China is sabotaging the international order to achieve its goal of global hegemony, throttling democracy at home to promote the autocratic rule of the Chinese Communist Party and trampling human rights to establish Han Chinese domination all over.
Now it has become important for Beijing to silence the voice of the United Nations against all these misdeeds of China. To ensure this, Beijing is now trying to use its money power to influence senior functionaries of the international watchdog, as a latest report from London has indicated.
The report is based on written evidence submitted by British Citizen Emma Reilly, a former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, to the Foreign Affairs Committee, a panel of M.P.s which scrutinizes the Foreign Office of the British Government.
“The Foreign Affairs Committee publishes written evidence received as part of its inquiry into international relations in the multilateral system,” says a website of the U.K. Parliament. “In the evidence, a former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and whistleblower Emma Reilly alleges that ‘dangerous favours’ are ‘being rendered by the OHCHR to the Chinese government’ and ‘those favours fall into a broader effort of the Chinese government to instrumentalize the U.N. to serve its national interests.’ Her evidence alleges a ‘UN cover-up of special favours to the PRC.’
Ms Reilly alleges that ‘during the two year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals ‘ that ‘Beijing paid bribes and had significant influence over the final texts put to the Assembly.’ Her evidence alleges that the PRC ‘imposes a secret conditionality across UN agencies that the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan.’
Her written evidence includes allegations that ‘(one of) the Chief(s) of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR was secretly providing the PRC with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council.’ It alleges that ‘UN officials at different levels deliberately lied to member states, including the U.K. delegation, who inquired about the UN policy of handing names — including of U.K. citizens and residents — to the PRC without their consent.
Her evidence alleges that ‘in cases where the PRC was provided with names of NGO delegates in advance by the UN Secretariat, the delegates have reported that family members were visited by Chinese police, forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared sentenced to long prison terms without cause, or, as regards Uighur, put in concentration camps.’ She alleges that ‘in some cases their family members died in detention. In at least one case, a person named on the PRC’s list who attended only a side event, later returned to China and died in detention.’ She alleges that ‘in at least one case, the Chinese government issued an Interpol red notice against an NGO delegate.’
The evidence includes allegations that ‘reports of both the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme on the origins of Covid were edited to reduce references to the possibility of laboratory leak.’
The evidence also includes a submission from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office that China is working to ‘shape the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view.’
Organizations such as the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, China Strategic Risks Institute, GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization), Hong Kong Watch, the Foreign Policy Centre and the Council on Geostrategy have submitted evidence, as well as individual experts and academics, such as Bill Browder.”
The report from London quotes Emma Reilly to explain how China is trying to browbeat even independent U.N. functionaries. “Beijing’s consistent demand for meetings and apologies following even the mildest criticism have served to ensure that even relatively independent UN officials do not publicly criticize China or even raise human rights concerns privately. This results in a perverse situation where democracies that permit dissent are much more regularly criticized by the UN’s human rights and humanitarian agencies than autocratic regimes.”
Analysts say Beijing is essentially trying to achieve its aim of attaining the status of the number one superpower in the world by sabotaging the rules-based economic order, undermining democracy and trampling human rights. To achieve this end, it is important that whistleblowers like the United Nations do not raise their voices against Chinese activities. It is also trying to influence votes in the United Nations to stop discussions on topics embarrassing to China from taking place in the international forum.
One of the most damning reports from the OHCHR against China was on the subject of the violation of human rights of the Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region. The report, released on August 31, 2022, concluded that the way the Uighur have been treated by the Chinese authorities amounted to “international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The Tibetan people too have been treated in a similar manner in the past, the latest attempt in the plateau being to segregate Tibetan children in boarding schools away from their families and train them in Chinese ways. The aim of the Chinese Communist Party is to bring all the minority communities in China under the domination of the Han Chinese.
The most glaring example of the way democracy is being trampled in China is the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Since 2019, systematic attempts are being made to throttle the democratic institutions in the island city that was once under British rule; like an independent judiciary, a representative legislature and a free Press. Following two draconian legislations, the National Security Law and Article 23, political activists and journalists have been arrested, independent newspapers have been closed and the voice of dissent has been throttled. It is a part of the policy of promotion of autocratic rule in China by silencing the voices of dissent.
The ultimate aim of the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping is to spread a global hegemony by sabotaging the rules-based international order. In the South China Sea Beijing is claiming sovereignty over the entire waterway by denying legitimate claims of the other littoral states: Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei. In 2016, China even refused to accept an arbitration order by the International Court of Justice on the dispute in South China Sea in favour of the Philippines and against China.
India is also at the receiving end of the Chinese policy of refusing to abide by the rules-based international order. In 2020, in clear violation of a series of bilateral protocols for the management of disputed areas on the India – China border, the Chinese army occupied about 1,000 sq km of disputed territories. The aim of China here, too, is to expand its hegemony over the strategically important Himalayan region.
thehongkongpost