-- Think differently in China and you are likely to find yourself send to a reeducation labour camp, as one young man who studied in Dublin found.

Miriam Donohoe reports from Beijing on China's lamentable human rights

Mar 10, 2001

Mr Zhao Ming, a postgraduate student, was nine months into his computer science course at Trinity College Dublin when he returned to China in December 1999 to visit family and friends. He has not been back to Ireland since.

Near the end of his break Mr Ming, a Falun Gong practitioner, was arrested in Beijing for protesting to the State Council Complaints Office about the suppression of the spiritual movement.

Released on bail a few days later, he had his passport taken and was told it would be returned only when he made a written statement agreeing not to complain about the government's Falun Gong policy again. Mr Ming refused.

With no passport he could not return to Dublin, but got work in Beijing. On May 13th the 30-year-old was arrested after he was followed to the home of a fellow Falun Gong practitioner. There was no trace of him for several months until his family discovered that he was being detained in a labour camp in Daxin county outside Beijing.

According to reports, Mr Ming's guards beat him with electric batons, and he was only allowed two hours' sleep a day. On one occasion the guards tried to force him to write anti-Falun Gong material; when he refused, he was allegedly beaten to the brink of death.

His student friends have held Free Ming rallies in Dublin, and the government in Beijing has been petitioned to release him. But to no avail.

Mr Ming is not alone. Human rights groups claim the number of people detained without trial in hundreds of so-called labour re-education camps across China could run into millions. The Chinese authorities dispute this, saying the number detained at any one time is 260,000.

The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, raised the use of the controversial camps in Beijing this week. In a blunt challenge to the Chinese government, she demanded that the 'inherently arbitrary' system of detention be scrapped. She also raised concerns about the huge number of Falun Gong members detained.

Mrs Robinson's intervention did not go down well with the Chinese. The Chief of the State Council Office for the Prevention and Handling of [term omitted], Mr Liu Jing, said [Chinese government's slanderous words]

...

While the camps have been used mainly to deal with petty criminals, particularly drug offenders and prostitutes, they are increasingly being used to silence political dissidents and thousands of defiant religious renegades, such as Mr Ming.

Labour prison factories, detention centres and re-education camps were created by Mao Zedong in the early 1950s. He modelled them on the Russian gulags as a way to punish and reform criminals in a manner useful to the state.

The system began as a means of punishing so-called counterrevolutionaries who had committed no major criminal acts and slackers who refused to perform their assigned work. But over the years all kinds of petty crimes have been added to the list.

Police have the power to place offenders in the labour camps. Anyone can be detained without trial or due process for three years. Mere association with a group unpopular with the authorities can be enough.

Falun Gong claims that 5,000 of its members are detained in camps across China, and that more than 100 have died as a result of torture. While the Chinese government admits there have been deaths among Falun Gong practitioners in custody, they claim [Chinese government's slanderous words].

There have been horrific accounts of prisoners subjected to cruel and degrading treatment and torture. These abuses have been criticised year after year by human rights organisations. Recently both Amnesty International and the US State Department strongly criticised the camps.

Many Chinese legal experts argue that the system is deeply flawed and has evolved through a series of inconsistent decisions, never authorised in a comprehensive law by the national parliament as required under recent legal reforms.

In a recent interview, a Chinese lawyer and labour activist, Zhou Guoqiang, told of his detention in 1994 in the Shuanghe Labour Re-education Camp, a prison farm in Heilongjiang province near the Russian border. He was arrested for planning to distribute T-shirts bearing the slogan 'Labour is Sacred', in a cheeky effort to assert workers' rights.

He said his fellow inmates were mainly young pickpockets, burglars and brawlers. He said 're-education' involved being locked up in a small cell and being hit with electric prods or beaten. Afterwards, inmates were persuaded to write a self-criticism, saying they had been re-educated.

He said the inmates were also subjected to another cruel form of torture every day: not being allowed to go to the toilet between breakfast and the final late-afternoon meal of the day.

There have been other accounts from former inmates of overcrowding, poor food and labouring for 12 hours a day on farms, in mines and in prison factory production processes.

The eyes of the world are on China as Beijing bids for the 2008 Olympic Games. Its poor human rights record hovers like a cloud on the horizon as it seeks to win this huge prize. Mary Robinson accepted this week that the Chinese seemed genuinely engaged in talks on the issue of punishment of minor crimes and their human rights record.

But she did take account of the timing of her visit, just as the influential Olympic Games inspection team finished its five-day examination of Beijing as a possible venue for the world's greatest sporting event.

'I did factor this in,' Mrs Robinson told journalists at a press conference in Beijing.

When the International Olympic Committee left Beijing last Sunday, the route from the city to the airport was lined with colourful silk flower arrangements.

By the time Mrs Robinson left the city on Wednesday, the flowers were gone. Olympic visit over, they were not left for the benefit of locals.

Will China's engagement with Mrs Robinson on the issue of human rights go the way of the artificial flowers, or is it for real? Only time will tell.