Tuesday, February 27, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Striking an early blow against mounting human rights abuses in China, the Bush administration will try next month to censure Beijing before an international rights forum, the State Department announced Monday.

The effort targets a crackdown in China against political dissent, religious freedom and Tibet's ethnic minorities as documented in the State Department's annual human rights report.

The report, released Monday, estimates that 100 or more members of the Falun Gong spiritual [group] were beaten or otherwise tortured to death in Chinese jails last year, as political dissidents were rounded up and herded into work camps or prisons, where thousands languished amid harsh conditions for peacefully opposing the government.

"The government's poor human rights record worsened," the report says of China. "The government continued to commit widespread and well-documented human rights abuses."

In response, the Bush administration is launching a diplomatic effort to condemn China's record in a resolution before the United Nations Human Rights Commission during its annual conference, which opens March 19 in Geneva.

Since China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the United States has tried and failed nearly a dozen times to secure such a resolution before the 53-country U.N. commission. ...

This article includes material from The Associated Press.