The Chinese government is accused of illegally harvesting the organs of Falun Gong members. However, a leading academic says that China isn’t the real threat – Western countries are themselves, reports Rahul Bhattarai of Asia Pacific Journalism.

Leading academics warn that the “problem” with China is not the Chinese Communist Party but that Western self-censorship is “killing” its liberal democracy.

“China is not the real threat there, we are, we are the biggest threat to liberal democracy in New Zealand,” says Dr Stephen Noakes, senior lecturer in politics and international relations and Asian studies at the University of Auckland.

“Every time we self-censor, when we choose not to speak out, when we chose to keep quiet for fear of not getting a visa, or not getting a trade deal … But since we, through our obsequiousness towards China are a potential threat, we can also be the cure,” he told a  public seminar last week.

READ MORE: Why China fears the Falun Gong

ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNALISM STUDIES NEWSFILE

Lawyers and political scientists gathered at University of Auckland (UOA) last week to discuss the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies about fundamental human rights and freedoms, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Organ harvesting
China has been under fire globally for its alleged unauthorised organ transplants from members of the Falun Gong community.

-Partners-

Though the initial position of the Chinese government was that all the organs were donated, “this was at a time when they [China] didn’t even have donation systems… and they did not have an organs distribution system,” said Professor David Matas, lawyer, author and professor of immigration and refugee law at the University of Manitoba.

While all organs were being found locally and the transplant volume was small, after the prosecution of Falun Gong began, the transplant volume “shot way up,” he said.

China became the leading producer of transplantation in the world, second only to the United States.

Research conducted in 2006 by Professor Matas and his colleagues concluded that “the organs were coming from the practitioners of Falun Gong”, he said.

As a result of his report, the Chinese government quickly shifted its stance and said that “everything that was coming from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, before their execution they decided to donate their organ as an atonement for their crimes,” said Professor Matas.

Foreign lobbying
In New Zealand strong lobbying from the Chinese Embassy prevented an exhibition of the Chinese spiritual organisation  Falun Gong to be set up in Auckland City.

Lawyer Barry Wilson, president of Auckland Council for Civil Liberties, said he had spent an enormous amount of time at the Auckland City Council trying to persuade them to allow the Falun Gong stand and the demonstrations for the protection of Falun Gong to remain.

“We were up against very strong lobbying from a Chinese Consulate and the Chinese Embassy which did not want that exhibition there,” he said.

The Chinese constitution of 1982 contained the civil liberties that are observed in democratic countries – “freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom from arbitrary arrest,” he said.

When Xi Jinping became president, he also brought his “clearly expressed opposition for liberal values”.

“In his speeches he has spoken of the dangers of the liberal ideas like civil liberties, constitution rights, the dangers they pose for Communist Party rule,” he said.

In China, there is no separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature – “courts and judges are subject to political direction,” he said.

Ruling by law
“What China needs is lawyers as cogs in its economic development machine, but it needs lawyers to rule by law, not keep the rulers in check through the rule of law,” he said.

Wilson said: “They [Falun Gong] are always interesting… its organisation and its events well deserve support.”

China has also been using various means to infiltrate foreign countries to exercise its soft power on them – the Confucius Institute (CI) is one such organisation, says director Doris Lui in her documentary movie, In The Name of Confucius. 

The documentary claimed CI was an “infiltration organisation”.

The Chinese government founded the institute in 2004 to teach foreigners the language and culture of China.

The documentary has been a strong critic of the CCP over its alleged violations of human rights, particularly against the Falun Gong community.

In August, the free screening of the movie was set to air in University of Auckland, but the airing was withdrawn at the last minute.

The University of Auckland, University of Canterbury and University of Wellington in New Zealand have ties with CI.

The CI, which is controlled by the Office of Chinese Language Council Internationl (Hanban) prevents its teachers from teaching Cantonese or Hokkien.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A Chinese government-sponsored cultural and education programme offers Mandarin lessons around the world. But a new film raises questions about a darker side of the Confucius Institutes, reports Rahul Bhattarai of Asia Pacific Journalism.

Chinese-born Canadian film director Doris Liu has had her visa to China denied but has never faced a direct threat or interference from the Beijing government over her controversial documentary In the Name of Confucius screened in Auckland last month.

Her visa to China has been rejected because of her investigative work, she told Asia Pacific Report.

Her documentary criticises Chinese policy and political influence through the multibillion dollar Chinese government-supported Confucius Institute programmes attached to 1600 universities and schools across the globe.

READ MORE: In The Name of Confucius

Three universities in New Zealand have ties with CI – University of Auckland (UOA), Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and Victoria University of Wellington.

AUT and Victoria University welcomed the screening of the documentary.

But the University of Auckland cancelled its public screening on the day of the event – just hours before the documentary was due to be screened.

“I had already been rejected for a Chinese visa to enter China because of my journalism before making this film,” film maker Liu said.

Recorded, threatened
However, she added that during her interviews in one of the Canadian institutes, the Confucius Institute director had video recorded her and threatened that she would report her back to Beijing.

“The director used her smartphone to film me conducting an interview with the school board representatives,” Liu said.

“She told me that she would report back to Hanban in Beijing about my media presence.”

Liu added that “the interview didn’t end happily as the school representatives stopped the interview and they all walked away.

“After that I couldn’t get access to any Canadian Confucius Institutes, except for a couple of telephone interviews.

“I could imagine that Hanban informed all its Chinese directors working at the Canadian Confucius Institute not to accept my interview requests.”

Suppressing teachings
While talking to Mack Smith of 95bFM, Dr Catherine Churchman of Victoria University said about the institute policy, “you have to teach Mandarin, you are not allowed teach Cantonese or Hokkien”, or any of the other Chinese languages and “you have to teach in the simplified Chinese characters set”.

Dr Churchman said the main reason the institutes did not allow the teaching of traditional Chinese was to “suppress people” from being able to read documents from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or many other overseas countries.

Until the 1980s, the Chinese diaspora, including in New Zealand, used traditional Chinese characters to publish their literature.

Liu said that many of the texts published in China, including the literature from the Chinese Communist Party and its foreign affairs, were only in traditional Chinese.

Suppressing the traditional Chinese was a form of “censorship that the Chinese Communist Party has over things written inside China”, she said.

“They [CI] have a lot of influence over the institute itself, they pay for half of it usually, and they pay quiet a lot of money,” she said.

Liu claimed that Victoria University received about “half a million” dollars in 2016.

Institute ‘controlled’
The Confucius Institute was controlled by Hanban, which was controlled by the Chinese Ministry of Education, she said.

While the ministry might not necessarily have had direct influence over the institute, it did provide rules about what was allowed to be taught in the institute.

After Auckland University cancelled the public film screening, an official statement by
Associate Professor Phillipa Malpas said: “The event was prematurely advertised as being open to the public before it had been approved and confirmed by my faculty.

“It was subsequently approved for screening to University of Auckland staff and students.”

AUT screened the documentary at a public event on July 26 with a packed auditorium, including an Asia Pacific Report journalist present.

However, Alison Sykora, head of communications in AUT, said the Chinese Vice-Consul-General spoke to the university before the screening of the movie. The Vice-Consul had been given an invitation but AUT had not yet received a reply.

Chinese soft power
The documentary shows how China has been using CI in order to influence foreign countries through soft-power initiatives.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former chief of the Asia Pacific Canadian Security Intelligence Service, says in the film: “CI were used to manipulate not only the academic world, where they were implanted, but to also emanate more influence outside of the campus as well.”

The documentary says that the CI is an “infiltration organisation” that was founded in 2004 by the Chinese government under the guise of teaching foreign students Chinese culture and language.

Institute teachers were also forced to sign a contract that they were not members of the banned and persecuted spiritual group Falun Gong.

Last November, the Chinese government pressured the Japanese government in an attempt to cancel an international conference due to the planned showing of the documentary, but in spite of the pressure the screening went ahead.

The film was shown in an international human rights conference in Tokyo, receiving a good response from the global audience.

In The Name of Confucius has been shown 57 times in 12 countries.

Film maker Doris Liu said that the movie had been well received, with review ratings of 8.7 out of 10 on Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and 4.8 out of 5 on Facebook.

Rahul Bhattarai is a student journalist on the Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies (Journalism) reporting on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz