By Katrina Willis of AAP

CANBERRA, Sept 15 AAP - Political repression was getting worse in China, Australian Democrats foreign affairs spokeswoman Senator Vicki Bourne told demonstrators outside the Chinese embassy here today.

About 150 people who gathered for the demonstration human rights messages from Amnesty International (AI) groups around Australi The banners were joined to form a "great wall of hope" around a section ofthe embassy compound and will be sent to the Chinese Sensaid economic growth hre was still no freedom of expression, association, assembly or religion, and thcountry was now holding the world's youngest political prisoner, the six-yea Panchen Lama, who was selecteds his successor.

Political interference in the judicial process was endemic, as were arbitrary detention, arrest, and year had executed more people than the rest of the world combined, she said.

"Political repression is actually getting worse. It's not getting better with economic improvements, it's getting worse," Senator Bourne told the demonstration organised by Amnesty International.

Senator Bourne, a member of Australians to join the struggle of the Chinese people, who were seeking respect for rights taken for granted in this country.

"We not only have to fight for our own political freedom, s as well," she said. The demonstration marked the culmination of Amnesty's major campaign for the year, and coincided with the visit to Australia of the Dalai Lama, a visit that has strained Australia's relations with China, which has occupied Tibet since 1950.

Governments of many industrial countries have argued that human rights will improve in China as that country engages in more trade with them, but Amnesty International earlier this year r a fia are:

Detention, without ccf children born outside the population program.

Use of the death porgan transplants from executed Chinese. Xiao Wei Ding of the Party for Freedom and Democracy in China demonstrators that repression of dissent was continuing, seven years afte violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square on the movement for democracy.

AI Australia's national director Kate Gilmore rejected ent advanced by China and other Asian countries that human rights were a western concept inappropriate to their cultures and their stage of economic development.

"The thirst for human dignity, and for communities which affirm equal access to that which dignifies, is not the monopoly of one state of mind, nor the prerogative of one style of culture," Ms Gilmore said.