World Tibet Network News Sunday, February 08, 1998

BEIJING, Feb 7 (Reuters) - China's official human rights body and pro-government scholars have lined up behind Beijing in rejecting a recent U.S. government report on the rights situation in China, official media said on Saturday.

In a yearly exercise which follows the U.S. State Department annual report on human rights, Beijing held a seminar at which officials and academics attacked Washington for distorting the situation in China and overlooking U.S. rights abuses, Xinhua news agency and major newspapers said.

"The Chinese scholars said the report makes unwarranted charges against China's human rights situation by resorting to distortion, fabrication and piecing together the so-called 'facts'," the China Daily newspaper said.

The attack on the January 30 State Department report -- which noted improvements on some fronts in the most favourable assessment given China in a decade -- was published two days before a tour by U.S. clergymen to look into religious freedom.

The Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders will begin a three-week fact-finding mission on Monday at the invitation of Chinese President Jiang Zemin in an apparent sign of Beijing's increasing willingness to engage its critics.

The Chinese scholars echoed their government's standard rejection on human rights criticism and repeated previous years' denunciations of U.S. crime and racial problems.

The Foreign Ministry dismissed the U.S. report as "irresponsible."

The State Department report said China widely employed heavy-handed tactics of intimidation and imprisonment to silence its critics despite easing pressure somewhat last year -- an assessment several Chinese dissidents have said was accurate.

Washington, the scholars argued, had wrongly labelled "hooligans" as democratic activists and was motivated by a desire to overthrow China's communist state.

"On the excuse of human rights, they give support to a very small group of so-called dissidents in China who endanger national security and go in for divisive activities," said Tian Jin of the United Nations Association of China.

Zhang Hongyi, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said the report aimed to support independence for Tibet, a Buddhist region invaded by Communist Chinese troops in the 1950s and still subject to occasional protests against Chinese rule.

U.S. statistics on violent crime and on the high concentration of blacks in the U.S. prison population system showed Washington ignored its own problems and applied a double standard on human rights, the experts said.

Some liberties advocated by the United States would bring chaos if accepted by China and other countries, warned Beijing University professor Huang Nansen.

"The freedom of homosexuality leads to the spread of AIDS and other sexual diseases, and the freedom of private gun ownership leads to frequent violent and terrorist incidents in U.S. society," Xinhua quoted Huang as saying.

Providing adequate food and clothing for its 1.2 billion people was China's greatest human rights achievement, said Zhu Muzhi, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies.

The scholars' propaganda attack before the unprecedented tour by the U.S. religious leaders was the latest set of mixed signals from Beijing on human rights, analysts said.

On Friday, Xinhua news agency offered evidence of the official attitudes the U.S. clerics will meet in their quest to promote religious freedom.

The news agency quoted Deng Fucun, an official of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee of the Protestant Churches of China, as saying the aim of the movement is to make all Chinese Christians patriotic citizens.

"If a Chinese Christian wants to disseminate the gospel, he should first be a good citizen of China," Deng stressed in a speech in Washington.