TLHRC Hearing Announcement

An Evaluation of 30-Years of the One-Child Policy in China

Wednesday, November 10

1 p.m.-4 p.m.

2318 Rayburn HOB

This year marks the 30-year anniversary of China’s one-child-per-couple policy, which in some cases results in forced abortion or sterilization.  The State Department’s 2008 Human Rights report states that, “[China’s] population control policy relied on education, propaganda, and economic incentives, as well as on more coercive measures.”  The one-child policy has broader societal implications resulting in a disproportionate number of males per female born in China each year due to sex-selective abortions.

To discuss these issues, we welcome as our witnesses:***

Toy Reid, Congressional-Executive Commission on China

Reggie Littlejohn, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers

Annie Jing Zhang, Women’s Rights in China
Nicholas Eberstadt, American Enterprise Institute

Rebiya Kadeer, Uyghur-American Association

Harry Wu, Laogai Research Foundation
Jiang Tianyong, Beijing Global Law Firm

A woman forced by Chinese government officials to undergo abortion may testify anonymously.

***Witness list is subject to change.

If you have any questions, please contact Elizabeth Hoffman at (202) 225-3599.

In conjunction with a special exhibition at the Laogai Museum "The Uyghur Experience: 60 Years under Communist Rule," NED, the Uyghur American Association, and Laogai Research Foundation are co-sponsoring a panel discussion examining the profound effects of the July 2009 violence in Urumchi on ethnic relations in China, and exploring potential ways forward for Uyghur-Han relations.

Panelists:

Nury Turkel is an attorney at a Washington law firm where he represents both U.S. and international aviation clients on matters involving federal administrative law, antitrust, government and congressional relations, as well as on commercial and aviation litigation matters.  He has worked with a group of lawyers since 2005 to free Uyghur detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  He has traveled to Guantanamo several times to meet with Uyghur detainees. He is the immediate past president of the Uyghur American Association where he co-founded and directed the Uyghur Human Rights Project.  He has testified before the U.S. Congress and given presentations at various academic and government institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and the United States Military Academy.  He has written policy-oriented editorials for The Wall Street Journal Asia and The National Review Online, and appeared in both domestic and international media including CNN, BBC, Fox News, NPR, and The Washington Post. He holds a JD and a MA in International Affairs from American University.  He speaks Uyghur, Turkish, and Chinese.

Dr. Sean R. Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program and an Associate Professor in the Practice of International Affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School for International Affairs. He is an expert on the region of Central Asia with a particular focus on the Uyghur people.  He has spent several years conducting research in Uyghur communities in both Central Asia and China and is the author of numerous articles and a documentary film on the Uyghurs of the Kazakhstan-China borderland. Dr. Roberts earned his Masters degree in Visual Anthropology and his Doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Southern California.  He also frequently writes about Uyghurs on his blog (The Roberts Report on Central Asia and Kazakhstan, www.roberts-report.com) and is in the process of updating his dissertation about the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan for publication as a manuscript. 

Dr. David Dahai Yu is Editor of Beijing Spring.  Dr. Yu grew up in Tianjin and graduated from Beijing University.  As a college student, he took part in the competitive local elections of 1980.  He co-founded the Chinese Economists Society (USA) and served as its first president (1985-86). He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and has taught at several U.S. colleges. He has been affiliated with Beijing Spring and its predecessor China Spring since 1989. 

The program will be moderated by Amy Reger, Researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Louisa Greve, Vice President for Programs - Asia, Middle East/North Africa, Multiregional, at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Light refreshments will be served.

Please RSVP to laogai@laogai.org by November 13.  Please arrive 15 minutes early for registration.

For questions or press inquiries, please contact Lindsey Purdy at 202-408-8300 or by email at
Lindsey@laogai.org.

Laogai Research Foundation
National Endowment for Democracy
Uyghur American Association

The Laogai Museum & Uyghur American Association are pleased to invite you to a reception to mark the opening of a new special exhibition

The Uyghur Experience: Sixty Years under Chinese Communist Rule

Hosted by Rebiya Kadeer, President of the World Uyghur Congress and Harry Wu, Founder and Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation

On Thursday, November 12, 2009
from 5:00-6:30pm
at the Laogai Museum,
1109 M St NW, Washington DC, 20005

Refreshments will be served.

Please RSVP by November 10 to Lindsey Purdy at 202-408-8300 or laogai@laogai.org.

For more information on the Laogai Research Foundation visit www.laogai.org. 

For more information on the Uyghur American Association visit www.uyghuramerican.org. 

Senator Byron Dorgan, Chairman and Representative Sander Levin, Cochairman of the
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China
invite you to a roundtable discussion on
“The Financial Crisis and the Changing Role of Workers in China”

Friday, June 19, 2009
10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Rayburn House Office Building, Room B-318

At this CECC Roundtable, a panel of experts will discuss the impact of the current financial crisis on the lives and rights of workers in China. Panelists will also examine the changing role that workers, including migrant workers, are playing in shaping the future of economic, legal, and political reform in China.

Panelists:

Leslie T. Chang, Author of Factory Girls (Spiegel & Grau, 2008); former China correspondent, The Wall Street Journal

Robin Munro, Research Director, China Labour Bulletin

Erin Ennis, Vice President, US-China Business Council

Earl Brown, Labor and Employment Law Counsel and China Program Director, Solidarity Center, AFL-CIO

CECC Roundtables are open to the public. No RSVP is necessary.

CECC Quick Brief
June 4, 2009

      
United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China     

CECC Quick Briefs provide short, general overviews of core human rights and rule of law issues in China today. For more detailed analysis, please visit www.cecc.gov.

* Announcement *

CECC Chairman Byron Dorgan and Cochairman Sander Levin invite you to attend a hearing titled “The 20th Anniversary of theTiananmen Square Protests: Examining the Significance of the 1989 Demonstrations in China and Implications for U.S. Policy" on June 4, 2009, from 2:15 to 4 p.m. in Room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building. Witnesses include Hon. Winston Lord, Dr. Perry Link, Dr. Susan Shirk, and Dr. Yang Jianli. This hearing will be simultaneously webcast.

CECC Quick Brief:
The 1989 Tiananmen Demonstrations

The Protests

After the death on April 15, 1989, of Hu Yaobang, a popular reformist Chinese Communist Party leader, Chinese students began to stage peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square and in other parts of China.
Protesters in Beijing called for the establishment of a dialogue with government and Party leaders regarding their demands, which included eliminating corruption and accelerating economic and political reforms, especially freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. As protests spread across China, more and varied demands emerged.
By early May, protests had expanded to over 50 cities in China. Protesters included not only students, but also journalists, workers, government employees, police, members of the armed forces, and other citizens.
Protests around the country, which were overwhelmingly peaceful, included marches, boycotting of classes, worker strikes, posting of pro-democracy wall posters, and hunger strikes.
At the height of the demonstrations in Beijing, protesters were estimated to number more than 1 million. Protests expanded to at least 131 cities in China, as demonstrators took to the streets in each city in numbers ranging from a few thousand to 120,000 at various times between mid-April and late May.

Chinese Government Response to the Protests

On May 20, 1989, having failed to persuade demonstrators to leave Tiananmen Square, Chinese leaders placed Beijing under martial law. People continued to fill the Square, and protests in other parts of China intensified, apparently in response to the declaration of martial law.
Late in the night of June 3 and continuing into the morning of June 4, tens of thousands of soldiers in columns of armored tanks outside of Tiananmen Square fired directly at unarmed Beijing citizens and indiscriminately into crowds. Tanks crushed some protesters and onlookers to death.
Chinese authorities issued an official report at the end of June 1989, which stated thousands of civilians "were wounded and over 200, including 36 college students, died during the riot." An initial report by the Chinese Red Cross estimated that 2,600 people had died, but this estimate was soon withdrawn. After 20 years, the exact number of dead and wounded remains unclear. Estimates of those who died as a result of the lethal force used by the government on June 3-4 range from the hundreds to a few thousand.
Although there is no independent confirmation, the Chinese government reported that 1,500 people had been formally arrested for participating in the protests. Tens of thousands more were likely briefly detained. Over forty executions have been documented.

U.S. Government Response

In June 1989, in response to the Chinese government's crackdown on the protesters, President George H.W. Bush suspended all high-level U.S. Government exchanges with P.R.C. officials and suspended U.S. Government and commercial military sales to, and contacts with, China. President Bush also announced that the government would review sympathetically any requests by P.R.C. students in the United States to extend their stay.
President Bush sent Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger on a secret trip to Beijing in December 1989 to brief Chinese leaders on President Bush's summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and to explore possibilities for developing a "road map" toward better relations.
In January 1990, the U.S. Congress passed what were referred to as the "Tiananmen Sanctions" (P.L. 101-246), designed to codify and expand the scope of President Bush's actions. While providing authority for presidential waivers, P.L. 101-246 prohibited a number of activities, including sales of military equipment and weapons to China (an embargo adopted by the European Union and still largely in effect in 2009); exports of U.S. satellites for launch in China; and export licenses to China for crime control and detection equipment.

Information Blackout

Chinese citizens today still face great difficulty accessing unofficial accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and crackdown. Officials continue to censor information about the protests in news media and on the Internet. Citizens searching for information on the Internet find that search results are heavily censored and links to related articles are blocked. Censorship of the Internet typically tightens up in the weeks leading up to June 4. This year, censorship has intensified, with reports indicating that numerous discussion boards have been shutdown and discussion related to Tiananmen and its 20th anniversary have been heavily censored.
Officials prohibit Chinese media from publishing all but the official version of events surrounding the protests and punish journalists and editors who try to slip photos or veiled references to the June 1989 crackdown past censors.
In 2005, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao received a 10-year sentence for exposing officials' attempts to censor media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the protests.
At a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press briefing on May 19, 2009, a spokesperson indicated that the official verdict declaring the demonstrations "counterrevolutionary" had not changed. In response to questions about the recently published secret memoir of former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed the use of force against students, the spokesperson was reported as telling journalists that:

               "concerning the political storm at the end of the 1980s and related issues, our
                party and government has drawn an unequivocal conclusion.... China has
                scored remarkable success in its social and economic development—facts
                have proven that the socialist road with Chinese characteristics that we pursue is
                in the fundamental interests of our people."

Ongoing Repression Related to the 1989 Protests

·       Chinese citizens still are serving prison sentences in connection with the 1989 demonstrations. For a list of representative cases, click here.

1       Citizens who attempt to publicly discuss or commemorate June 4 have been subject to physical attacks, harassment, surveillance, and detention. For example:

·       In March 2009, Zhang Shijun, a former soldier at the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 who published an open letter to Hu Jintao asking for an official reassessment of Tiananmen, was detained by authorities and remains in custody at an undisclosed location.

1       In April, Sun Wenguang, a 75-year old retired professor in Jinan city, Shandong province, was physically assaulted on his way to pay respects to Zhao Ziyang, the now deceased reformist leader who was purged in 1989 for maintaining that the Chinese government should engage in dialogue with student protestors in Tiananmen Square.

2       At the end of May, a former Tiananmen prisoner from Zhejiang province, Wu Gaoxing, and four other citizens wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao seeking compensation for those who had been jailed after the crackdown on June 4. Wu was subsequently detained.

3       Police are stationed around the clock at dissident writer Jiang Qisheng's home in Beijing. Jiang was imprisoned for four years in 1999 in connection with his efforts to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, and recently released a detailed report based on interviews with individuals connected to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

·       Ding Zilin, the central figure in the Tiananmen Mothers group—a loose network of about 150 family members of June 1989 victims—was prevented by security forces from leaving her home in May 2009 to attend a private gathering to mourn her son and others who were killed in Beijing 20 years ago. Chinese authorities asked Ding Zilin to leave Beijing in advance of June 3, but she refused. She is under strict surveillance.

·       The Chinese government selectively denies entry into China to students, workers, and others who fled China after June 4, including entry for family visits in some cases. International law prohibits arbitrary denial of the right of a citizen to return to his or her home country. A number of individuals active in the 1989 protests have been repeatedly denied entry. In recent months, Yi Danxuan was denied entry.

Recommendations

Urge the Chinese government to review the cases of those still imprisoned for participating in the 1989 demonstrations for compliance with internationally recognized standards of fairness and due process in judicial proceedings.
Call on the Chinese government to cease harassing, interrogating, and detaining citizens who seek to mourn and remember the Tiananmen victims, and who seek to document the identities of those injured and killed in June 1989.
Urge the Chinese government to allow protest participants living in exile in the United States and elsewhere to return to China safely and without risk of retribution.
Support Chinese citizens' calls for an official Chinese government accounting and reassessment of the events surrounding June 4, 1989.

Download a full copy of the Commission's 2008 Annual Report here.

Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLRHC)

Schedule of Events

Around the 20th Anniversary

of the Tiananmen Square Crackdown

        June 3rd and 4th 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Below is a list of events on or around Capitol Hill that will be held in commemoration. We hope that you will be able to attend some of these events (additional events may be added in follow-up notifications).

Wednesday, June 3:

4 - 6 p.m., CVC H-215

Briefing and press conference.  Sponsored by the Wei Jingsheng Foundation http://www.weijingsheng.org/

6:30 p.m., Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York, NY:

Preview screening of “Portraits of Lives Lost and the Quest for Justice.” This screening is sponsored by Human Rights in China. http://hrichina.org/public/contents/category?cid=1068

Thursday, June 4:

All Day, Rayburn HOB Foyer:

Turnley Photo Exhibit sponsored by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and the Laogai Research Foundation

8:45 am to 9:45 am, 4th Estate Restaurant, National Press Club:

1989 Tiananmen Massacre Survivors’ Reunion. Press conference held by survivors from all over the world to commemorate the movement and victims of Tiananmen Square. http://npc.press.org/

9:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m., Dirksen SD-124:

Undermining Democracy- 21st Century Authoritarians.  Sponsored by Radio Free Asia.  http://www.rfa.org/english/news/special/june4/

10 a.m. - 2:00 p.m., West Lawn, Capitol:

“Remembrance and Reconciliation” rally. A Gathering at replica of the Goddess of Democracy to commemorate the events of June 4th and call for reconciliation. Sponsored by Initiatives for China. http://initiativesforchina.org/tiananmen-20th-anniversary-commemorative-events/

10:30 a.m., Rayburn HOB Foyer:

Press conference with former Tiananmen protestors Lu Decheng, Yu Dongyue, and Yu Zhijian, with statements from members of Congress. Sponsored by the Laogai Research Foundation. http://www.laogai.org/news2/newsimg/2009/05/2009-05-3368-671.jpg

2:15 - 4:00 p.m., Dirksen Room 628:

The 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen: the Significance of the 1989 Demonstrations in China. Sponsored by the Congressional Executive Commission on China. http://www.cecc.gov/pages/hearings/2009/20090604/index.php

5 - 6:45 p.m., CVC Orientation Theater North:

Screening of the Frontline documentary “The Tank Man.” Sponsored by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission

7 – 9 p.m., National Presbyterian Church 4101 Nebraska Ave NW:

Repentance, Reconciliation, and Re-Formation: Re-commissioned after 20 Years. Sponsored by ChinaAid, God Bless China Foundation and Washington International Church

Sunday, June 7:

2:30 p.m., Newseum, Knight TV Studio, Level 3: 

Inside Media: Twenty Years After Tiananmen with special guests Bob Deans (Cox Newspapers) and Bernard Shaw (former CNN Anchor), who reported live from Tiananmen Square.  Sponsored by the Newseum. http://www.newseum.org/events_edu/upcoming/about.aspx?item=TIAN090514&style=a   

We look forward to seeing you at these events. If you have any questions please call Hans Hogrefe (Rep. McGovern) or Elizabeth Hoffman (Rep. Wolf) at 202-225-3599.

James P. McGovern, M.C.                         Frank R. Wolf, M.C.
Co-Chair, CHRC                                        Co-Chair, CHRC