German Chancellor visits China

On the occasion of Chancellor Merkel’s visit to China, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) appealed to her to use her visit to address the human rights situation in the People’s Republic. “More trade with China will not lead to more respect towards human rights in the People’s Republic. Under President Xi Jinping, China has been chasing from one negative record in terms of human rights to the next – despite opening up economically,” stated Ulrich Delius, the STP’s director, in a letter to the Chancellor. In this letter, the STP also asked Merkel to advocate for the release of the poet Liu Xia and the Uyghur human rights activist Ilham Tohti, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. In addition, the human rights organization strongly criticized that China is using its high-tech industry to exert absolute control over the people and to cut down on democratic freedom rights. Merkel will be traveling to Beijing on Thursday.

Delius emphasized that China continues to distance itself from its intentions to promote the rule of law. In the Xinjiang region, for example, thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs were detained in illegal reeducation centers – indefinitely and without contact to the outside world – which means that the Chinese security system is systematically breaking its own laws. “A state that systematically ignores and violates its own laws will not gain trust by foreign investors, nor will it be able to live up to its claim to world power,” the human rights activist emphasized. “Without legal certainty, there will be no sustainable development in China – only an arbitrary rule of Communist Party officials.”

This arbitrariness is especially evident in the fate of poet Liu Xia. The critically ill widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died shortly after being released from prison in July 2017, is being driven into insanity and suicide. She has been under house arrest for eight years. China’s government persistently refuses to let her leave for Germany.

The situation of Ilham Tohti, an Uyghur professor of Economics, is not much better. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for trying to promote understanding between the Han majority and the Uyghurs. In prison, he is not allowed to keep in touch with his family. “In Xinjiang, China is relying on absolute control and on escalation. There are attempts to increase the persecution of the Uyghurs, which is solely based on their ethnic origin, and to extend the repressive measures to the Kazakhs living in the region,” Delius informed the Chancellor.