China and Human Rights

Countering recent hype around technology, a leading expert argues that the endurance of dictatorship in China owes less to facial recognition AI and GPS tracking than to the human resources of the Leninist surveillance state. For decades China watchers argued that economic liberalization and increasing prosperity would bring democracy to the world's most populous country. Instead, the Communist Party's grip on power has only strengthened. Why? The answer, Minxin Pei argues, lies in the effectiveness of the Chinese surveillance state. And the source of that effectiveness is not just advanced technology like facial recognition AI and mobile phone tracking. These are important, but what matters more is China's vast, labor-intensive infrastructure of domestic spying. Central government data on Chinese surveillance is confidential, so Pei turned to local reports, police gazettes, leaked documents, and interviews with exiled dissidents to provide a detailed look at the evolution, organization, and tactics of the surveillance state. Following the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the Chinese Communist Party invested immense resources in a coercive apparatus operated by a relatively small number of secret police officers capable of mobilizing millions of citizen informants to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The CCP's Leninist bureaucratic structure--whereby officials and party activists penetrate every sector of society and the economy, from universities and village committees to delivery companies, telecommunication firms, and Tibetan monasteries--ensures that Beijing's eyes and ears are truly everywhere. While today's system is far more robust than that of years past, it is modeled after mass surveillance implemented under Mao Zedong and Chinese emperors centuries ago. Rigorously empirical and rich in historical insight, The Sentinel State is a singular contribution to our knowledge about coercion in the Chinese state and, more generally, the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes.

This book describes the development of human rights in the People's Republic of China since 1949. In particular, since the reform and opening-up, China has deepened its understanding of the rule of law and human rights, and realized the incorporation of human rights into the Constitution. The cause of human rights in China has entered a period of rapid development in a planned and step-by-step manner, and a path of human rights development suited to China's national conditions has been set out. China's international exchanges and cooperation in the field of human rights have gradually deepened and strengthened, and China has made unique contributions, becoming a participant, builder and contributor to international human rights governance.

This book discusses human rights law, focusing on Chinese contributions to international human rights viewed from a perspective of global governance. The original research presented here integrates a variety of research methods: inter-disciplinary approaches, historical and comparative methods, documentary research and so on. The research findings can be described briefly as follows: In global governance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) serves as a historic cross-cultural heritage, while Pengchun Chang, the Chinese representative, made great contributions to the establishment of the international human rights system.  After examining the characteristics of the Chinese discourse on human rights in global governance, the book suggests fundamental principles for improving human rights standards in China. In addition, it explores Chinese concepts of human dignity concerning the Declaration on Human Dignity for everyone, everywhere. The target readers are global scholars and students of law, politics, philosophy, international relations, human rights law, religion and culture. The book will provide these readers a vivid picture of China's contributions to international human rights, and a better understanding of the significance of traditional Chinese culture and wisdom. 

This book focuses on the "algorithmic turn" in state surveillance and the development of new platforms that allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to shape human behavior in all areas of life through its widespread social credit system. Perhaps no country has gone further than China in setting up overt systematic tracking, surveillance and constant computational evaluation of its citizens. Everyday life is saturated with a pervasive digitization that affects social mobility, economic opportunities and personal freedoms. Global organizations operating in China have to take account of the ramifications of these systems for data protection within the CCP's explicit project of forming a digital civilization. The volume covers the new technological practices that have transformed how states acquire and analyze personal data, the "TikTok-ification" of society as social credit platforms built on the familiarity with this popular app's interaction paradigm and the fast expansion of the digital economy that followed the new legal status of data as a production component in 2019. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by research into China's digital civilization project from media, journalism, communication and global studies.

China's Social Credit System has fundamentally re-shaped global notions of surveillance, making it into European Union legislation and hundreds of media headlines. Drawing on a rich body of empirical evidence, this book offers one of the first comprehensive assessments of this infamous system, from its fragmented implementation to its implications for both human rights and the market order. Surprisingly, it illustrates even China's government is confused about this messy initiative. Separating fact from fiction, Social Credit is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in technology, governance, and surveillance in China and beyond.  

Speaking to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2022, President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to the 'opening up' policy of his predecessors — a policy that has burnished the party’s political legitimacy among its citizens by enabling four decades of economic development. Yet, for all the talk of openness, 2022 was a year of both literal and symbolic locks and chains — including, of course, the long, coercive, and often brutally enforced lockdowns of neighbourhoods and cities across China, most prominently Shanghai. Then there was a vlogger’s accidental discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, sparking an anguished, nationwide conversation about human trafficking. That was part of a broader (if frequently censored) conversation about gendered violence and women’s rights, in a year when women’s representation at the highest levels of power, which was already minimal, decreased even further. There was trouble with supply chains and, with the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, in August, island chains as well. Despite the tensions in the Asia-Pacific, the People’s Republic of China expanded its diplomatic initiatives among Pacific island nations and celebrated fifty years of diplomatic links with both Japan and Australia. As the year drew to a close, a tragic fire in a locked-down apartment building in Ürümqi triggered a series of popular protests that brought an end to three years of ‘zero COVID’. The China Story Yearbook: Chains provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories from 2022.

This volume is a collection of up-to-date, authoritative essays on China's Law of Personality Rights, its impact in practice and its legal background. The Law of Personality Rights was enacted in China in May 2020, the first time that the Law has been legislated as an independent part of the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China, marking an unprecedented step in protecting the personality rights of citizens. As the first volume of a two-volume set that elucidates the theory, practice and codification experience of the Law in China, the book examines the basis for the Law as a standalone part of the Civil Code, its overall framework and the delimitation and formation of the Law. In terms of practical aspects, the contributors delve into institutional arrangements, the relationship between human rights and personality rights, and the relationship with laws on tort liability, as well as those pertaining to marriage and the family. The book will be an essential reference to scholars and students studying civil law, continental law, Chinese law and the legal protection of personality rights.

This book investigates how Uyghur-related violent conflict and Uyghur ethnic minority identity, religion, and the Xinjiang region, more broadly, became constituted as a 'terrorism' problem for the Chinese state. Building on securitization theory, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), and the scholarly definitional debate on terrorism, it develops the concept of terroristization as a critical analytical framework for the study of historical processes of threat construction. Investigating the violent events reported in Xinjiang since the early 1980s, the evolving discursive patterns used by the Chinese state to make sense of violent incidents, and the crackdown policies that the official terrorism discourse has legitimized, the book demonstrates how the securitization, and later terroristization, of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, is the result of a discursive and political choice of the Chinese state. The author reveals the contingent and unstable nature of such construction, and how it problematizes the inevitability of the rationale behind China's 'war on terror', that has prescribed a brutal crackdown as the most viable approach to governing the tensions that have historically characterized China's rule over the Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the politics of contemporary China, security and ethnic minority issues, International Relations and Security, as well as those adopting discursive approaches to the study of security, notably those within the critical security and terrorism studies fields.

Presenting the life stories of ten Uyghur women, this book applies the techniques of narrative analysis to explore their changing worldviews and conversions to political engagement. Born and raised in East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the 1970s-90s, each woman, after personally experiencing incidents of ethnic discrimination, chose to leave China before 2005. Settling in a western country, they strive to become the voice of the Turkic people who are silenced or detained in the "re-education" camps. The narratives are based on interviews conducted online between 2020 and 2021, collected as a form of oral history. The book focuses on the escalating tensions, turning points experienced in their youth, and the religious, political and psychological factors that prompted their transformations in self-identity, ideology and the emergence of a new Uyghur-Muslim feminism. Through the women's stories, the book describes how women activists are navigating the competing reality constructions of the dire situation in the Uyghur Homeland and actively restorying a genocide to bring about social and political change.

Hongkongers' Fight for Freedom: Voices from the 2019 Anti-extradition Movement documents this momentous episode in the history of Hong Kong through the voices of its participants. Drawing on the interviews of 56 participants, this book portrays how normally acquiescent Hongkongers joined the Movement en masse, driven by government intransigence, police brutality and flagrant injustice. It also conveys the deep emotions and strong sense of commitment and identity which evolved in the process. The Movement was a courageous effort by its citizens to defend their freedoms, but sadly, it also marked the beginning of the city's sharp descent into Chinese tyranny. While a curtain of silence now enshrouds Hong Kong, it is imperative that these voices of resistance be preserved and heard.