Rights situation nightmarish in first year of China’s fifth generation leaders
Comments Off on Rights situation nightmarish in first year of China’s fifth generation leadersOriginally published by Tibetan Review. net on March 5, 2014
(TibetanReview.net, Mar05, 2014) – China’s fifth generation leadership which took government power under President Xi Jinping in March last year was responsible for the harshest suppression of civil society in over a decade, reported US-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) Mar 3, quoting prominent rights lawyer Teng Biao. The group said in their annual report that the number of arrests and disappearances of government critics tripled in a “nightmarish” first year of Xi Jinping’s presidency.
The group said it had documented more than 220 criminal detentions of human rights activists in 2013, nearly three times the number it counted in the previous year. The group added that it had also counted three times more recorded cases of “enforced disappearances” than during the year before.
The report, “A Nightmarish Year Under Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’,” said dozens of Chinese activists had described 2013 as the worst year for human rights since at least 2008, which saw crackdowns on civil liberties around the Beijing Olympics and on the Charter 08 campaign for reform.
“Xi Jinping has touted the ‘Chinese Dream’ of economic growth under iron-fisted maintenance of political stability, while ushering in his draconian policies,” the Mandarin Service of Radio Free Asia(Washington) Mar 3 quoted the group’s research coordinator Victor Clemens as saying.
The report’s release came two days ahead of the opening of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, and its advisory body, the ornamental Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.