You know the U.S. has really screwed up when nations like China, who have an appalling human rights record, can use actual facts to legitimately question our values. The Chinese have always challenged our human rights reports but since Abu Ghraib and the other prison scandals they are finding many in the world willing to now believe them. Thanks President Bush.



China's Report on Human Rights Violations in the US (Pt. 1)
By Information Office of the State Council of the PRC


Related stories: Human Rights 4-04-05, 9:35 am>

From People's Daily Online

In 2004 the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the United States. The scandal shocked the humanity and was condemned by the international community. It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the United States once again posed as the "the world human rights police" and released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. As in previous years, the reports pointed fingers at human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions (including China) but kept silent on the US misdeeds in this field. Therefore, the world people have to probe the human rights record behind the Statue of Liberty in the United States.

I. On Life, Liberty and Security of Person

American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person.

Violent crimes pose a serious threat to people's lives. According to a report released by the Department of Justice of the United States on Nov. 29, 2004, in 2003 residents aged 12 and above in the United States experienced about 24 million victimizations, and there occurred 1,381,259 murders, robberies and other violent crimes, averaging 475 cases per 100,000 people. Among them there were 16,503 homicides, up 1.7 percent over 2002, or nearly six cases in every 100,000 residents, and one of every 44 Americans aged above 12 was victimized.

The Associated Press reported on June 24, 2004 that the number of violent crimes in many US cities were on the rise. In 2003 Chicago alone recorded 598 homicides, 80 percent of which involved the use of guns. The Washington D.C. reported 41,738 murders, robberies and other violent crimes in 2003, averaging 6,406.4 cases per 100,000 residents. In 2004 the District recorded 198 killings, or a homicide rate of 35 per 100,000 residents. Detroit,which has less than 1 million residents, recorded 18,724 criminal cases in 2003, including 366 murders and 814 rapes, which amounted to a homicide rate of 41 per 100,000 residents.

In 2003 the homicide rate in Baltimore was 43 per 100,000 residents. The Baltimore Sun reported on Dec. 17, 2004 that the city reported 271 killings from January to early December in 2004.

It was reported that on Sept. 8, 2004 that by Sept. 4, 2004 there had been 368 homicides in the city, up 4.2 percent year-on-year. The USA Today reported on July 16, 2004 that in an average week in the US workplace one employee is killed and at least 25 are seriously injured in violent assaults by current or former co-workers. The Cincinnati Post reported on Nov. 12, 2004 that homicides average 17 a week and there are nearly 5,500 violent assaults a day at US job sites.

The United States has the biggest number of gun owners and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. According to a survey released by the University of Chicago in 2001, 41.7 percent of men and 28.5 percent of women in the United States report having a gun in their homes, and 29.2 percent of men and 10.2 percent of women personally own a gun. The Los Angeles Times reported on Jul. 19, 2004 that since 2000 the number of firearm holders rose 28 percent in California.

About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day. In 2002 there were 30,242 firearm killings in the United States; 54 percent of all suicides and 67 percent of all homicides were related to the use of firearms. The Associated Press reported that 808 people were shot dead in the first half of 2004 in Detroit.

Police violence and infringement of human rights by law enforcement agencies also constitute a serious problem. At present, 5,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States use TASER - a kind of electric shock gun, which sends out 50,000 volts of impulse voltage after hitting the target. Since 1999, more than 80 people died from TASER shootings, 60 percent of which occurred between November 2003 and November 2004.

A survey found that in the 17 years from 1985 to 2002, Los Angeles recorded more than 100 times increase in police shooting at automobile drivers, killing at least 25 and injuring more than 30 of them. Of these cases, 90 percent were due to misjudgment. (The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 29, 2004.)

On Jul. 21, 2004 Chinese citizen Zhao Yan was handcuffed and severely beaten while she was in the United States on a normal business trip. She suffered injuries in many parts of her body and serious mental harm.

The New York Times reported on Apr. 19, 2004 a comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the last 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today. The study identified 199 murder exoneration, 73 of them in capital cases. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years.

The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest in the world. Statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last November showed that the nation made an estimated 13.6 million arrests in 2003. The national arrest rate was 4,695.1 arrests per 100,000 people, 0.2 percent up than that of the previous year (USA Today, Nov. 8, 2004).

According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to 2 million in 2000, a hike by six times. From 1995 to 2003, the number of inmates grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the country, where one out of every 142 people is behind bars. The number of convicted offenders may total more than 6 million if parolees and probationers are also counted. The Chicago Tribune reported on Nov. 8 last year that the federal and state prison population amounted to 1.47 million last year, 2.1 percent more than in 2003. The number of criminals rose by over 5 percent in 11 states, with the growth in North Dakota up by 11.4 percent and in Minnesota by 10.3 percent.

Most prisons in the United States are overcrowded, but still cannot meet the demand. The country has spent an average of 7 billion US dollars a year building new jails and prisons in the past 10 years. California has seen only one college but 21 new prisons built since 1984.

Jails have become one of the huge and most lucrative industries, with a combined staff of more than 530,000 and being the second largest employer in the United States only after the General Motors. Private prisons are more and more common. The country now has over 100 private prisons in 27 states and 18 private prison companies. The value of goods and services created by inmates surged from 400 million US dollars in 1980 to 1.1 billion US dollars in 1994. Abuse of prisoners and violence occur frequently in US jails and prisons, which are under disorderly management. The Los Angeles Times reported on Aug. 15 last year that over 40 state prison systems were once under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food and lack of medical care.

The NewsWeek of the United States also reported last May that in Pennsylvania, Arizona and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of others before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. Male inmates are often made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation. New inmates are frequently beaten and cursed at and sometimes made to crawl.

At a jail in New York City, some guards bump prisoners against the walls, pinch their arms and wrists, and force them to receive insulting checks nakedly. Some male inmates are sometimes compelled to stand in the nude before a group of women guards. Some female inmates go in shackles to hospital for treatment and nursing after they get ill or pregnant, some give births without a midwife, and some are locked to sickbeds with fetters after Caesarean operation.

Over 80,000 women prisoners in the United States are mothers, and the overall number of the minor children of the American women prisoners is estimated at some 200,000. The country had more than 3,000 pregnant women in jails from 2000 to 2003 and 3,000 babies were born to the prisoners during this period (see Mexico's Milenio on Feb. 21, 2004). It is estimated that at least more than 40,000 prisoners are locked up in the so-called "super jails", where the prisoner is confined to a very tiny cell, cannot see other people throughout the year, and has only one hour out for exercise every day.

Sexual harassment and encroachment are common in jails in the Unite States. The New York Times reported last October that at least 13 percent of inmates in the country are sexually assaulted in prison (Ex-Inmate's Suit Offers View Into Sexual Slavery in Prisons, The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2004). In jails of seven central and western US states, 21 percent of the inmates suffer sexual abuse at least once after being put in prison. The ratio is higher among women inmates, with nearly one fourth of them sexually assaulted by jail guards.

II. On Political Rights and Freedom

The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common.
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Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly 4 billion US dollars, some 1 billion US dollars or one third more than that spent in the 2000 elections. The 2004 presidential election has been listed as the most expensive campaign in the country's history (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the cost jumping to 1.7 billion US dollars from 1 billion US dollars in 2000. To win the election, the Democratic Party and Republican Party had to try their utmost to raise funds.

The Washington Post reported on Dec. 3 last year that the Democratic Party collected 389.8 million US dollars in electoral funds and the Republican Party raised 385.3 million US dollars, both hitting a record high (see Fundraising Records Broken by Both Major Political Parties, Washington Post on Dec. 3, 2004).

Data released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Dec. 14, 2004 show the average spending for Senate races was 2,518,750 US dollars in 2004, with the highest reaching 31,488,821 US dollars; and the average spending for House races was 511,043 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the highest reaching 9,043,293 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topraces.asp?cycle=2004).

The Republican Party, the Democratic Party and their periphery organizations spent a total of 1.2 billion US dollars on TV commercials, making this presidential election the most expensive in history. The TV commercials were broadcast 750,000 times, twice of the airings in the general election in 2000. In the Oct. 1 - 13 period in 2004, the Republican Party spent 14.5 million US dollars on advertising, and the Democratic Party's advertising spending amounted to 24 million US dollars in the first 20 days of October 2004.

In the elections, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as 130,000 US dollars. In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The Baltimore Sun called this "Buying Power" (see "Buying Power", The Baltimore Sun, April 5, 2004). Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. Some interest groups also got themselves involved in the judge election campaign.The US election system has quite a few flaws. The newly adopted Help America Vote Act of 2004 requires voters to offer a series of documents such as a stable residence or identification in registering, which in reality disenfranchises thousands of homeless people.

The United States is the only country in the world that rules out ex-inmates' right to vote, which disenfranchises 5 million ex-inmates and 13 percent male black people (see Milenio, Mexico, Oct. 22 2004).

The 2004 US presidential election reported many problems, including counting errors, machine malfunctions, registration confusion, legal uncertainty, and lack of respect for voters. According to a report carried by the USA Today on Dec. 28, 2004, due to counting errors, a review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. Due to machine malfunctions, 92,000 ballots failed to record a vote for president in Ohio alone. Registration confusion made four fifths of the states go into the election without computerized statewide voter databases (see "Election Day Leftovers", USA Today, Dec. 28, 2004). The Democratic Party brought 35 lawsuits against the Republican Party in at least 17 states, charging the latter with threatening and blocking voters from registering or voting, especially minority ethnic groups. In Florida, the cases of Black people being removed from voter registration list or their votes being denied were 10 times higher than people of other races. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported on Sept. 22, 2004 that during the period of election, someone often distributed handbills to Black voters to bilk and intimidate them by saying that anyone who defaulted electricity bills, apartment bills or parking fines would be arrested outside the polling booths. Some others pretended to be plainclothes outside polling booths and demanded voters show their identifications. However, black people who were able to present photo identification were less than one fifth of white people, therefore, many of them were rejected.

In the meantime, fabrications of disputable pictures and statements were put in the agenda of political maneuvers. Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies. According to statistics of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of University of Pennsylvania, campaign advertisement for the 2004 US presidential election had a large proportion of false information that was enough to mislead voters, far beyond 50 percent in 1996. In the Republican camp, at least 75 percent contained untrue information and personal attacks. The website of the center (http://www.FactCheck.org) listed at least 100 items of such information.

The US freedom of the press is filled with hypocrisy. Power and intimidation hang over the halo of press freedom. The New York Times published a commentary on March 30, 2004, saying that the US government's reliance on slandering had reached an unprecedented level in contemporary American political history, and the government prepared to abuse power at any moment to threat potential critics.

A collected works, Zensor USA, revealed that whenever the faults of government dignitaries or big companies were touched, the strong American press censorship system would snap at the journalists who insisted on investigation and made them the last sacrificial lamb. (see Das Schweigen der Journalisten, Handelsblatt, Germany, March 17, 2004).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept watch on a leader of freedom of speech movement in University of California at Berkeley for a decade long. Although no record showed he violated federal laws, the FBI hired someone to keep monitoring his daily activities and collect his personal information without permission from the court. (see SingTao Daily, Oct. 11, 2004).

On July 16, 2004 the US State Department made a regulation, in violation of the norms of most other countries, that foreign reporters should leave the country while waiting for the valid period of their visas to be extended. The annual report of Native American Journalists Association criticized the US administration for the move, which severely infringes upon press freedom. (see AP story, Antigua, Guatemala Oct. 24, 2004).

Someone with the American Society of Newspaper Editors said that the US administration's measures reflected its repulsion of foreign news media. (see Milenio, Mexico, June 20, 2004). In Iraq, the United States on the one hand alleged that it had brought democracy to the Iraqi people, on the other hand it suppressed public opinion. On March 28, 2004 US troops closed down a Shiite newspaper in Baghdad, which triggered a protest demonstration by thousands of Iraqi people.

On Sept. 27, the Association of American University Presses, Association of American Publishers and other organizations jointly lodged a complaint to the district court of Manhattan, New York, charging the Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Department of the Treasury with deliberately preventing literary works of Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese writers from entering the United States and turning the economic sanctions against the three countries into a "censorship system" to stop free dissemination of information and ideology. (see Xinhua story, Sept. 30, 2004).

In another case, eight reporters, including Jim Taricani of the TV station in Providence, Rhode Island with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Judith Miller of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, were declared guilty for they declined to disclose the confidential sources of news. The New York Times pointed out on Nov. 10, 2004 that through these cases, it was found out that press freedom suffered rampant infringement.

In addition, in recent years, over a dozen foreign journalists have been detained in airports in the United States, including the one in Los Angeles. In March 2003, a Danish press-photographer was expelled out of the country after a DNA test. A Swiss journalist was rejected from entry of an airport in Washington D.C. The airport staffs by force took pictures and finger prints of the journalist. Meanwhile, he was not permitted to contact the Swiss embassy in the Unite States. In May, two groups of French journalists, altogether six members, were rejected of entry the US territory. They simply came to the Unite States to cover an exposition. Two Dutch journalists fell into trouble when they were covering a film award ceremony. In October and December, one British reporter and one Austrian journalist were held up at US airports respectively. In early May, 2004, a British female journalist, who was sent by The Guardian to Los Angeles to cover some events, was detained at the Los Angeles airport and faced interrogation and body search, and then was handcuffed and taken to the detention house in the downtown. There, she was detained for 26 hours before sent back to Britain.

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China's Report on Human Rights Violations in the US (Pt. 2)
By Information Office of the State Council of the PRC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related stories: Human Rights 4-04-05, 9:25 am

From People's Daily Online

III. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The United States refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights and took negative attitude to the economic, social and cultural rights of the laborers. Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world richest country.

The population of people living in poverty has been on a steady rise. According to a report by The Sun on July, 6, 2004, from 1970 to 2000 (adjusted for inflation), the bottom 90 percent's average income stagnated while the top 10 percent experienced an average yearly income increase of nearly 90 percent. Upper-middle-and-upper-class families that constitute the top 10 percent of the income distribution are prospering while many among the remaining 90 percent struggle to maintain their standard of living. Worsening income disparities have formed two Americas. (Two Americas, The Baltimore Sun, July 6, 2004). According to a report of the Wall Street Journal on June 15, 2004, a study on the fall of 2003 by Arthur Kennickell of the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve System showed that the nation's wealthiest 1 percent owned 53 percent of all the stocks held by families or individuals, and 64 percent of the bonds. They control more than a third of the nation's wealth. ( US Led a Resurgence Last Year Among Millionaires World-Wide, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2004). In Washington D.C., the top 20 percent of the city's households have 31 times the average income of the 20 percent at the bottom. (D.C. Gap in Wealth Growing, The Washington Post, July 22, 2004).

Since November 2003, the average income of most American families have been on the decline. The earning of many medium and low-income families could not keep up with the price rises. They could barely handle the situation. According to the statistics released by the US Census Bureau in 2004, the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three years. It rose by 1.3 million year-on-year in 2003 to 35.9 million. The poverty rate in 2003 hit 12.5 percent, or one in eight people, the highest since 1998. (Census: Poverty Rose By Million, USA Today, August 27, 2004, More Americans Were Uninsured and Poor in 2003, Census Finds, The New York Times, August 27, 2004).

The homeless population continues to rise nationwide. On Dec. 15, 2004, an annual survey report released at the US Conference of Mayors showed that the number of people seeking emergency food aid increased by 14 percent year-on-year while the number of people seeking emergency shelter aid increased by 6 percent. (http://www.usmayors.org). It is estimated that the homeless population reached 3.5 million in the United States. But the US Federal budget has stopped providing funds to build new affordable housing, which forced many local governments to cut the public housing projects. The city of San Diego has a homeless population of 8,000, but the government could only provide 3,000 temporary beds. Those without lodging tickets are regarded illegal to live on the streets. They would be summoned or detained. In January 2004, an investigator with the US Commission on Human Right denounced the US for large-scale infringement on human rights on housing issue.

The health insurance crisis has become prominent. A report of the Washington Post on Sept. 28, 2004 said health insurance costs posted their fourth straight year of double-digit increases in 2004. Over the past four years, health insurance costs have leaped 59 percent - about five times faster than both wage growth and inflation. Around 14.3 million Americans put one fourth of their income on the health expenses. (Higher Costs, Less Care, The Washington Post, September 28, 2004). Currently, family health insurance plan costs more than 10,000 US dollars each year. Many families could not afford it. Fewer workers have coverage - 61 percent in 2004, compared with 65 percent in 2001. (Health Plan Costs Jump 11%, The Washington Post, September 10, 2004) Compared with 2003, the number of people without health insurance increased 1.4 million to 45 million, or 15.6 percent of the country's population. (Census: Poverty Rose by Million, USA Today, August 27, 2004). In Texas, about one fourth of the workers don't have health insurance. (Spain Uprising newspaper, May 11, 2004). In California, around 6 million Californians don't have health insurance and the welfare system with the annual cost of 60 billion US dollars are about to collapse. (The Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2004). Meanwhile, medical accidents occurred one after another, becoming the third killer following heart disease and cancer. According to a report of Boston Globe on July 27, 2004, one out of every 25 in-patients become the victim of medical accident. From 2000 to 2002, 195,000 people died of medical accidents each year. The actual figure might be twice of that.

IV. On Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination has been deeply rooted in the United States, permeating into every aspects of society.

The colored people are generally poor, with living condition much worse than the white. According to a report of The Guardian of Britain on Oct. 9, 2004, the average net assets of a white family is 88,000 US dollars in 2002, 11 times of a family of Latin American ancestry, or nearly 15 times of a family of African ancestry. Nearly one third of the African ancestry families and 26 percent of the Latin American ancestry families have negative net assets. 74 percent of the white families have their own houses, while only 47 percent of families of the African and Latin American ancestry have their own houses. The market value of houses bought by black families is only 65 percent of those of white people. Black people's encounter of mortgage loans refusal for house purchase or furniture is twice that of white people. Some black families don't even think of buying their own houses. The death rate of illness, accident and murder among the black people is twice that of the white.

The rate of being victim of murders for the black people is five times that of the white. The rate of being affected by AIDS for the black people is ten times that of the whites while the rate of being diagnosed by diabetes for the black people is twice that of the whites. (The State Of Black America 2004, Issued by National Urban League on March 24, 2004, http://www.nuL.org/pdf/sobaexec.pdf).

Statistics show that the number of black people living in poverty is three times that of the white. The average life expectancy of the black is six years shorter than the white.

People of minority ethnic groups are biased against in employment and occupation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the United States received 29,000 complaints in 2003 of racial bias in the workplace (Racism in the 21st Century, published in USA Today May 5, 2004 issue).
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Statistics provided by the United States Department of Labor also suggest that by November 2004, the unemployment rate for black and white people is 10.8 percent and 4.7 percent respectively (http://bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf). In New York City, one of every two black men between 16 and 64 was not working by 2003 (see Nearly Half of Black Men Found Jobless, published by The New York Times on Feb. 28 2004). Black people not only have fewer job opportunities, but also earn less than white people. Even with the same job, a black man only earns 70 percent of that for a white man. Regions such as California, where immigrants make up a larger proportion of the local population, are almost like traps of death. Mexican Laborers who have come to work in the United States have a mortality as high as 80 percent.

Teenagers from at least 38 countries work like slaves (EFE San Francisco, Sept. 26, 2004). Out of 45 million people who are unable to afford Medicare in the United States, 7 million are African-Americans, accounting for about one fifth of the total African-Americans in the States. The proportion is 77 percent higher than that for the white people (available at http://www.johnkerry.com/communities/afric...gw_record.html).

The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, so the gap between black and white people is simply an insult to the founding essence of the United States (see US News and World Report on March 29, 2004).

Apartheid runs rampant at schools of the United States. On May 17, 1954, Chief justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court announced the court's decision over a case known as Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of "separate but equal" had no place in US public schools. Fifty years later, white children and black children in the United States still lead largely separate lives. One in eight southern black students attends a school that is 99 percent black. About a third attend schools that are at least 90 percent minority. In the Northeast, by contrast, more than half of blacks attend such schools (Schools and Lives Are Still Separate, The Washington Post, May 17, 2004).

Racism recurs on campus of American universities. Fascist slogans and posters promoting superiority of white people, along with threats by weapon or words were found on college campuses including University of California at Berkeley. Protests were sparked off when Santa Rosa Junior College in California published anti-Semitism opinions in a column article in its campus newspaper and the chat room of its website were dominated by white-superior surfers. At Dartmouth College, white girl students auctioned off black slaves in fund-raising activities. At the University of Southern Mississippi, hordes of white students assaulted four black students, chanting racist slogans after a football match was over. At Olivet College of Michigan State, where there are only 55 black students, 51 of the black students quitted school after racial cases of violence or harassment (see The China Press, a Chinese language newspaper published in New York, on April 17, 2004).

Racial prejudice has made social conflicts to become acute, causing a rise in hate crimes. Racial prejudice, most often directed at black people, was behind more than half of the nation's 7,489 reported hate crime incidents in 2003, the FBI said on Nov.22 2004. Race bias was behind 3,844 of the total cases in 2003, FBI claimed after having made statistics of hate crimes handled by 16 percent of the law-enforcement organizations in the States.

Reports of hate crimes motivated by anti-black bias totaled 2,548 in 2003, accounting for 51.4 percent of the total, more than double the total hate crimes against all other racial groups. There were 3,150 black victims in these reports, according to the annual FBI figures (AP, Washington, Jan. 26, 2004). And with regard to the attribute of race, among the 6,934 reported offenders, 62.3 percent were white (http:/www.fbi.gov/pressrel/presssrel04/pressel/12204.htm).

In a related development, because of the "lingering atmosphere of fear" stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks and fallout from the Iraq War, there were 1,019 anti-Muslim incidents in the United States in 2003, representing a 69 percent increase. There were 221 incidents in 2003 of anti-muslim bias in California, tripled a year ago (Los Angeles Times, May 3).

Racial prejudice is ubiquitous in judicial fields. The proportion for persons of colored races being sentenced or being imprisoned is notably higher than whites. In accordance with a report published in November 2004 by the US Department of Justice, colored races accounted for over 70 percent of inmates in the United States. And 29 percent of black people have the experience of being in jail for once. Black people make up 12.3 percent of the population in the United States, but by the end of 2003, out of 1.4 million prisoners who are serving jail terms above one year at the federal or state prisons, 44 percent were blacks, or on average, 3,231 in every 100,000 African-Americans were criminals. Latino-American inmates make up 19 percent of the total prisoners, or 1,778 in every 100,000 Latino-Americans are inmates. Inmates of other color races account for 21 percent (http://wwww.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/P03.htm). At the end of 2003, 12.8 percent of black men aged 25 to 29 were in prison (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 8, 2004), compared 1.6 percent of white men in the same group (A Growing Need for Reform, The Baltimore Sun, June 20, 2004). Blacks receive, on average, a longer felony sentence than whites. A black person's average jail sentence is six months longer than a white's for the same crime. Blacks who are arrested are 3 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites who are arrested. White felons are more likely to get probation than blacks. (see the State Black America 2004, issued by National Urban League on March 24, 2004, http://www.nul.org/pdf/sobaexec.pdf).

After the Sept. 11 incident, the United States openly restricts the rights of citizens under the cloak of homeland security, and uses diverse means including wire tapping of phone conversations and secret investigations, checks on all secret files, and monitoring transfers of fund and cash flows to supervise activities of its citizens, in which, people of ethnic minority groups, foreigners and immigrants become main victims.

Statistics show that after the Sept. 11 attacks, 32 million were investigated out of racial prejudice concern throughout the United States. Among the people being investigated out of racial prejudice concern, African-Americans made up 47 percent, followed by people of Latino and Asian origins. White Americans only account for 3 percent. On June 23, 2004, authorities with the Los Angeles Police Department and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation authorities investigated the televised beating of a black suspect by white police in Los Angeles that has resurrected the explosive spectre of the 1991 Rodney King assault. Eight police officers have been removed from regular duties following the incident on June 23 in which three of them were seen tackling the suspected black car thief, one beating him repeatedly with a metal flashlight (AFP, Los Angeles, June 24, 2004).

In the meantime, the anti-immigrant trend has become increasingly serious in the States. The US Department of Homeland Security announced in November 2004 that 157, 281 immigrants were repatriated in one year, up 8 percent from a year ago, a record high. The number of foreigners arrested without any documents also went up by 112 percent (Argentina La Nacion, Nov. 21, 2004).

Another report says starting from last year, many American cities such as San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Saint Paul, Denver, Kansas and Portland, dozens of immigrants from Mexico or other countries are arrested each day and are forced to wear fetters like suspects. The practice of treating illegal immigrants like criminals has become a national trend. The limit in the definition of terrorists and illegal immigrants has become very blurry.

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China's Report on Human Rights Violations in the US (Pt. 3)
By Information Office of the State Council of the PRC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related stories: Human Rights 4-04-05, 9:15 am

From People's Daily Online

V. On The Rights of Women and Children

The situation of American women and children was disturbing. The rates of women and children physically or sexually victimized were high. According to FBI Crime Statistics, in 2003 the United States witnessed 93,233 cases of raping. Virtually 63.2 in every 100,000 women fell victims. The statistics also showed that every two minutes one woman was sexually assaulted and every six minutes one woman was raped.

The number of women abused and treated at First Aid Centers exceeded one million every year. More than 1,500 women in the United States were killed every year by their husbands, lovers or roommates (The Milenio, Mexico, Sept. 26, 2004). Nearly 78 percent of American women were physically victimized at least once in their lifetime. And 79 percent of the women were sexually abused at least once. A survey released in November 2004 by the US National Institute of Justice showed by the time they concluded four years of college education, 88 percent of the women had experiences of physical or sexual victimization and 64 percent of them experienced both. In the past decade, charges handled by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against sexual harassment on women surged 22 percent (The Sun, Jul. 16, 2004).

Sex crimes in the US military were on the rise. According to the Washington Post (Jun. 3, 2004), from 1999 to 2002 the number of lawsuits against sexual crimes in the US army that were formally filed grew from 658 to 783, up 19 percent. And the number of rape cases went up from 356 to 445, up 25 percent. The number of such cases rose equally 5 percent between 2002 and 2003. The British Guardian reported on Oct. 25, 2004 that by the end of September 2004 the Miles Foundation had dealt with 242 cases filed between September 2002 and August 2003 about US woman soldiers being raped or sexually harassed in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain or Afghanistan. In addition, there were 431 cases of US women soldiers being sexually harassed at other military bases.

Women's labor and social rights were violated. According to The Sun newspaper (Jul. 16, 2004), the charges handled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on sexual discrimination against women grew 12 percent in the past decade. In 2004 two cases drew wide attention. They were a bias class lawsuit involving 1.6 million women employees at Wal-Mart and another case involving 340 women staffers of Morgan Stanley (New York Times, Jul. 13, 2004).

Men and women on the same job were not paid the same. Statistics released by the US Labor Department in Jan. 2004 showed a woman who worked full time had the median earning of 81.1 percent of that for a man. The Chicago Tribune said on Aug. 27, 2004 that the rate of women in poverty went up fast, to 12.4 percent of the entire female population.

The health care for American women was at a low level. The US Family Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave for childbirth to about half of all mothers and nothing for the rest. A study of 168 countries conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated that US workers have fewer rights to time off for family matters than workers in most other countries, and rank near the bottom in pregnancy and sick leave. "The United States trails enormously far behind the rest of the world when it comes to legislation to protect the health and welfare of working families," said Jody Heymann, a Harvard associate professor who led the study. (AP Boston, Jun. 17, 2004)

Child poverty was a serious problem. The Chicago Tribune reported on Aug. 27, 2004 that the number of children in poverty climbed from 12.1 million in 2002 to 12.9 million in 2003, a year-on-year increase of 0.9 percent. About 20 million children lived in "low-income working families" -- with barely enough money to cover basic needs (AP Washington, Oct. 12, 2004). In California, one in every six children did not have medical insurance. The Los Angeles Times said on May 6, 2004 that in the metropolitan area the number of homeless children found wondering on the streets at nights numbered 8,000, which had stretched the 2,500-bed government-run emergency shelter system well beyond capacity. Poverty deprived many children the opportunity to obtain higher education. In the 146 renowned institutions of higher learning, only 3 percent of the students came from the low-income class, while 74 percent of them were from the high-income class.

Children were victims of sex crimes. Every year about 400,000 children in the US were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets. Home-deserting or homeless children were the most likely to fall victims of sexual abuse. Reports on children sexually exploited, which were received by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, soared from 4,573 cases in 1998 to 81,987 cases in 2003 (The USA Today, Feb. 27,2004).

In recent years scandals about clergymen molesting children kept breaking out. According to a study commissioned by the American Catholic Bishops, in 2004 a total of 756 catholic priests and lay employees were charged with child sexual harassment. It is believed that from 1950 to 2002 more than 10,600 boys and girls were sexually abused by nearly 4,400 clergymen (AFP, Feb. 17, 2005). Moreover, every year over 4.5 million kids in the United States were molested in kindergartens and schools, which amounted to one in every ten (AP, Jul. 14, 2004).

Violent crimes occurred frequently. Studies show nearly 20 percent of US juveniles lived in families that possessed guns. In Washington D.C. 24 people younger than 18 were killed in 2004, twice as many as in 2003 (The Washington Post, Jan. 1, 2005). In Baltimore, 29 juveniles were killed from Jan. 1 to Sept. 27 in 2004. In 2003 35 were killed (The Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2004).

A report released by the US Justice Department on November 29, 2004 said about 9 percent of school kids aged 9 to 12 admitted being threatened with injury or having suffered an injury from a weapon while at school in 2003.

More and more schoolers were reluctant to go to school because of security concerns. Child abuses and neglects were widely reported in the United States. The Sun newspaper reported on May 18, 2004 that in 2002, a total of 900,000 children in the United States were abused, of whom nearly 1,400 died.

Every year, 1.98 out of every 100,000 American children were killed by their parents or guardians. In Maryland, the rate was as high as 2.4 per 100,000. (Md Child Abuse Deaths Exceed National Average, The Sun, May 18, 2004). The Houston Chronicle newspaper reported on Oct. 2, 2004 that in Texas, each staff of local government departments responsible for protecting children's rights handled 50 child abuse cases every month.

Two thirds of juvenile detention facilities in the United States lock up mentally ill youth; every day, about 2,000 youth were incarcerated simply because community mental health services were unavailable. In 33 states, juvenile detention centers held youth with mental illness without any specific charges against them (http://demonstrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/200408171941-41051.pdf).

The USA Today reported on July 8, 2004 that between Jan. 1 and June 30 of 2003, 15,000 youth detained in US youth detention centers were awaiting mental health services, while children at the age of 10 or younger were locked up in 117 youth detention centers. The detention centers totally ignored human rights and personal safety with excessive use of drugs and force, and failed to take care of inmates with mental problems in a proper way. They even locked up prisoners in cages. There were reports about scandals involving correctional authorities in California, where two juvenile inmates hanged themselves after they were badly beaten by jail police (San Jose Mercury News and Singtao Daily, March 18, 2004).

VI. On the Infringement of Human Rights of Foreign Nationals

In 2004, US army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi POWs, which stunned the whole world. The US forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi POWs. They made the POWs naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women's underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes, and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds. They even forced some of the these POWs to play "human-body pyramid" while staying naked, in the presence of US soldiers who were standing on the roof and mocking at them. They sometimes sodomized these POWs with lamp pipes and brooms. Some Iraqi civilians were also fiercely abused.

The newspaper Pyramid pointed out that the true face of Americans was exposed through this incident. A spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said, sarcastically, that the US has made the whole world see what the hell a democratic, law-ruled nation is.

According to US media like the Newsweek and the Washington Post, as early as several years ago, in US forces' prisons in Afghanistan, interrogators used various kinds of torture tools for acquiring confession, causing many deaths.

British newspaper The Observer reported on March 14, 2004 that according to a report by the ICRC, US soldiers had formed a kind of mode for arresting people even before the Iraq war. "Torture is part of the process."

Over 100 former Iraqi high-ranking government and military officials were put under special custody by the US military. They stayed 23 hours a day in dark, small and tightly closed concrete-made wards, where they were allowed to leave the wards twice a day, with 20 minutes available for taking a bath or going to the toilet.

On Nov. 26, Iraqi Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti was put in a sleeping bag by force and died after he was physically tortured during an interrogation.

According to a latest report by AP, on Feb. 18, 2005, in November 2003, CIA people hanged dead one of the so-called "ghost" prisoner in the Abu Ghraib Prison by fierce means, with his two hands cuffed behind his back. When he was released with shackles and lowered, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on."

Among the 94 abuse cases confirmed and published by the Office of the US Inspector General for the Filed Army, 39 people were killed, 20 of these cases were confirmed as murder. There were also severe child abuses conducted by the US forces.

At least 107 children were imprisoned in seven prisons including the Abu Ghraib Prison run by the US forces in Afghanistan. They were not allowed to get in contact with their families. Their term in prison was undetermined. It was not clear when they were going to be brought court hearing. Some of these children had been abused. One low-ranking US officer who had served in the Abu Ghraib Prison testified that US soldiers abused some of these children in custody, and they had even assaulted young girls sexually.

What's more fierce is that US soldiers used military dogs to frighten these juvenile prisoners to see whose dog could scare them to lose control on excretion. US forces had violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, by detaining two Palestinian diplomats to Iraq in a prison ward of the Abu Ghraib Prison, together with 90 other men. They spent one year in the prison, suffering from very poor living conditions.

The ICRC believed that abuse of detained Iraqis in the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison was not a single case. It was a systematic behavior. According to some White House documents that were made public on June 22, 2004, the Department of Defense approved to use harsh means to interrogate prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The US Secretary of Defense said in the public that the Geneva Convention does not mean that all the detainees, especially those who were so-called "non-fighting personnel", should be treated as a POW. A draft memorandum of the Department of Defense also claimed that US laws and international conventions, including the Geneva Convention, which strictly ban the use of torture, do not apply to US President as the General Commander of the US Army. A memorandum of the US Department of Justice makes it even more clearly that the United States could use international laws to measure other countries on the issue of the treatment of POWs, while it is not necessary for Washington to abide by these laws. The interrogators were trained to find ways to torture prisoners, physically, while they should exceed the Geneva Convention, technically.

Media found that the US soldiers' behaviors in humiliating Iraqi prisoners as showed photos were typically what they were trained for. US Brigadier General Yanis Karpinski told the press that her boss once said to her that "prisoners are dogs." If they were made to think that they were a bit better than dogs, they could get out of control.

Meanwhile, the US government has tried for the third successive year to extend the term of a resolution of the UN Security Council that soldiers could be exempted of lawsuit by the International Criminal Court, even if they break the relevant rules. In view of prisoner abuses in Iraq, this has been strongly criticized by the UN General Secretary (Reuters' story on June 17,2004).

Former US President Jimmy Carter also criticized that the US policies formulated by the high-ranking officials are a kind of retrogression, which has damaged the principles of democracy and rule of law and lacked respect for fundamental human rights.

To avoid international scrutiny, the United States keeps under wraps half of its 20-odd detention centers worldwide which are holding terrorist suspects. And at least seven US-controlled clandestine prisons, one of which dubbed "inferno," in Afghanistan, have not been kept within the bounds of law. (Prensa Latina, Aug. 16, 2004)

In a report by the Human Rights First on 24 US secret interrogation centers, these secret facilities are believed to "make inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but virtually inevitable." (British newspaper the Times, Sept. 11, 2004)

Moreover, an executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to other countries, in a bid to use torture and evade American laws. The plane is leased by the US Defense Department and the CIA from a private company in Massachusetts. Being accused of making so-called "torture flights," the jet has conducted more than 300 flights and has flown to 49 destinations outside the United States, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. The suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the plane (British newspaper the Times, Nov. 14, 2004). The United States has secretly shifted thousands of captives worldwide in the past three years, most of whom were not indicted officially.

The United States is the No. 1 military power in the world, and its military spending has kept shooting up. Its fiscal 2005 defense budget hit a historical high of 422 billion US dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over fiscal 2004. As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the United States has made a fortune out of war. Its transactions of conventional weapons exceeded 14.5 billion dollars in 2003, up 900 million dollars year-on-year and accounting for 56.7 percent of the total sales worldwide. The Iraq War has been "a helping straw" to the US economic development.

The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Spain's Uprising newspaper on May, 12, 2004 published a list of human rights infringement incidents committed by the US troops, quoting two bloodthirsty sayings of two American generals, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" by General Philip Sheridan and "we should bomb Vietnam back to the stone age" by air force general Curtis LeMay. We can still smell a similar bloodiness in the Iraq War waged by the United States.

Statistics from the health department of the interim Iraqi government show 3,487 people, including 328 women and children, have been killed and another 13,720 injured in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces between April 15 and Sept. 19 in 2004.

A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the US-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children.

Jointly designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the survey also finds that the majority of the additional, unnatural deaths since the invasion were caused by violence, while air strikes from the coalition forces were the main factor to blame for the violence-caused deaths. (Associated Press, Oct. 28, 2004)

On Jan. 3, 2004, four US soldiers stationed in Iraq pushed two Iraqi civilians into the Tigris River, making one of them drowned.

On May 19, 2004, an American helicopter fired on a wedding party in a remote Iraqi village close to the Syrian border, killing 45 people, including 15 children and 10 women. On Nov. 20, 2004, seven people were killed in Ramadi in the Anbar province when US troops opened fire on a civilian bus.

According to a Staff Sergeant in the US Marines, his platoon killed 30 civilians in six weeks. And he has witnessed the blasphemy and gradual rotting of many corpses, and a lot of wounded civilians were deserted without any medical treatment. (British newspaper The Independent, May 23, 2004)

In addition, the US troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-US militants since the invasion. The American forces has so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent.

The United States has been hindering the work of the United Nation's human rights mechanism. And it either took no notice of or used delaying tactics on the requests of relevant UN agencies to visit its Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

Some justice-upholding developing countries introduced draft resolutions on America's democracy and human rights situation to the 59th UN General Assembly, to show their strong concern over the US human rights infringement, prisoner abuse, media control, and loopholes in its election system.

It is the common goal and obligation for all countries in the world to promote and safeguard human rights. No country in the world can claim itself as perfect and has no room for improvement in the human rights area. And no country should exclude itself from the international human rights development process, or view itself as the incarnation of human rights which can reign over other countries and give orders to the others. Even the United States shall be no exception.

Despite tons of problems in its own human rights, the United States continues to stick to its belligerent stance, wantonly trample on the sovereignty of other countries, and constantly stage tragedies of human rights infringement in the world.

Instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably, the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously. The double standards of the United States on human rights and its exercise of hegemonism and power politics under the pretext of promoting human rights will certainly put itself in an isolated and passive position and beget opposition from all just members of the international community

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/ar...eview/894/1/87/

NR, NS...they are still good at writing propaganda I see. I'm sorry, but they have been writing this stuff since the Moaist revolution...this is always what they say about us. But now they put it online.

If all of this is so true then why do all of their citizens want to come here? I go to school with a bunch of people from China, and do you know when the first time three of the chinese students in my class saw the Tiannomen Square footage? One year ago....in the US. They NEVER saw it in China. They were not allowed to see it. My Chinese classmate told some of his friends about it, and even downloaded it to computer from (get this ) a Taiwaese website, and the people in his country said it was a lie, all made up film from hollywood!

Then there is the issue of gap between rich and poor...China has us beat on that gap by a mile! No safety for workers. Not much crime either, but you should see their prisons. Not so many even survive their prisons. I don't think they even want to talk about THEIR interogation and torture techniques!

No. I do not fret about what the Chinese Communists say....we are still the place where people all want to come, and we have big upsides and big downsides, but all in all, we're gonna be alright.

Yes, I know they have always criticized us on human rights which is why I said it in my post.

In reading your comments about how the U.S. is a better place to live than China, I think you may have misunderstood the reason for my post. I don't think anyone here would say that China is a better place to live. I did not post the Chinese propaganda here because I think they are the good guys. In fact, I said what an appalling record they have on human rights. I posted this because I think the Bush Administration has screwed up royally on the issue of human rights.

Aside from the moral issues involved with what they did, they have also handed the Chinese an issue that they can exploit for their own use. In the past, the world pretty much ignored what China said about the U.S. human rights record precisely because their own record was so dismal. Most people correctly believed that China was merely knocking the U.S. to take the heat off of themselves. Now with the torture scandal the rest of the world may be starting to pay attention to what China has to say.

For instance, the world sees the U.S. denying what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan & Cuba when the world knows full well that it did happen. Pretty soon they begin to wonder if the other charges that the U.S. has always denied might also be true. That gives China a perfect opening to spread their propaganda on the internet and in foreign newspapers that don't support the U.S. line. I'm not worried about you & I believing the propaganda I'm worried about the rest of the world.

I'm sure that the Chinese are positively gleeful at what transpired in Iraq, Afghanistan & Cuba. The horrible torture that occured there does not shock their sensibilities because they have done it themselves. What is new is that the U.S. has now lost the moral high ground to hold China accountable for their human rights abuses because of the choices that the Bush Adminstration made. What is new is that the attacks on the U.S. by China are now falling on ears that are more willing to listen.

Make no mistake, I don't support China and their abusive human rights record at all and have no desire to defend them. But I also don't support when the U.S. abuses human rights and pretends that it doesn't.

Yeah I agree. There are a couple of generals and a certain attorney general I would like to see put in Gitmo!!! It's NOT a fun thing to see your longtime critics crow over your foibles and the subsequent lack of credibility on the prosecution of the chain of command.

Inhumane tortures will always be exposed no matter how well the torturers try to hide them. There will always be someone with integrity and conscience to spill the beans.

It's absurd for the Bushies to believe that they can always get away with crime.

And if we truly believe that China should be ashamed the way they torture their prisoners, the we should also put to shame our leaders for imitating their torturous ways. Tortures have no place in civilized societies...

Heart's information about China was very interesting to me. I do not get to meet many Chinese here, in fact most of them come over as students and almost starve to death they have so little support. In the light of what China is criticizing Japan for, lack of transparency about Japan's war record (as shown in school text books) the Chinese have a real nerve. They keep the truth from their own people about the very recent past, by all accounts.

See what I mean. We have allowed China to cast themselves as improving their human rights. More propaganda.

Beijing Cites Progress on Protection Of Rights

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 14, 2005; Page A20


BEIJING, April 13 -- The Chinese government, frequently criticized for its human rights record, declared Wednesday that it had brought rights violations "under control" by prosecuting more than 1,500 officials accused of abusing prisoners or holding them without legal grounds.

The assertion came in a report on human rights issued one month after a U.S.-Chinese bargain under which the government freed a well-known prisoner, Rebiya Kadeer, in return for a pledge from the Bush administration to abstain from seeking a resolution condemning China before the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Carrying out the promise, U.S. officials in Geneva filed a resolution Wednesday urging the commission to condemn Cuba but said nothing about China.

The report, the eighth in a series of white papers issued since 1991, depicted human rights violations by China's security organs as aberrations -- criminal acts by wayward officials. The judiciary, it said, carried out a campaign of "vigorous measures" in 2004 to make sure police and prison authorities were punished for any illegal detentions, torture, disruption of elections or negligence that caused loss of life or property.

"In total, 1,595 government functionaries suspected of criminal activities were investigated and prosecuted, thus effectively bringing under control offenses of infringement on rights," the report said.

Human rights organizations and foreign governments have repeatedly depicted rights violations in China as a reflection of government policy. The court system and police, they have noted, remain under the control of the government and Communist Party, depriving citizens of recourse to an independent authority in case of official abuse.

Kadeer had been sentenced to an eight-year prison term under legislation making it illegal to reveal "state information" to foreigners. Her supporters said that she was prosecuted for speaking out against government actions that favored the ethnic Han majority over Muslim minorities, particularly in her native Xinjiang province in western China.

The Chinese government, in defining human rights, has traditionally emphasized social welfare over individual freedom. The report cited 270 news conferences by the central government and 460 by provincial governments as promotion of "citizens' rights to information, supervision and participation in public affairs." It did not address party censorship, which controls what is published and broadcast throughout the country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

I agree that they have nerve considering their own abuses but that does not mean that they are not right about Japan hiding what they did in China in WWII. Japan was guilty of horrendous conduct in WWII. What they did at Nanjing and other places in China was criminal and it is not detailed in school text books. Nor is making "comfort women" out of Korean women detailed.

Iris Chang wrote a very detailed account of what happened at Nanjing. If you get a chance you should read it.

Iris Chang's suicide stunned those she tried so hard to help -- the survivors of Japan's 'Rape of Nanking'

- Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, November 20, 2004



Nanjing, China -- When Iris Chang arrived here in the sweltering summer of 1995, locals were at once surprised and bemused that the sweet, ponytailed, young American planned to take on the darkest period in the city's modern history --

the 1937 wartime massacre when Japanese invaders killed some 300,000 people and raped, burned and pillaged the Chinese capital, then called Nanking, into ruins.

When she left a month later, historians, friends and colleagues were so impressed with her single-minded focus, they harbored little doubt the 27-year- old Bay Area writer would focus a global spotlight on what Chinese call the "Great Nanjing Massacre." They were right. When Chang's book, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," was published in 1997, it became an instant best-seller, generated international attention and reignited debate over Japan's responsibility for war crimes.

Chang, who lived in San Jose, shot herself to death Nov. 9 in her car, parked along a rural road south of Los Gatos. The news hit Nanjing fast and hard. This bustling city of 6 million glimmers with modern construction and growing wealth, but scars from the Japanese occupation linger barely beneath the surface. Many wonder if the gentle, sympathetic young woman, known here as Chang Shunru, was the massacre's latest victim.

"It all had such a huge impact on her mind," recalls Duan Yueping, then assistant curator of the Memorial Hall of the Nanking Massacre Victims, who worked every day with Chang, guiding her to massacre sites and through stacks of documents and photos.

Duan, a tough middle-aged woman who studied the Nanjing atrocities for years and considers herself a seasoned pro, still has nightmares from the stories she's heard and photos she's seen. Chang, she says, worked incessantly in Nanjing interviewing survivors, immersed in graphic pictures and documents, all the while agonizing over why the story was not widely known outside China. By the time she left Nanjing, Duan says, Chang was physically weak but even more committed to telling the story.

"The subject matter had to affect her. Perhaps she could not bear it," Duan says, her eyes filling with tears as she pulls out a picture of herself and Chang at a dinner in Nanjing.

"We just can't understand why such a great young writer and lovely person would leave the world so early," Duan says, shaking her head.

In her Nanjing book, Chang wrote: "My greatest hope is that this book will inspire other authors and historians to investigate the stories of the Nanking survivors before the last of the voices from the past, dwindling in number every year, are extinguished forever."

Two of the city's last living victims do know that Chang's work changed their lives.

Ni Cuiping was 11 years old when Japanese soldiers slaughtered her parents and six other family members, stabbed her repeatedly with a bayonet and left her for dead. There was no money or means for medical treatment during the siege, so she healed slowly and badly. Nearly 70 years later, her left shoulder is mangled from the stab wounds that left her whole arm underdeveloped and useless.

"My body is a witness to the Japanese atrocities," says Ni.

Chang's book -- the first widely published English-language history of the massacre -- brought global attention to the plight of survivors like Ni. Though there were extensive trials after the occupation ended, Japan paid no reparations and international politics kept the massacre under wraps for decades while survivors, many unable to work because of their disabilities and social stigma, languished in poverty. Chang videotaped their stories, wrote them down, and, most importantly, gave them a voice around the world.

"We wanted the whole world to know," says Ni, who visited San Francisco with Chang for a war-crimes conference in 2001.

Iris Chang has faded from the memory of Xia Shuqing. Her mind, especially this time of year, is occupied with other things. Xia was a girl of 7 when Japanese soldiers broke down her door, shot her father to death, raped and killed her mother, then murdered five other family members. She, too, was bayoneted repeatedly and left for dead. It all happened in December of 1937, and when winter approaches, it's difficult for Xia to think of other things.

"I was half-blind, I've cried so many times over these years," says Xia, her eyes welling.

Ni says that, at one time, she would shake with fear trying to speak of the Japanese invasion and the slaughter of her family. Because of the work of Chang and others, she and Xia feel strongly today and speak openly of their horrors. Though they are financially better off and more comfortable from donations and help after Chang's book, both women still want Japan to issue an official apology, something for which Iris Chang fought passionately.

Chang ended her life before she saw any apology; Japan has issued no formal statement regarding her death. Her loss has left another wound in Nanjing and across China. Her death made headlines nationwide, with newspapers referring to her in reverent tones as a modern-day heroine. In Nanjing, the city was abuzz, from taxi drivers to shopkeepers, about what may have led to such a sad ending for the "young warrior," named alongside NBA star Yao Ming as one of the most famous young Chinese today.

Besides giving international attention to a story that has long been a bruise on China's national psyche, Chang added immensely to the overall body of research about the Nanjing Massacre. Historian Sun Zhaiwei, a professor at the Jiangsu (Province) Academy of Social Sciences, was one of the first people to meet Chang in Nanjing. Sun noted that Chang uncovered the historically invaluable 2,000-page diaries of German John Rabe, a Nazi who saved tens of thousands of Chinese from certain slaughter by creating a Nanjing safety zone marshaled by the city's then-few expatriates.

Others can't help but compare Chang's fate with that of another American, Minnie Vautrin, who lived in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation and led a safe house effort that saved thousands of lives and thousands of Chinese women and girls from systematic rape by Japanese soldiers. In her book, Chang wrote how Vautrin returned to the United States and killed herself a year later, exhausted and haunted by the images of those she could not save.

Chang's close friend Ignatius Ding, a retired Cupertino engineer who sponsored some of her early research, said the parallels between Vautrin and Chang are strong. Both were deeply passionate and involved, both took the events to heart and both eventually collapsed under the weight. A Chinese garden in Norfolk, Va., that contains a memorial to Minnie Vautrin plans to add a memorial to Iris Chang, including her as the latest victim of the Nanjing Massacre.

Although Chang's work was dismissed as amateurish by some historians and Japanese scholars, Sun, considered one of China's foremost authorities on the Nanjing Massacre, said Chang's real contributions were invaluable.

"I could not believe it was true when I heard the news," says Sun, clutching a photo of himself and his daughter with Iris Chang in the United States. "I sincerely believe that her contributions to Nanjing and to world peace will always be with us."

In tribute to Chang, the victims' memorial hall in Nanjing held a service at the same time as her funeral in Los Altos on Friday. The stark memorial hall, filled with documents, photos and human remains, will add a wing next year dedicated to Iris Chang.

Memorial hall director Zhu Chengshan said Chang's book brought immense attention to the place, boosting international recognition and funding. The number of visitors each year to the hall, built near one of Nanjing's mass graves, has doubled to 1.2 million people since the book was published.

"We all think she contributed so much. Her spirit will never die, especially in this fight," says Zhu. "Her influence won't die."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...&type=printable

Nightmare in Nanking
By Sue De Pasquale
John Hopkins University
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Iris Chang was a young child when her parents first told her stories about a slaughter of the Chinese people so horrible as to be almost beyond belief. She recalls their voices quivering in outrage, as the two university scientists talked of Japanese soldiers slicing Chinese babies into thirds and fourths. Of Chinese men used for bayonet practice. Of pregnant women disemboweled, their fetuses killed.

What Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin Chang were describing for their young daughter was a bloodbath that has come to be known as "The Rape of Nanking"--an eight-week orgy of torture and killing that began in December 1937 and left an estimated 300,000 Chinese men, women, and children dead.

"It was hard for me to even visualize how bad it was because the stories seemed almost mythical--people being chopped into pieces, the Yangtze River running red with blood," says Chang (MA '91) today. Chang's maternal grandparents had escaped Nanking just a few weeks before the killing began; though her parents had not yet been born at the time, both grew up hearing stories of the atrocities--stories that they in turn passed down to their American-born children, Iris and Michael. "It was very painful for me to think about, even then," she says.

As a grade schooler, Iris visited her local library in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to see what she could find in the history books. She found nothing, and remembers thinking: If the Rape of Nanking truly was as gory as my parents have insisted, then why hasn't anyone written a book about it?

Two decades later, someone has. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (BasicBooks/HarperCollins, 1997), by Iris Chang, is due out in bookstores later this month--in time to mark the dark event's 60th anniversary. While Chang's book is not the first to be written on the subject, it is the first narrative history aimed at a mass American market. Advance reviews have been favorable: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes has described it as "a powerful, landmark book"; Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai, calls it a "gripping account" that has been "meticulously researched."

HarperCollins is looking for sales to exceed 70,000 copies, and Newsweek will run a lengthy excerpt from the book in its November 17 issue. Newsweek also purchased rights to run the excerpt in its Japanese and Korean language editions, and its English-language European editions, which means that after more than half a century of relative obscurity, the story of the Nanjing Datusha, or Great Nanjing Massacre, will reach millions of readers. (Chang refers to the city as "Nanking" in her writing and speech because that was its English name at the time of the massacre.)

To Chang, this last news may be the brightest spot to arise out of her labors to write about this somber chapter in history. "This is a book I really had to write," she says. "I wrote it out of a sense of rage. I didn't really care if I made a cent off of it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937."

As important, Chang says, is that the Japanese government be made to own up to the massacre. "This book is an attempt not only to alert the world to what happened, but to enable the Japanese to look into their consciences and decide what they're going to do about it as a nation," she says. "They have not yet apologized for what happened. They certainly haven't paid any reparations. They have not faced up to their responsibility in the way that the Germans were forced to do over, and over, and over."

ON MEETING IRIS CHANG for the first time in Sunnyvale, California, I'm struck by how young she seems--even younger than the 29 years I know her to be. She is tall and thin, with straight, black hair that she pulls back from her face in a ponytail. As she leads me through a sunny courtyard to her poolside apartment, she is sweet and chatty; it's not hard to see how she wound up a princess on the Homecoming Court during her undergraduate years at the University of Illinois. What's harder to picture is how she spent several years immersed in such horror.

Chang graduated from Illinois in 1989 with a degree in journalism. She did a summer internship for Associated Press and spent a year reporting for the Chicago Tribune before landing in the science writing program at Hopkins's Writing Seminars. There, to the envy of more experienced writers who have spent years trying to get their first book published, Chang landed a contract halfway through her one-year program. She was barely 23 years old.

The fact that Chang was fluent in Mandarin helped immensely, says Susan Rabiner, who was then an editor and vice president at Basic Books (a division of HarperCollins). Rabiner was looking for someone to write a book about a brilliant Chinese scientist who had been a pioneer of the American space age. Rabiner knew only part of his name--Tsien--and that he had been deported to China during the height of the Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Once back in China, to the United States' lasting chagrin, he went on to transform a primitive military culture into one able to deliver nuclear bombs intercontinentally.

Chang faced formidable obstacles in tackling research for the biography. For starters, Tsien Hsue-shen, who still lived in China, refused to cooperate. For another, much of the military information she needed to track down in both China and the U.S. was classified. Then there was the highly technical nature of her subject matter.

The result of her labors, Thread of the Silkworm (Basic Books), was published in 1995. The book was not a commercial success; fewer than 10,000 copies have been sold to date. But Silkworm earned positive mention in The Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Nature, Science, and a host of other publications, both scientific and mainstream. The reviewers uniformly praised the young writer for her solid research and engaging style.

Rabiner, who had taken a chance on Chang, was impressed with the result: "Iris is an indefatigable researcher--very thorough and tenacious. That's her strongest trait," says Rabiner.

When Chang approached Rabiner about doing her second book on the Rape of Nanking, timed to commemorate its 60th anniversary, Rabiner says she and Basic Book's then-publisher "jumped on it right away. We both knew this was going to be extremely big." As Chang remembers it, the deal was signed within a few hours.

Chang sips lemonade as we talk in her writing studio, which turns out to be a room in the modest two-bedroom apartment she shares with husband Brett Douglas, a young Silicon Valley engineer. Her desk holds two of the largest, circular Rolodexes I have ever seen. One bulges with all of her contacts for the Silkworm book, the other her contacts for Nanking, she explains. On the wall across from her desk is a map of the city of Nanking, circa 1936. On it she has used colored markers to delineate landmarks: a pink line denotes "Cheng's Road," a green line traces "Tang's Road." Until recently, the map also held photos depicting scenes of torture and killing, taped to the spot in the city where they occurred. Chang says her husband was more than a little relieved when she had to take the photos down to send off to her publisher.

Indeed, the story of what happened in the days and weeks after Chinese forces invaded the city of Nanking does not make for easy viewing--or reading. To piece the story together, Chang examined primary source materials in four different languages (with the help of translators): Chinese, Japanese, German, and English. She read diary accounts of American missionaries and medical workers who were in Nanking at the time. She looked at photos and film footage that had been smuggled out of China. She combed articles that appeared in Japanese, English, and American newspapers. She corresponded with a former Japanese soldier who had taken part in the massacre. She examined reams of U.S. and German military communications. And she spent more than a month in Nanking, touring massacre sites and interviewing Chinese survivors.




In the days after the Japanese invasion, Chinese soldiers and civilians were mowed down by machine guns, used in decapitation contests, and burned alive.
Photo courtesy Yale Divinity School Archives
The Japanese invasion of the Chinese capital of Nanking came at the midpoint of its war against China, which began in 1931 with the seizure of Manchuria and ended in 1945; during that period an estimated 10 million to 30 million Chinese perished, according to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and Chinese war historians.
As Chang lays it out, some 50,000 Japanese soldiers began smashing through the walls of Nanking in the pre-dawn hours of December 13, 1937. Carnage followed almost immediately, as tens of thousands of young Chinese men (both soldiers and civilians) were herded up and led to the outskirts of town, where they were mowed down by machine guns, used in bayonet practice and decapitation contests, or soaked with gasoline and burned alive. A Japanese military correspondent described one such orgy of killing this way: "Those in the first row were beheaded, those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded. The killing went on non-stop, from morning until night, but they were only able to kill 2,000 persons this way."

In the days and weeks that followed, Japanese soldiers raped more than 20,000 Chinese women (some estimates run as high as 80,000); many of these women, after being raped and abused by more than a dozen different men, were killed, while others were disemboweled, had their breasts sliced off, or were nailed alive to walls, Chang says. ("Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman," wrote one former Japanese soldier to Chang in recollection, "but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.") And the chilling list of atrocities goes on: Chang documents routine cases of live burial and castration, of fathers being forced to rape their own daughters as family members looked on. Japanese soldiers reportedly hung some people by their tongues on iron hooks, and buried others up to their waists, then watched as they were torn apart by German shepherds.




Thousands of Chinese were saved, thanks to the efforts of two dozen Westerners who set up an international safety zone. The zone was led by a humanitarian Nazi named John Rabe.
Photo courtesy Yale Divinity School Archives
Getting rid of all the bodies proved to be a monumental problem. One Japanese general complained in his diary that it was nearly impossible to find ditches large enough to dispose of 7,000 to 8,000 corpses at a time. Some soldiers attempted cremation, but ran out of gasoline and instead left mountains of smoldering corpses. Some ponds in the city actually disappeared because the bodies absorbed all the water. Chang says many of the bodies were dumped into the Yangtze River, lending credence to her parents' earlier stories of the Yangtze running red with blood.
The months that Chang spent documenting this horrific scenario took a physical and emotional toll. "I was weak during the whole time I was writing the book, and physically unwell during the month I spent in China," she says. "I lost weight and I lost hair. I got sick frequently. I was very unhappy."

During her month in Nanking in the summer of 1995, Chang visited mass execution sites, and videotaped interviews with a dozen or so survivors whom local historians had helped her track down. They were elderly and mostly poor, living in tiny airless apartments tucked into alleyways or high up in concrete skyscrapers.

On one such tape, an athletic-looking 83-year-old relates the amazing story of his escape from near-certain death, 60 years earlier. Tang Shunshan had been rounded up with other Chinese men and women and herded to the edge of a giant pit. As one Japanese soldier methodically made his way forward, slicing off prisoners' heads with his sword, other soldiers followed behind, picking up heads and tossing them into a pile as part of a killing contest. Luckily for Tang, when the man standing in front of him was beheaded, the momentum of the body caught Tang and sent them tumbling backward into the ditch. Tang hid himself under the man's body, and waited for over an hour as the contest continued. When it was over, one soldier stayed behind to bayonet the piles of bodies. Tang endured five bayonet wounds before fainting. Later in the day his friends found and rescued him.


"There were times when I really wanted to cry, but I couldn't," says Chang. "There had reached a point where there were no more tears."
In another interview, which Chang pops into her VCR to play while I'm there, a woman tearfully reads from a prepared statement. Chang translates for me as the woman shares her story, which is heartbreaking to watch and to hear. Liu Fonghua was only a year old when she was yanked from her father's arms before he was led away to be executed. Her mother, she says, never recovered. "Blood and tears were her life," Fonghua reads into the camera. "As soon as anyone mentions the Nanjing massacre, she couldn't help but cry uncontrollably and suffer headaches for a long time. I never saw her smile. Because my father's death was so brutal, and also because my mother endured hardship all her life-- hardship that was carved onto her very bones and seeped into the deepest recesses of her heart--my mother could never smile again." By the time Liu Fonghua finishes reading her statement, she is sobbing so hard she can barely talk. Tears drip from her chin.
Chang turns off the television set, and we sit in silence for several minutes, drained. Meeting the massacre's survivors face to face, she says quietly, was both the best part of her trip, and the worst. "There were times when I really wanted to cry, but I couldn't. It had reached a point in me where there were no more tears."

From the outset of the project, Chang knew she did not want to fill her book with one atrocity after another. So in addition to examining the massacre itself, she also deals with such questions as, What could have motivated the Japanese soldiers--many of them still boys--to behave so heinously? "I wanted to probe the forces by which a government could turn non-violent people into killing machines," she says. "I'm intrigued by the potential for good and evil in our society."

In her book, Chang posits several theories to explain how the Nanking atrocities could have transpired. Some scholars believe the seeds for violence were sown by the brutal, humiliating way in which Japanese officers and soldiers were treated by their higher-ups. When these same soldiers were given the power of life or death over the Chinese, says Chang, "it is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted." Exacerbating the situation was the contempt that the Japanese held for the Chinese--the product of decades of propaganda and social indoctrination. Chang says that for many Japanese soldiers, murdering a "sub-human" Chinese was akin to squashing a bug or butchering a hog. Religion also played a factor, she believes. The Japanese imperial army considered itself to be on a holy mission--that it was Japan's destiny to control all of Asia.




For the Japanese soldiers, getting rid of all the bodies proved to be a real problem, Chang says. Some ponds actually disappeared because the corpses absorbed all the water.
Photo courtesy Yale Divinity School Archives
But while The Rape of Nanking does plumb the depths of man's inhumanity against man, it also offers a few, shining moments of redemption. While hundreds of thousands of Chinese met their deaths that winter of 1937-38, thousands of others were saved--largely due to the heroic efforts of two dozen Western foreigners who were living in Nanking at the time. They maintained a two-and-a-half-square-mile wide "international safety zone," which at its height served 250,000 Chinese refugees.
The safety zone leaders were an odd assortment of individuals, seemingly ill-equipped to stand up against the carnage they saw going on around them: American and German missionaries, businessmen, doctors, and professors. Perhaps the most unlikely hero of them all was a humanitarian Nazi by the name of John Rabe. Chang has dubbed him the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking."

Chang knew the barest details about Rabe from her early research: that he was an executive with Siemens Company and head of the Nanking chapter of the Nazi party; that he had led the safety zone and risked his life to save thousands of others. But what happened to Rabe once he left Nanking in February 1938? There the trail went cold. For historians, the remainder of his life was a mystery. Chang set to work digging. After ascertaining that Rabe had been born in Hamburg, she wrote to a well-connected friend of a friend there, who put her in touch with Rabe's granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt. From Reinhardt, the young historiographer received the surprise of her life: John Rabe had kept a detailed 1,200-page diary chronicling the Nanking atrocities. Reinhardt's family was willing to go public with it.

News of the existence of the Rabe diary hit big. The New York Times devoted an entire page to it last December, and the story was picked up by ABC, CNN, and other media. In the Times article, William C. Kirby, a professor of modern Chinese history at Harvard, called the diary "an incredibly gripping and depressing narrative... that will reopen this case in a very important way."

In his diary, Rabe writes with riveting detail about being on call day and night to stop rapes in progress, of providing safe haven to hundreds of Chinese women in his backyard, of delivering rice amid gunfire. To the Chinese he became "the living Buddha of Nanking"--the man who gave new mothers in the safety zone a gift of $10 for each new son and $9.50 for each new daughter. ("Girls in China aren't worth as much as boys," he would write in explanation to Adolph Hitler.)

Chang has no qualms about describing Rabe as a humanitarian, despite his clear loyalty to the Nazi party. She believes his ardor for the party was based on its socialist program, and that Rabe was unaware of Hitler's intent to commit genocide against the Jews. "Rabe was isolated from what was happening in Germany because he had spent most of his adult life in China," she notes.

Rabe did not receive a hero's welcome after he returned to Germany in April 1938, as Chang learned through her correspondence with Reinhardt. Now in her late 60s, Reinhardt was seven years old when her grandfather returned to Berlin. She remembers the ensuing years well.

Rabe's initial efforts to publicize the Nanking Massacre through lectures and public appearances were quickly cut short by the German government, which was trying to become friendly with Japan. The Gestapo arrived at his doorstep one day, then interrogated him for hours, making it clear he should keep quiet about what he had witnessed in China. After the war, Rabe was arrested and interrogated first by the Soviets and later by the British. By the winter of 1946, the city of Berlin was in shambles, and food was scarce. The Rabe family was on the brink of starvation, reduced to eating acorn soup and weeds. That spring, Rabe petitioned to become "de-nazified," citing in his own defense that he had been unaware of Nazi atrocities while in China; while he eventually won the suit, the humiliating legal wranglings he endured left him penniless and broken, Reinhardt says.

When those in Nanking heard about what had happened to Rabe, the Chinese responded in what Chang describes as "It's a Wonderful Life" fashion. They raised $100 million Chinese dollars (about $2,000 U.S. dollars in 1948), and sent bundles of much-needed food to Rabe and his family every month until China fell to the Communists in 1949. The outpouring of support, John Rabe has said, restored his faith in humanity. In 1950, he died from a stroke.

There is interest on the part of filmmakers in doing a movie about John Rabe's life. Chang has already been interviewed for several documentaries, and been contacted by a London filmmaker who is eager to produce an epic movie. "It would be so gratifying to me if my book eventually did inspire some filmmaker to do a truly good movie about the Rape of Nanking," she says. "I want the world to know what happened. I don't want these victims to be erased from history the way their lives were erased."

HOW DID IT HAPPEN that an event of such magnitude as the Rape of Nanking was relegated to obscurity? Chang examined high school history textbooks throughout the United States and found that only a handful even mentioned the massacre. The American Heritage Picture History of World War II, for years the best-selling pictorial history of the war, contains nary a word nor a picture about the atrocities in Nanking.

Cold War politics was largely to blame, Chang says. "Suddenly, in the 1950s, the two Chinas [the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China] both needed Japan as an ally against each other, so neither one of them really aggressively pushed the issue." In fact, Chinese citizens who stirred things up by lobbying for reparations risked being punished by their own government--a situation that continues today, Chang says. "There were people who ended up losing their jobs, and losing their pensions, and they've been thrown in prison," she says.

During the Cold War, the United States also was loath to risk alienating Japan, because it considered its former enemy an important ally in Asia against the twin Soviet threats of China and the USSR. Within the United States the Asian presence was not what it is today, thus attention tended to focus more on the European side of World War II. While American Jews were successful in drawing attention to the story of their Holocaust, their Chinese-American counterparts were much less successful in telling their story. Chang believes that's partly because most Cold War Chinese ŽmigrŽs to the U.S. were like her parents: scientists--not writers, historians, or filmmakers, who would have an inclination and the necessary venues to get the word out and muster outrage.

Chang also believes there has been a tendency on the part of some Americans to view the Japanese as victims of World War II. "It's hard for people to see them as aggressors because we have such compelling images of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Those images are so gripping that they occupy more space in the public consciousness than images of Pearl Harbor," she says. Relocation camps, which were set up within the U.S. during the war and held Japanese-Americans against their will, further contribute to their "victim" status, she says.

Within Japan, information about the massacre has always been closely guarded by the government, Chang says. The result is that many Japanese know little--if anything--about it. In the Japanese propaganda blitz that began days after the invasion, Japanese-controlled newspapers in China reported that the Chinese had gone back to their homes and businesses, that Japanese soldiers were playing joyfully with local children, and that peace and order reigned.

"The level of ignorance about World War II throughout Japan is appalling," says Chang, shaking her head. One Japanese psychology professor she talked to said he's been asked by more than one puzzled college student: Who won the war? "Right now in Germany, it is against the law not to teach about the Holocaust. I think something similar should have been implemented in Japan decades ago," Chang says. "Even the media is involved in an unspoken code of silence on this. It's alarming to me how much suppression is still going on."

Last winter, she got a call from the Los Angeles bureau chief of Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading liberal paper. Kazumi Mizumoto wanted to break the story about the Rabe diary to the paper's 8 million readers, so he flew to Sunnyvale to interview her. Afterward, she said, "He had unbelievable difficulties getting the story published."

Mizumoto, who has since resigned from the paper, says his editors were "too prudent and cautious" about running the story because of pressure from Japan's right-wing scholars and journalists. That movement's main focus, he says, "has been to praise and justify what Japan has done" during modernization. After Mizumoto's interview with Chang, his editor insisted he fly to Berlin to interview Ursula Reinhardt in order to have an airtight case. The story eventually ran, but Mizumoto lost his "scoop," and the article did not appear on the front page as he had expected.

"Later," he says, "one of my colleagues told me that there was a tacit understanding among the editors and upper bureaucrats of the Asahi not to publish stories on the Nanking Massacre on the front page unless there are some outstanding historical findings," he says. "They did not regard the existence of the diary and the report by Rabe as an outstanding historical document."


"There are people [in Japan] who are denying that the [massacre] happened, and the government supports the practice of enshrining them," she says.
Beyond the issue of suppression within the media, says Chang, there is the denial on the part of right-wing scholars and government officials. When Chang shifts the conversation to this subject, her earlier sunniness disappears. She is angry, and it shows. "There are people who are openly denying that the [Rape of Nanking] happened, and the government supports the practice of enshrining them," she says, her voice taking on an edge. "It's like building a cathedral in the memory of Hitler, and worshipping statues of Hitler as God."
What would Chang like to see from the Japanese? She responds without hesitation. "First and foremost, a sincere apology from the prime minister, issued on behalf of the entire government, for what happened in Nanking and elsewhere in China. At a minimum, they should put in their textbooks a true accounting of what happened. They also need to open up their archives to scholars. And Japan definitely should be paying reparations for [the massacre]."

Interest in the Nanking massacre has risen markedly in the last few years; that's partially due to the efforts of a new generation of Chinese-Americans--activists who are intent on getting the word out through books, documentaries, and symposiums. Later this month, Princeton University will host an international conference on the Rape of Nanking; Chang will be there to talk about Japanese suppression of information about the massacre and to share new material (diaries and letters) that she unearthed during her research.

Though her book is now finished, Iris Chang has absorbed the pain and horror of the Nanking massacre in a way that is hard to set neatly aside. She's thought hard about channeling her passion into activism, but ultimately has decided to move on with her writing. There are other stories that need to be told.

"Political activism is a full-time job, and I see myself primarily as a writer and a scholar," Chang says. "Over time, I may have more impact on the world, I think, as a writer of books and articles than I could ever have as a political activist."

Sue De Pasquale is the magazine's editor.


http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/1197web/nanking.html

The Comfort Women Project

Chunghee Sarah Soh, Ph.D.
San Francisco State University



This ongoing project examines the issue of Comfort Women in the context of violence against women and the patriarchal sexual culture and militarism. Comfort women are the young females of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army before and during the Second World War. Field research for this project has been carried out in Korea,1 Japan,2, New York City and the National Archives in Washington D.C.3, and The Netherlands 4. Some of the findings of this research have been published in Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Korea Journal, International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter, Peace Review, Social Science Japan Journal, Women's Studies International Forum, four entries in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, twenty-one papers presented to professional meetings, and twenty-two invited lectures. Three papers are available for on-line viewing at the website of the Institute for Corean-American Studies: Japan's Responsibility Toward Comfort Women Survivors, which originally appeared as Working Paper No. 77 for the Japan Policy Research Institute; Human Dignity and Sexual Culture: A Reflection on the "Comfort Women" Issues; and Human Rights and Humanity: The Case of the "Comfort Women." Parts of the following text have been excerpted from the article in Korea Journal.



Some Background on the Comfort Women Issue


s Alice said, we should begin at the beginning. However, as Foucault implies, what constitutes the beginning depends upon one's point of view. Rashomon-like, Japanese, Koreans, Americans, and the other parties to the Second World War have very different views of the course of that horrific period. Likewise, feminists, masculinists, nationalists, have very different views of the comfort women issue. One important purpose of this project is to gather, analyze, and attempt to understand as much information as is possible about comfort women and attitudes toward comfort women before time precludes the possibility of conversing with the principals, 5 and before history is too-much sifted through the sieve of selective memory.


The comfort women, which is a translation of the Japanese euphemism, jugun ianfu, (military comfort women), categorically refers to women of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances who became sexual laborers for the Japanese troops before and during the Second World War. Countless women had to labor as comfort women in the military brothels found throughout the vast Asia Pacific region occupied by the Japanese forces. There is no way to determine precisely how many women were forced to serve as comfort women. The estimate ranges between 80,000 and 200,000, about 80 % of whom, it is believed, were Korean. Japanese women and women of other occupied territories (such as Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma and the Pacific islands) were also used as comfort women.


The Japanese rationale for the comfort system was to enhance the morale of the military by providing amenities for recreational sex. The authorities believed such amenities would help prevent soldiers from committing random sexual violence toward women of occupied territories, which became a real concern after the infamous Nanjing Massacre in 1937 6. Besides its reputation, the military authorities were also concerned with the health of the troops, which prompted their close supervision of the hygienic conditions in the comfort stations in order to help keep sexually transmitted diseases under control.


When the war ended, the only military tribunal concerning the sexual abuse of comfort women took place in Batavia (today's Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia) in 1948. The Batavia trial convicted several Japanese military officers for having forced into comfort stations the 35 Dutch women mentioned in the case. However, the same trial completely ignored similar ordeals suffered by native Indonesians and women of other ethnic backgrounds. The photo at the left shows two of the surviving Dutch ex-comfort women participating in the monthly demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Den Haag, The Netherlands, September 18, 1998. The demonstration is organized by the Foundation for Japanese Honorary Debts, a non-govermental organization of the Dutch civilian internees, forced laborers, and POWs in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) during the Japanese occupation (1942-1945).


In Korea the comfort women issue began to emerge only in the late 1980s. The international community began to hear about the comfort women issue from December 1991, when a number of Koreans, including three former comfort women, filed a class action suit against the Japanese government on behalf of former soldiers, paramilitary, and bereaved families demanding compensation for the violation of human rights of certain categories of Koreans under Japanese colonial rule. A major political impact of the lawsuit has been widening the bi-national dispute into the universalistic issue of women's human rights.


The responses of the governments of Korea and Japan: It was the complete denial by a Japanese official at a Diet session in June 1990 of any governmental involvement in the recruitment of comfort women that spurred the formation of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter referred to as the Korean Council) in November 1990. The Korean Council then sent an open letter to the Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki, which listed the following six demands:

That the Japanese government admit the forced draft of Korean women as comfort women;
That a public apology be made for this;
That all barbarities be fully disclosed;
That a memorial be raised for the victims;
That the survivors or their bereaved families be compensated;
That these facts be continuously related in historical education so that such misdeeds are not repeated.



The Japanese response on the six demands in April 1991 was that there was no evidence of the forced draft of Korean women, and hence no public apology, disclosure, nor memorial were forthcoming. The Japanese reply pointed out that all claims of compensation between Japan and South Korea had been settled by the 1965 treaty, and that "textbooks would 'continue' to reflect Japan's regret for aggression against the rest of Asia." Angry reaction brought about further action on the part of the Korean Council and the efforts of the women's groups reached a turning point in August 1991 when Kim Hak Sun 7 (photo right) became the first Korean woman to give public testimony to her life as a comfort woman. The December 1991 lawsuit mentioned above has attracted the attention of the worldwide media about the hitherto hidden chapter on the role of comfort women in the history of the Second World War.


The documents Yoshimi Yoshiaki, (photo left) a history professor, retrieved at the Library of the National Institute for Defence and his writing about them in the January 11, 1992 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, a major daily newspaper, forced the Japanese government to admit the involvement of the state in the operation of comfort stations. Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi expressed his regret and apologies during his state visit to South Korea in January 1992. While still ruling out any compensation for the comfort women, the prime minister indicated that some measure 'in lieu of compensation' would be considered after receiving the report of fact finding committees being set up in South Korea and Japan, respectively. A woman freelance journalist in Japan criticized that Miyazawa's apologies were ill-conceived because the comfort system was a necessary evil to be adopted in war zones to avoid harm to local women. She further questioned the political and economic motivation of the sudden prominence of the issue.


The Japanese report, Results of Investigation into the Question of 'Military Comfort Women' Originating from the Korean Peninsula, which was published on July 6, 1992, was based on 127 documents, including those first found by Professor Yoshimi. These documents came mostly from the Self-Defence Agency and the Foreign Ministry, and those from the Foreign Ministry demonstrated much wider official involvement in the comfort system than could be attributed to the arbitrary initiative of the Armed Forces alone. The fact that there were no relevant documents released from the Police Agency or the Labor Ministry, the two agencies most implicated in the forced recruitment of women, was a source of much criticism on the shortcomings of the scope of the investigations. The Justice Ministry was not even included in the investigation even though it was known to have the full records of all war crimes trials, including the Dutch cases.


The South Korean government's report, Interim Report of the Fact-Finding Investigation on Military Comfort Women under Japanese Imperialism, was published on July 31, 1992. It consisted of a survey of the reports by the Japanese government and the United States Army, respectively, and a summary of representative testimonies given by the survivors who registered at the Victim Report Centers set up in two cities. The report also included criticism of the Japanese report for lacking comprehensive coverage as to the establishment and management of the comfort stations.


The North Korean report, An Indictment: The Japanese Government Must Fully Establish the Truth on the 'Military Comfort Women' Question and Sincerely Apologize, was issued on September 1, 1992. It included life stories of North Korean survivors and attacked the Japanese government report for claiming to have no evidence of recruitment by coercion. North Korea, which had become involved in the comfort women issue from the time of Miyazawa's visit to South Korea in January 1992, supports for North Korean survivors to be compensated by Japan on the same principle as had applied to the atomic bomb victims.



The Korean Council conveyed its reaction to the Japanese report in an open letter to Prime Minister Miyazawa in October 1992. The letter described the report as a mere enumeration of data and expressed a strong opposition to the establishment of a relief fund for former comfort women being considered by the Japanese government It urged Japan to first clear up the comfort women issue and wartime and post-war responsibility before seeking to be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. (Photo left shows the anthropologist with Lee Hyo-Chae, a co-representative on the Korean Council.)


The Japanese government admitted deception, coercion and official involvement in the recruitment of comfort women in a supplementary report issued in August 1993.



Some observers predicted the Japanese admission of the use of coercion in the recruitment of the comfort women to be the beginning of the end of the comfort women as a live issue. Unfortunately, the comfort women issue is still contentiously alive today. In fact, it is ironic that the focus of the public debate in Japan during the spring and summer of 1997 was precisely on the issue of the coerced recruitment of comfort women. The nationalist conservatives in Japan assert that there is no evidence for coercive recruitment of comfort women by the military or the state. Moreover, the controversy over the methods of compensation for the survivors continues. For example, the Korean government issued in July 1997 a notification to Usuki Keiko (photo right) that she would be denied entry to South Korea for her actions taken on behalf of the Asian Women's Fund (AWF) to pay the "atonement money" to the seven former Korean comfort women. From the Korean perspective, acceptance of such money allows Tokyo to avoid legal responsibility fot the state's complicity in establishing and maintaining the comfort women system.


Notes
1. This research was supported by a travel grant from the Association for Asian Studies, Northeast Asia Council.
2. This research was supported by a Faculty Development Grant from San Francisco State University, and by a Japan Foundation Fellowship at the University of Tokyo.
3. This research was supported by a travel grant from the Association for Asian Studies, Northeast Asia Council.
4. This research is being supported by a Senior Visiting Fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University.
5. For example, the week this page was first posted the following item appeared in Time, September 1, 1997 (Page 25):
Died. MARIA ROSA HENSON, 69, the first Filipina to reveal that she had served as a sex slave for Japanese soldiers during World War II; of a heart attack; in Manila. One of 46 "comfort women" who filed suit against Japan in 1993, Henson was among the few who accepted compensation from a private fund and a letter of apology from Japan's Prime Minister.

These photos of a table honoring Maria Rosa Henson were taken by the anthropologist at the meeting of a Japanese non - governmental organization in support of the lawsuit brought by the Filipina former comfort women: Tokyo, September, 1997.


6. Estimates from various sources suggest that up to as many as 20,000 women were raped, and some 300,000 people died at the hands of Japanese troops at Nanjing (Nanking). As Calvocoressi & Wint wrote:
The ferocity of the Japanese at Nanking amazed the world. The massacre was done for the most part by Japanese conscripts, unfamiliar with war, perhaps neurotically working out of their system the extreme repressions in which they had passed so much of their lives. Some Japanese officers in other centres wept with shame and indignation when they heard the details of the ravage.
The effect was profound in other countries of the world. At first the news of the outrage was censored, but ultimately it got into the world press. Anxious though they were to avert their gaze from Asia, because of the preoccupations in Europe, the countries of the West turned their attention to Nanking, and were appalled by seeing a foretaste of what might soon be everywhere. From then on, the Japanese army was held to be uncivilized, savage and terrible.

Calvocoressi, Peter, & Guy Wint. Total War Volume II:The War in Asia. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. (Page 89.)

7. In 1995 Kim Hak Sun told the anthropologist that she thought the Japanese tactics would be to stall the legal proceedings until all the litigants were dead 8. Her words proved tragically prophetic in that the litigation was still pending at the time of her death. She died on December 16, 1997, at the Ewha Womans University Hospital in Seoul. She left all her savings to Tongdaemun Methodist Church in Seoul to help people who were less fortunate than she was. Her funeral procession was routed to pass in front of the Japanese Embassy, where it halted for a symbolic demonstration of her struggle against the Japanese government 9.
8. Soh, Chunghee Sarah. 1996. "The Korean 'Comfort Women': Movement for Redress." Asian Survey 36 (12): 1226-1240.
9. Han'guk Ilbo, December 18, 1997.


Project Publications, Papers and Lectures
Publications
Soh, C. S., "Japan's Responsibility for Comfort Women Survivors," Working Paper No. 77, Japan Policy Research Institute, May, 2001a.
This paper is available on-line at the ICAS web site.
- Prostitutes versus Sex Slaves: The Politics of Representing the "Comfort Women." In The Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, Margaret Stetz and Bonnie Oh, eds. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., pp. 69-87, 2001c.
- Centering the Korean "Comfort Women" Survivors Critical Asian Studies 33(4): 603-608, 2001d
- From Imperial Gifts to Sex Slaves: Theorizing Symbolic Representations of the "Comfort Women." Social Science Japan Journal 3(1): 59-76, 2000a. [ Return ]
- Human Rights and the "Comfort Women." Peace Review 12(1): 123-129, 2000b. [ Return ]
- Individuelle versus kollective Rechte: Die uberlebeden Zwangsprostituierten [Individual versus Collective Human Rights: The case of Korean " Comfort Women" Survivors]. Korea Forum 9 (1): 6-9. 1999. (An invited contribution, translated into German by Dr. Roland Wein, The editor).
- Japan's Comfort Women. International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter 18: 33, (February, 1999). [ Return ]
- The Problem of "Comfort Women": The Intersections of Gender, Sexuality,Class, Ethnicity, and the State. In Cross-Cultural Communication East and West in the 90's. B. L. Hoffer and J. H. Koo, eds, pp. 83-87. San Antonio, TX: Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, 1998.
- "Uncovering the Truth about the 'Comfort Women.'" Review Article of Hicks, George, The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War; Howard, Keith, ed., True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women; Ruff-O'Herne, Jan, 50 Years of Silence. Women's Studies International Forum 21 (4): 451-454 (1998). [ Return ]
- "Sexual Slavery (Japanese Military);" "The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan;" "Yun Chong-ok;" "Kim Hak-sun." Four entries in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ABC Clio, (1997). [ Return ]
- "Review of Hicks, George, The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War." Korea Journal 37(2): 136-141. (1997) [ Return ]
- The Korean "Comfort Women": Movement for Redress. Asian Survey, 36(12):1227-1240, 1996. [ Return ]
Papers Presented to Professional Meetings
Soh, C. S., "Sexual Enslavement and Reproductive Health among 'Comfort Women' Survivors." Paper presented at the American