My response # 1

This is my first response.


Hi John,

This is Miguel, Martin's boyfriend. I know we haven't met but Martin is really busy with a paper right now, and since I have some interest in China, he asked me to respond to the issues you brought up in relation to human rights.
So let me try to respond to some of the things you have raised:

You say that the rights of individuals should take second place to the integrity of the country. That can be true to a certain degree, and I appreciate the fact that China is a very particular country with a lot of people and with quite a few problems that many Western nations do not have. Also although the Chinese government is in some respects an authoritarian government, it is also a secular and pragmatic government that allows liberty to its citizens within the range of private and economic life that a lot of other authoritarian regimes do not.

However, in my opinion many of these individual rights should be promoted not just because they sound nice or pretty -- they should be supported because they bring benefits to the whole of society.
Let's talk in particular about China's case: the Chinese government still arrests people who consistently call into question and contest its policies on various issues. Most of these so called dissidents don't want to overthrow the government or provoke anarchy in the streets of Chinese cities.
They just want for there to be free discussion of those issues, and for the whole chinese people to be able to voice their opinion on these. What they are against is a bunch of unelected Party officials who don't have to justify their decisions to anyone to be able to do whatever they want -- and keep on doing it even if the people are against it. That's because no matter what they do they cannot be voted out.
A government that doesn't have to take the views outside its own insider group becomes out of touch, arrogant, and therefore makes foolish decisions. That's what has happened in China already many times, for example during Mao's time. Whatever Mao and the other party officials decided could not be examined or contested, it was like the word of God. In the 1960s lots of Chinese intellectuals and scientists tried to speak out against the crazy agricultural and population growth policies of Mao. They had education and great intelligence, so they could see that trying to convert desert and mountains into farmland was a terrible idea environmentally and would not result in a lot more food output. They could also see that the Mao's and the Party's policy of encouraging the Chinese people to have many children was going to increase the population beyond control and cause environmental and economic problems.
They were sent to re-education camps and silenced. The small group of party officials went on with their crazy policies because there was no one to say that they were wrong and lay facts and knowledge out. 40 years later China is still paying the price for ignoring freedom of expression back then -- the population skyrocketed and 20 years later the country had to adopt the emergency 1-child policy to bring thigs under control; the revolutionary agricultural projects and experiments of the government didn't yield much good and resulted in lots of environmental degradation. One of the intellectuals that spoke out at the time against the foolish population and agricultural policies was sent to a camp, I think his name is Wang Li, and he has now been rehabilitated. If the government had not been able to just send him to a camp and shut him up, perhaps people would have thought harder about the issues involved and made better decisions.
So, the point is human rights aren't just nice, they are vital to have a healthy society.
As regards Tibet and the Dalai Lama -- look ,China annexed Tibet against the will of the Tibetan people, that is a reality. I don't particularly like the Dalai Lama, and perhaps Tibet would even be worse off if it was ruled by a theocratic government of monks as it was before China took over. But that is not the point -- the point is they don't consider themselves Chinese and don't want to be ruled by China. And as a people they have the right to determine what they want.
It's like in Iraq -- perhaps Iraqis are actually better off being ruled by America than by Saddam Hussein or crazy shiite Ayatollahs but they don't want to be ruled by a foreign power. It is natural, people want to be in charge of their own destiny. It's the same with individuals: if I see someone who doesn't administer his money well and spends all of it on stupid things or gambles it away, I can't just say "I know how to take care of your finances better than you do, so I will make those decisions for you from now on" Even if that person would perhaps be better off, he will resist because we don't like to be dominated or dictated to by outsiders.

Hope you find this interesting, and I look forward to your response,

Miguel