Larry Herzberg returns to discuss human rights in China, addressing the situation with the Uighurs, Hong Kong, and religious freedom.
Episode 042 – China: Human Rights
Penny: Welcome, everyone, to another episode in the Diversity and Inclusion for All series of Calvin University. Today our topic is China unpacking some key ideas and associations that we have with China. And I'm joined again by colleague Larry Herzberg, who's a professor emeritus of Calvin University. He has taught Chinese and Japanese and been the director of Asian studies for years and years and has lots of personal and professional experiences related to China and Chinese cultures that he's able to draw on to share with us today some important perspectives in our understanding of China.
Larry: The Chinese people, by and large, have never been more prosperous or freer, including in terms of religion than they are right now. They're nowhere as prosperous or free as Americans or Europeans, Canadians, Australia and so on. But they have come such a long way, but they're not given credit for what they have achieved. And instead the Western media has and politicians concentrate on the very obvious negative things about China, which are all true.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project, supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Human rights is an important issue when we think about China. I know a lot of us have associations and we hear about different stories in the news. So, when it comes to human rights in China, one of the issues that comes up again and again is the issue of the Uighurs. And I wonder if you can tell us just really briefly, first, what you think is most important for us to know about that group of people in China and then how to understand China's policy and what we hear on the news, as I'm going to say, mistreatment or human rights abuses related to this people group in China.
Larry: China has 56 ethnic groups which Americans should understand. Only about 91 to 92% of people in China are Han Chinese people that we think of as Chinese. One of the large minorities in China, although far from the largest, are the Turkish Uighurs, who are largely Muslim and mostly inhabits Xinjiang province, which is way to the northwest in China. There are 12 million of them and right now it's estimated (China's government won't divulge that information) was estimated that 1 million, about 8% of them are in these what China calls reeducation camps. I'm alarmed about this, as our listeners will be, because I'm an American. I believe in human rights and freedom. But it's a serious misunderstanding, including by people on both the left and the right, that the persecution of the Uighurs--of the Turkish Muslim minority --is due to their religion. Indirectly, it is, but it’s due to a fact that has received almost no notice in the West, in the Western news. And that is the fact that in the decade leading up to this, what really amounts to incarceration of 8% of the Uighurs, there were a lot of terrorist acts by separatists who are Uighurs in their capital city ofÜrümqi, as well as across China, in which hundreds of Chinese innocent civilians, men, women and children, were killed and many more injured, and Chinese property. stores, and so on burned.
Penny: When were those terrorist attacks?
Larry: The principal ones were in 2014, but four or five years before then, the Chinese government took the draconian action that they did to round up so many of these Uighurs. Who did they round up? They rounded up any Uighurs who were expressing support for the separatist movement to have this province of China become independent, a province that China desperately wants to hang onto, because even though it's not a very populous one, it is rich in natural resources, including oil, and produces other important minerals for China, and so they're trying to hang onto it. And because China does surveil the Internet in a way that is anathema to us in the West, they could tell who had expressed sympathy for the separatist movement, and they are afraid of more terrorist actions --granted by a very tiny minority of these people who would be willing to do these. But and the latest terrorist incident before the reeducation camps were started was in 2016. That was five years ago. So, under a regime under Xi Jinping, this becomea definitely more repressive, although nothing nothing like it was in the Mao era. Then they took this terrible action.
It has been called genocide, cultural genocide by American government officials and others. I don't think that's quite fair to label it that when it's 8% of the people. Nevertheless, it's a horrible thing to do to these people and and to their families. And we're concerned with the …what we see as slave labor coming out of that. And the US Government is pushing back, now just recently prohibiting the sale of any products from that province that might have been produced by what we see as prison labor and as we should.
And we need to speak out against human rights abuses in China, although ultimately it will do no good because China, I suppose rightfully from their perspective, says what right does the United States have to preach to us about our internal affairs, any more than they would say: we don't talk about how you treat migrants at the border or the inequities toward minority groups in America. I don't think there's a fair equivalency there, of course, but nevertheless that's the Chinese argument. That doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out against human rights abuses around the world, including in China. But we need to understand that the Chinese government isn't persecuting these Turkish Muslims because of their religion. Because Muslims in the rest of China and the ones that aren't Uighurs have no issues in being able to worship in their mosques in huge numbers as I've seen myself in China. But it is because of the fear of terrorist acts by these separatists.
Penny: Mm hmm. And the threat of a separatist movement that could gain traction. That's another thing that the government wants to avoid.
Larry: That's correct. And the same thing has been true about Tibet, even though Tibet has even fewer people than Xinjiang, but is huge and is on the border with so many countries with which China has issues, including India. And so as a buffer zone for them. It doesn't… Tibet, unlike Xinjiang, isn't rich in natural resources, but it's also this national pride. If, for example, imagine that the Navajo were at least half the population of New Mexico and they wanted independence from the U.S. And Washington state was inhabited mostly or largely by Muslims, and they wanted independence from the United States. How would the average American react toward that, especially if they committed terrorist acts in order to bring that about, even though it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, but nevertheless. Well, in Tibet in the past, also not covered by the U.S. and other foreign media very much at all but just the repression then that happened afterwards, the Tibetans like the Uighurs… or this is back several decades ago, but they also --their separatists also attacked and killed Chinese civilians in Tibet, certainly in Lhasa, and burned shops, just like the Uighur separatists.
Penny: Oh, that's interesting. So, here I'm letting people know how naive and unknowing I am. But when I think of Tibet, I think of the Dalai Lama and, you know, peace and harmony kind of ideals. And then the Free Tibet movement that was popular for a while and still is among certain people. And so I didn't even know that there had been these other sort of terrorist attacks coming out of Tibet, that could be one thing that China's reacting to. I want to be clear, though, that we are not saying that there aren't human rights abuses because there are human rights abuses. Right. In terms of the Uighurs and in terms of maybe even people in Tibet right now.
Larry: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we should condemn them very strongly here in the West and especially the United States with our high ideals. And certainly to incarcerate the Uighurs, as the Chinese have done, is anathema to every ideal that we hold as Americans.
Penny: I also want to talk about Hong Kong, because that's been in the news too recently, that we hear in the West about different, let's say, journalists or other protesters who are trying to advocate for more free speech, more rights for Hong Kong, a little more self-government and less control by China. And that they are then either arrested or banned or mistreated in some way. Could you help us understand that a little bit better? What what are we missing maybe in our news coverage? What is important to contextualize what we hear coming out of Hong Kong?
Larry: Once again, we need to look historically a little bit to understand this. And again, I am not trying to defend the Chinese government's actions. I believe in human rights and freedom of the press. But to understand the Chinese approach to Hong Kong, we need to go back to the fact that this is a city that was this little fishing village in the middle of the 19th century when the British wanted to force opium on China. The opium poppy doesn't grow in China. So, why do we associate historically opium with China? The British had a terrible trade imbalance with the Chinese. Does this sound familiar: where the British wanted everything from China. They wanted silk and porcelain and tea. And the Chinese wanted nothing from the British. And this was causing the British to pour millions, billions of gold into China without getting anything back. The British thought: what can we hook the Chinese on? Oh, the opium poppy grows in India, which we control, which we govern. Let's hook the Chinese on opium. And as they did that, China fought two wars to try to keep opium out of China. The early 1840s was the first opium war, and the second one was in the early 1860s.
Well, China, which had been the leading country in the world for several thousand years in every way, technologically, culturally, in terms of literacy, a fact that's easy to forget, but which has caused great Chinese pride in recovering that status finally.
In the 18th, 19th century, China didn't have an industrial revolution. They fell way behind the West technologically. Their military was no match for the British. So, the British win these two wars in the 1840, 1860s, and they win all these concessions from the Chinese government, including some ports that they would have total control over, including Hong Kong and parts of Chinese cities, which they totally took over. And the famous sign in a park in Shanghai, China's largest city, no dogs or Chinese allowed. I mean, imagine that in Central Park in New York City, no Americans or dogs allowed.
So, Hong Kong, this little fishing village then becomes this major international trading center. But the British ruled that, like they did all their colonies until by 1997, the British had agreed to return Hong Kong to China because Hong Kong is right in the middle of a Chinese province, a very prosperous southeastern Chinese province of Guangdong, and right next to the third most important city in China, economically, Gwangju, where it's just next door. And the British knew they were going to have to give up Hong Kong. So, about a decade before they suddenly granted all these democratic rights and freedom of speech and a legislature and so on to the people of Hong Kong. And the people of Hong Kong like that. And they get used to it, as we would wish everyone in the world would.
But okay, so China takes it over and they give the promise that for the next 50 years or 1997 or another 50 years till 2047, they would continue to grant those rights to the people of Hong Kong. Well, they have reneged on that promise in the last few years, again, with President Xi Jinping. Again, he's not the terrible dictator that Mao Zedong was, but nevertheless, fearing any kind of separatist acts or whatever, any kind of rebellion against the government has instituted these arrests of legislators in Hong Kong that advocate against the Chinese government and also journalists and so on, which is anathema to our whole way of doing something.
But I should mention that the 1.41 billion people in China have no sympathy for the people, the 7 million people in Hong Kong or the five or 6 million Tibetans or the 12 million Uighurs, because they figure that in the Hong Kong case, for example, that why should the people in Hong Kong have any more rights than they have? They do fine. They're happy with their life. Hong Kong people for the first 24 years under China's Communist Party domination have been granted rights far beyond what they get. And, so, we should realize from a Chinese people's perspective, not just the government's perspective, that: they're totally for law and order. And then what we also have uncovered in Western media is once again, when the Chinese government started to crack down on freedom of the press and legislators and in Hong Kong, that there was violence against the police who tried to maintain order. And but we then cover in the Western media the crackdown and the beatings of Hong Kong protesters.
Now, again, I'm not excusing any of this, and I would like to see all of China become a democracy, but they have no history of it. And a lot of Chinese intellectuals with whom we are friends and some of them have gotten Ph.D.s from universities in the United States and are back teaching at major universities in China. They don't feel that their own country is ready, even though they hate a lot of what the Chinese government is doing. Again, not excusing any of this behavior on the part of China, but and we can protest all we want and should and should, but it's not going to have any effect on the Chinese government.
Penny: So, I just want to clarify a couple of things. So, it is true that originally Great Britain leased Hong Kong rights so that they were legally obligated to give it back in 1997. Is that a fair understanding of the situation there?
Larry: That's right, because it was a third war where foreigners, including the United States and Britain, participated in. And France and and Japan and so on. And that was the Boxer Rebellion in 1898, where the British and other foreigners had taken over large sections of the major Chinese cities, especially on the coast, and refused to follow any Chinese law and just claimed it as their own territory. And when a number of Buddhist followers in 1898 then attacked foreign concessions there in Beijing, the united troops of Britain, the United States and so on, came in and suppressed this and then extracted a tremendous amount of money and even more concessions from the Chinese government. And one of those was that Britain would then lease Hong Kong in 1898 for 99 years. And so in 1997, Qin and I, my wife and I, were in Beijing and we watched this huge clock in Tiananmen Square in the middle of Beijing. Do a millisecond--I kid you not: a millisecond --countdown to when Hong Kong would come back to the fold-- would be returned to the country, as the Chinese say.
And it has to be realized that if we in the United States or anyone else in the world is to understand China and where they're coming from, we have to realize that they were the greatest civilization in the world, along with Rome. And Rome fell. And then it was China alone in the world from what was the Middle Ages in the West until about the 18th century. And they sent ships, hundreds of ships that were ten, 20, 50 times larger than Columbus's to Africa. 60, 70 years before the Portuguese explorers, before the Spanish explorers and so on. But they never colonized. And China has been humiliated for the last couple of centuries by Western powers, by having them occupied. Japan occupied the major cities in China starting in 1937 until they lost World War II in 1945, and the cities reverted to Chinese control.
It's a tremendous, tremendous source of pride that in the last 30, 40 years, the Chinese have reclaimed their position as a major world power. And that's why they want Taiwan back. That's why they want to hang on to Xinjiang and Tibet. That's why they don't want Hong Kong to get any ideas, separatist ideas or ideas that they can have freedoms that the rest of China doesn't, that they're not fully under control of the Chinese government.
And why the Chinese people continue to support a one-party government in which they have no free elections except on the very local level, by the way, that they do have. But their lives are getting so much better and their lives are in the last 30, 40 years--We've seen this with our friends, too, who are not party officials and who are writers and heads of radio stations and so on, lawyers in China, --their lifestyle and that of hundreds of millions of Chinese over the last 40 years, the standard of living has not just doubled, it's not just tripled. It's literally, literally 100 times, 200 times what it was. The Chinese are out buying us in numbers of cars each month. When I first went to China in 1982, no Chinese owned any cars. They weren't allowed and they weren't…they couldn't afford it anyway, even if they could. And so this prosperity in China rising, it got to be one of the major nations in the world is, as I said, this tremendous source of pride. And when the United States shows a resentment of that, that China will talk back and they are.
Penny: Mm hmm. So, I think it's helpful. I think, you know, growing up in the United States, I learned European history, but I didn't really learn a lot of Asian history. So, it's interesting to just be a little more aware of the long history of that part of the world and of their then identity as explorers and people with worldwide touch. But as you mentioned, which is also interesting to me, they didn't do the whole colonization kinds of things that I associate with the European powers. Right. Of a couple of centuries ago.
Larry: That's absolutely true. And the reason for that is that China so, so many times larger than the Netherlands, than Spain and Portugal, and than Britain an island country of Britain, they felt that they they were largely an agricultural society, not a trading society. Western European wealth was built largely starting in the Renaissance and beyond by trade, by colonizing other countries. China felt, the Chinese government felt they had everything they needed within their own borders. And so after the Seven Voyages of their Sinbad (and the Sinbad legend comes from the eunuch Zheng He who in the early 1400s made seven voyages to India, to Africa and so on in these huge ships) they were called that --they were after his death, the Chinese government said: we'll do no more exploration. We have everything we need within our own borders. But then China failed to have an industrial revolution.
It should be pointed out that most of the world's greatest inventions for several thousand years came from China, including the compass. How did Columbus really know the world was round? He knew. All the explorers knew. They knew that the world wasn't flat because the Arabs had maps that they had gotten from the Chinese that showed just that, that the world was so much larger than they had thought. And and Columbus could use those maps from the Arabs, which they had gotten from the Chinese to circumnavigate. The compass coming coming from China. Gunpowder coming from China. Paper making coming from China and so on. The printing press was invented in China two centuries before Gutenberg. Although it was Gutenberg, his development of the movable type printing press should be celebrated because it was developed separately from that in China. But China was so much more advanced, much, much larger cities, when Marco Polo visited and the 13th century, than any of European cities by far. And Marco Polo and his uncles were so impressed with the fact the Chinese were printing books in the tens of thousands and the people were so much more literate than the people in Europe and so on.
So again, when China fell behind the West and then got basically colonized in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Western powers and then by Japan, by Japan, Japan got their entire culture, their written language, 60% of their spoken words, Buddhism, rice, cultivation, architecture, everything from China, Confucian ideals --which the Japanese never want to fully admit but is absolutely historically 100% true. When the Japanese then take over all the major cities in China 1937 to 1945, and brutally massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians -- for the Chinese to recover from that now and to even surpass Japan and the Japanese economic miracle used to be the greatest economic miracle in world history. Well, China has blown that out of the water. And so Japan is now the third economy in the world. But China has two and a half times their GDP.
Penny: One of the associations that some people have with China is that it's anti-Christian or anti religious. I'm wondering how true that is.
Larry: In the 1950s through the 1970s, that would be a correct perception. But it wasn't that China was anti-Christian. They were anti religion because they felt religion --the opiate of the masses. And besides, they wanted to ensure that the allegiance of the Chinese people were for the government and not for any religion. So they didn't just persecute Christians and the Christian church. No, they did the same thing to Buddhists, to Muslims, to the Daoists, and so on.
Penny: So, when you say persecution, what were some of the things that are true that happened in that era?
Larry: They closed churches, they closed mosques and Buddhist temples. And those temples they sent the clergy--they didn't kill them or imprison them, but they sent them down to the countryside to work with the peasants and so on. But that was in the Mao era, the 1950s through the seventies. By the 1980s, the Chinese government said, well, we have in our Constitution now that there is freedom of religion and you have freedom to practice the five --what they see as the five major approved religions in China. And those are: Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam. And so we've seen a tremendous resurgence of religious belief, religious faith or religious worship in China in the last four decades. And so not only were churches and mosques and temples reopened, but they've been flooded with people. And new churches built or refurbished, temples rebuilt as a large part of their history.
And I myself, with my Calvin students, have gone to huge Christian churches in Beijing and elsewhere and worshiped with a thousand Chinese people and so on. I was there in China in 1982, in Xi’an, when their oldest and largest church in that major city in the northwest of China, when it first reopened after 30 some years of being closed and their ministers allowed to preach again and they distributed Bibles and so on. The church was so packed, they had six services a week or whatever. On Sundays they had to have two services, one after the other, and they could only fit in about half the congregation into the church for each service. And so half of the congregation would be out in the courtyard outside of the church listening in. But we as foreigners were allowed to sit in the very first row because they were so excited. We were the first Americans to worship or any foreigners to worship with them. For the last 30 some years, the church had gone underground. These people didn't cease to be Christians. Many of them were very old. Well, now we're seeing in the Christian churches majority of young people who are attracted to Christianity and the Christian church up until very recently was growing faster in the last three or four decades, growing faster than anywhere in the world, except perhaps in certain African countries.
And so when the Christian population when I was studying about China in the 1970s and studying the Chinese language, Christians, as far as we knew, only made up, say, a half of 1% of the population. Now the estimates run between three and 6% of the Chinese population. We'll never know for sure because Chinese don't register their religious preferences in polls or so on like we do in the West. But Bibles-- it's easy to get a Bible in China. You can get one at any church in China, even some of the bookstores. They don't have the Bible on the shelf, but you can ask for it and they'll bring it out from the back. And not only are Bibles easily obtainable in China, where there are millions and millions of them, but China has become a net exporter of Bibles to the rest of the world from their printing press in Nanjing, run… called the Amity Press. And it was started in conjunction with Billy Graham's son and continues apace.
And there are seminaries and the Chinese government has no problem. They don't send spies into the churches, as long as the congregations are just talking about how to be a good person and about honoring Jesus or whatever and talking about the Bible, no problem. As long as they don't speak out against the government. And the Christian clergy in China, both the Catholic and Protestant clergy, they don't feel like that's their calling. Their calling is to be a good shepherd of their flocks and to help people lead good Christian moral lives. And the sermons sound very much like the sermons that we hear here in Grand Rapids or elsewhere in the United States.
And then my wife and I visited Buddhist temples and Daoist temples. And we we can't go into a mosque, but you can visit go in the grounds of the mosque. And we saw the hundreds of Muslim worshipers in Xi’an, for example, where there's so many Muslims who --live not Uighurs, but Muslims…Chinese Muslims go in to worship --all men. But in the Buddhist temple, seeing people of all ages burning incense and praying. They don't have --Buddhists and Daoists don't have-- regular worship services the way Jewish Christians and Muslims have.
But so it’s true that under Xi Jinping in the last few years, maybe the last five or six years, the Chinese government has become more repressive, not toward the churches and church worship, but toward schools that they knew were really Christian schools which are not allowed. And these Christians and they forced them ..they didn’t smashed them or imprison the teachers or anything. But they told them, you have so and so much time to vacate the premises. And so they moved out into the countryside or the outskirts of the city. Now, there have been some highly publicized cases of the Chinese government cracking down on Christians in the last decade or two, because our Western media is always really anxious to latch onto anything negative about China and any abuses of human rights. The second part is right that we should do so. But. It gives a rather skewed view of the fact that most Christians still worship freely in China. But, for example, a very publicized case was in the most Christian city in China Wenzhou, a very successful economic port city, fairly far south, where about 10% of the population is estimated to be Christian. They built not only these really large churches, but they put on the top gigantic crosses that were several stories high and made the crosses the most visible thing in a city of millions of people. And that is a challenge to the authority of the Chinese government that wants their citizens to have their first allegiance to their government and their country and not to any foreign entity. And they see Christianity as a foreign religion, which it is, although to be fair, so is Buddhism. The only indigenous religion is Daoism. The church leaders weren't imprisoned or beaten, but the crosses were torn down. And this, you know, terrible violation of rights of Christians from our perspective, from the Chinese perspective, this was going beyond the boundaries of what is allowed under religious freedom.
And so the Chinese government, though, and I believe this is still true, has seen in the last three or four decades that Christians make really good citizens, that they tend to be more moral than the average person in China, not that the average Chinese is immoral, but the Chinese people make good citizens. A lot of them are highly educated, a lot of university students have been attracted to Christianity from their foreign teachers and from an attraction to generally to things Western. And so the Chinese government has not been anxious to crack down on Christianity, not in the last four decades, but when China was granted the Olympics, summer Olympics in I think it was 2008, it was 206. I can't remember. I'm an old man now, but 2008, I believe, there were columnists in national newspapers in the U.S. and editorials in the Grand Rapids Press that equated the granting of the Olympics to China in 2008, to be the equivalent of granting the 1936 Olympics to Hitler and Nazi Germany. I wrote it --back when there was a real Grand Rapids Press--I wrote a long editorial opinion piece in which I said: as the son of a man who escaped Nazi Germany, as a Jew and as someone who has been following China for decades, I would beg to strongly disagree with that statement that China is nowhere like Nazi Germany. But China has never put to death or imprisoned for any length of time Christian leaders, including in the 1950s, sixties and seventies, during that really repressive time. And China, certainly this was true when I said this five or six years ago. This is still quite true today that the Chinese people, by and large, have never been more prosperous or freer, including in terms of religion than they are right now. They're nowhere as prosperous or free as Americans or Europeans, Canadians, Australia and so on. But they have come such a long way, but they're not given credit for what they have achieved. And instead the Western media has and politicians concentrate on the very obvious negative things about China, which are all true.
Penny: So, I think what's helpful for our listeners to take away is that we just need more information. We need a more nuanced understanding of both the cultural differences and the contextual sort of what's happening on the ground differences that are the background for different policies or things that have happened in China and are even happening today. And it's not to say that China doesn't do anything wrong, because we recognize that there are human rights abuses and there are things that are terrible that have happened. But to to understand a little bit better, the context of those, I think just helps us understand that. And then also to realize that while we need to speak out about human rights abuses and hold other people accountable, we also can't overlook our own our own issues and the ways that we too, don't necessarily honor every person and give them the dignity, respect, and rights that they they should have.
Larry: So China does some evil things. By the way, the U.S. does, too, although I'm glad I'm an American and not a Chinese person. I think America is a lot better country morally than China. But nevertheless, China is not evil, and the Chinese people are not evil. In fact, there's some of the most likable and admirable people in the world. So, that's right. We have to learn to peacefully coexist with China with all their glaring flaws.
Penny: Well, you kind of inspired me, I think. I want to read more about the history of China and in that part of the world, just…. I feel like that's really missing right in my own education.
Larry: None of us can know everything about every part of the world, let alone it even today, let alone the history. We all need each other. And it's true that if the U.S. and China would cooperate more, we could make … continue to make the world better for both countries instead of making it worse for both.
Penny: Thank you so much, Larry, for joining us to unpack and to understand China a little bit better.
Larry: Thank you for inviting me.
Penny: This episode, number 42, is part of a mini-series on Understanding China today. You or interested friends might also enjoy our other current episodes on China. You can learn a bit about Chinese history and culture in episode 40. In Episode 41, we explore issues such as pollution, China's relationship with Taiwan, and China's role in the COVID crisis. Tune into Episode 43 if you're keen to hear Professor Herzberg explain China's so-called one child policy. In that episode, Larry helps us understand the history, cultural context, and effects of China's sometimes controversial family planning policies.
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