Published by: World Tibet Network News, Monday, March 11, 1996

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuter) - China Sunday issued a document hailing its human rights record, saying it outpaced the United States in terms of equality of distribution and guaranteeing fundamental freedoms.

"The U.S. is not qualified at all to feed its own arrogance and make indiscreet remarks or criticisms against China," the official Xinhua news agency said.

"It is a basic fact that China has been doing much better than the U.S. in terms of equally enjoying and universally guaranteeing basic human rights and freedom," it said.

"The U.S. ... should make greater efforts to improve its domestic human rights conditions," Xinhua said.

The U.S. State Department last week accused China of persistent and widespread human rights abuses and said it would again co-sponsor a resolution criticizing these practices at the upcoming United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

Xinhua blasted the State Department report, saying it "once again spread rumors about, distorted and attacked" China's human rights record, but made no mention of the serious human rights problems in the United States.

"Discrimination against ethnic groups remains the darkest abyss in the U.S. society," it said, noting that 97 percent of senior management personnel in big firms were white males.

It said half the U.S. population was illiterate while boasting that China had reduced its number of illiterates and semi-illiterates aged below 15 to 12.01 percent of its 1.2 billion population, down from 80 percent in 1949.

Xinhua quoted the International Labor Organization as saying about 20 million American employees, or 8 percent of the country's population, had no privacy -- they were monitored by electronic devices each year.

It did not give a comparative figure.

Chinese dissidents, diplomats and foreign reporters frequently come under intense security surveillance.

Xinhua said the communists ended slavery in China after coming to power in 1949 and in Tibet in 1959 but noted that the Mississippi state legislature did not pass a law abolishing slavery until February 1995.

Despite already tense relations with Beijing on human rights and other issues, the U.S. State Department -- in its annual report on human rights worldwide -- kept the focus on China as one of eight countries where "governments continued systematically to deny basic rights to their citizens."

The other states so designated in the report were Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria and North Korea.

The report said the Chinese government "continued to commit widespread and well-documented human rights abuses, in violation of internationally accepted norms."

Officials stepped up repression and by year's end "almost all public dissent against the central authorities was silenced by intimidation, exile or imposition of prison terms or administrative detention," it said.

Although authorities deny this, China holds perhaps thousands of political prisoners and still has not provided a full accounting of all those missing or detained from the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, the report said.

President Clinton severed the link between U.S. trade benefits and China's human rights record in 1994, arguing that expanded trade would open China to greater interaction with the West and, eventually, improve rights.