance or death of hundreds.

The 44-page section on China particularly criticized the government’s treatment of its Tibetan and Uighur minorities, and what it termed “increased detention and harassment of dissidents and petitioners.”

But the section also offered scattered instances of approval. The number of nongovernmental organizations in China rose by more than 9 percent in 2007, the last year for which records are available, despite harsh restrictions on the groups, the State Department said. China also “experimented with various forms of public oversight of government,” from telephone hot lines to public hearings on proposed legislation, in an effort to give citizens some say in policies.