Campaigning for human rights in China: Huai’an

In January of 2003, I made my first trip to China, to Huai’an in Jiangsu Province. I was contracted to lecture about Aboriginal people in Australia, but it ended up being just as much about campaigning for human rights in China as anything else.

In total, I lectured at nine universities and schools throughout Jiangsu and Hebei Provinces, and surprisingly, all the institutions I lectured at were accepting of my speeches.

The basis of the lectures was the dispossession of Aboriginal people in Australia, and how this aligned with the dispossession of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the people of Tibet.

At that time, Tibet was very much an international concern, but the plight of the Uyghurs was not so well known in the global community. Many that I spoke to in China weren’t that aware of what was going on in Xinjiang, just that they weren’t supposed to talk about it.

Tibet has been an independent country since the 7th century, and was once a mighty empire. It was occupied by China for many centuries, but regained it’s independence in 1913.

Then in 1951, the Chinese government invaded Tibet, and took control once again. During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, between 200,000 and 1,000,000 Tibetans died as a result of Chinese suppression, and over 6,000 monasteries were destroyed. The carnage continues today, as China tries to destroy the Tibetan culture.

It was a similar situation in Xinjiang. It had a history dating back 2,500 years, before coming under Chinese rule in the 18th century. Since that time, the Uyghurs have been fighting to regain their independence. This ramped up in the 1990s, with what Chinese authorities refer to as terrorist attacks.

These conflicts prompted the Chinese government to commit a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the province including, according to some, genocide. As in Tibet, the Chinese government is trying to wipe out the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.

My first lectures were at the Huaiyin Institute of Technology in Huai’an, about five hours drive from Shanghai. I was a little nervous about repercussions from the Chinese government for talking about subjects that were forbidden in China. However, the administration at the institute thought they were quite interesting.

The lectures focussed on education in Australia, and particularly the Aboriginal people. The institutes Chinese administration tried to play up that fact that Australia’s human rights abuses were worse than anything in China, but the students I was lecturing to seemed to see it differently. They saw what their government was doing was wrong.

The mindset of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is that they are never wrong, and that their control over the lives and thinking of the Chinese people is absolute. They are so convinced of this that they usually fail to see that their control is not absolute, and that many students and business people have now seen what the west can offer, and reject the CCP mindset.

Critical thinking is banned in China, but my lectures focussed around critical thinking, with a view to getting the students to think for themselves. This actually proved easier than I thought it would be.

My observation was that no matter how much an authoritarian government and the dictators that rule it try, they are never able to completely break the human spirit. It is genetically coded in us to fight for freedom, and this spirit remains dormant in the Chinese people.

True, it is suppressed in China by a brutal regime, but it can never be extinguished. The students I taught back in 2003 are now the business leaders and educators in China. The work that was done by thousands of foreign educators and business leaders in China during the last few decades have kept this spirit alive.

Emboldened by my success at the Huaiyin Institute, I was happy to accept invitations from other schools in the province, including in Huai’an, Baoying and Jiangdu in Jiangsu Province. I then moved on to Shijiazhuang and Langfang in China’s northern Hebei Province, close to Beijing.

The work was demanding, and I was always conscious that what I was doing may have negative repercussions, so in late March, I decided to have a break and return to Australia for a brief time.

I would make two more trips to China in 2003, and a number of trips in later years, and I came to like the people there.

Hopefully one day they can enjoy the same freedoms that we in the west enjoy, and hopefully the people of Tibet and Xinjiang regain their independence.

This cannot happen under the current political system, and it can only be hoped that the people of the international community work together to bring down this barbaric dictatorship.

Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based Social Justice Campaigner, Writer, Teacher and Business Consultant. He has campaigned for social justice in Australia, promoted human rights in China and worked with the homeless in Honolulu. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Education and a degree in Management.