Experts Tell Congress: China Is ‘Working to Impair the Vitality of the U.N.’

Experts on communist China’s systemic abuses of human rights expressed disgust and alarm at the process by which the United Nations Human Rights Council evaluated the nation’s record during a “periodic review” in late January, accusing Beijing of hijacking the process to drown out legitimate criticism and elevate friendly voices.

The Human Rights Council evaluates all U.N. member countries through a process called the “Universal Periodic Review,” in which the Council drafts reports on respective governments’ respect for human rights and allows a session of peer commentary in which other countries can remark on the evidence of respect for or abuse of human rights. In 2024, the Human Rights Council is scheduled to evaluate 14 countries, China among them; it held its peer review session for China on January 23.

“Last week, at the Universal Periodic Review of the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations, the Chinese Communist Party thought that it could drown out the truth of its shameful human rights record,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), said at a hearing on the U.N. process held on Thursday, “enlisting its allies to offer pampering praise instead of probing questions, while giving a platform to Party-controlled civil society groups over independent non-governmental organizations.”

Smith declared the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, totalitarian dictator Xi Jinping, “a systemic challenge to the international, rules-based order.”

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The hearing, titled “The PRC’s Universal Periodic Review and the Real State of Human Rights in China,” offered a platform to true Chinese human rights experts and victims of the communist regime to share evidence of widespread human rights atrocities in the country and explain how China’s outsized influence at the United Nations is rotting its values.

The Chinese Communist Party is one of the world’s most aggressive state violators of human rights. At the top of its list of atrocities is the ongoing genocide of the ethnic Uyghur minority of East Turkistan, a region communist China occupies and administers under the Mandarin name “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” In addition to imprisoning up to 3 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minority members in concentration camps, China has engaged in a systematic campaign to reduce the population through the killing of Uyghur babies both in and outside the womb, the forced sterilization of entire villages of women, widespread campaigns to enslave the population in factories, and a documented process to kill Uyghurs by cutting out their organs alive and selling them to wealthy buyers.

Outside of East Turkistan, the atheist Communist Party represses every faith known to exist in China – most prominently, Christianity and Islam – tortures and disappears members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, and actively persecutes suspected political dissidents and human rights activists, including lawyers who specialize in legal defense of dissidents.

Sophie Luo, the wife of imprisoned human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi, addressed the hearing on Thursday, listing the various atrocities against such attorneys as including “forced disappearance, secret detention, torture, coerced confession, fabricating criminal evidence, closed-door trials and sentences, and the use of ongoing surveillance even after human rights defenders are released.”

These issues were largely absent from discussions at the U.N. in January with the exception of some statements from American and European representatives at the periodic review. A prominent reason for that silence is that China endeavored to “stymie a fair and thorough assessment of its human rights record by manipulating the Universal Periodic Review (UPR),” Rana Siu Inboden of the University of Texas at Austin told the CECC.

“China’s actions over the last decade show that the PRC has become intent on using its presence in the UN to alter international human rights norms and rewire the system in ways that will make it easier for states to escape scrutiny of their human rights records,” Inboden explained. “One of China’s key strategies toward this goal is soliciting fawning or soft-ball comments from compliant nations in order to flood the proceedings with weak recommendations and perfunctory remarks.”

Inboden noted that China launched an all-out campaign to convince friendly nations – both those genuinely allied with China and those economically dependent on it – to speak at the periodic review session, “manipulat[ing] the process so that the speaking list is filled with many countries offering bland statements and insipid or meaningless recommendations.”

“Beijing’s machinations meant that during its January 2024 UPR 163 nations had signed up to speak which meant that each country only had 45 seconds to deliver remarks.,” she concluded.

Rushan Abbas, the founder of the human rights group Campaign for Uyghurs, told the hearing that she personally saw Chinese regime agents intimidate authentic representatives of oppressed communities at the U.N. and attempt to drown their voices out.

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“In Geneva, I witnessed how a totalitarian state aiming to silence dissent and legitimize its oppression worldwide worked to exploit this UN mechanism to receive an international seal of endorsement,” Abbas told the CECC. “I saw a pro-Chinese attendee jotting down notes on his phone while looking over at an Uyghur activist’s computer. This deliberate surveillance occurred inside the UN, a space meant for secure and open discussion on human rights.”

“Before the session began, we could see droves of pro-Chinese students and Chinese Government-Organized NGOs sent to overcrowd the venue to restrict access for authentic human rights representatives,” she explained. “The mission of these operatives was clearly to limit civil society participation, and it took our persistent efforts with the UN Secretariat to secure access to the hall that clearly had more available space.”

Abbas concluded that China was “indeed successful in shielding its egregious crimes from scrutiny” with its underhanded tactics.

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