Guess Hu's Coming for Dinner?

Aug 25, 2005; Commentary by Mata Press Service

If you are judged by the company you keep, then Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has friends in some very low places.

Come September, hundreds of thousands of your Canadian tax dollars will be spent to protect and serve China‘s president, Hu Jintao, who will stop in Vancouver for a state dinner and another yet-to-be-determined function.

The B.C. stop, planned for Sept. 17, will cap Hu‘s first visit to North America since he became president of the world‘s most populous country in 2003. Martin and his “federal sources“ have been feeding the media with comments about how great this visit is going to be for B.C.

It will highlight B.C.‘s role in Canada‘s efforts to forge strong links with its second-largest trading partner, said a government official. Another piped that Vancouver offers North America‘s closest major deep-water port and international airport to China.

What is being glossed over and hidden is the fact that Hu ranks as one of the world's worst dictators alongside the likes of his friends Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Burma and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Let‘s help you to get to know Hu, the man who oversees the gross human rights violations in a pariah regime.

Hu the son of a family of Shanghai tea merchants, was always the class monitor through school, says his biographer Ma Ling, a Beijing journalist whose book is published only in Hong Kong and Taiwan and not mainland China.

He seems to have attracted powerful mentors since, first at Beijing‘s elite technological university Tsinghua, where he studied to be a hydro-electric engineer, and then inside the party. Over 12 years, he rose steadily to important jobs in Gansu‘s economic planning agency, before a patron pulled him back to Beijing where he quickly became head of the Communist Youth League and then a provincial party secretary in impoverished Guizhou in China‘s south-west.

In 1988, Hu was transferred to run Tibet as party secretary, and by the time he arrived in Lhasa the city was erupting as Tibetans rebelled against Chinese rule. His job was to handle the “dirty work“ of crushing separatist agitation and Hu arranged to bring 170,000 extra troops into Tibet and declare martial law in 1989 as proof of his commitment to Beijing.

Around the same time, the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing were broken up by troops. Between 1,000 and 2,600 protesters were killed. Terrorists did not kill them; their own government did. The Chinese government later confirmed that over 2,500 demonstrators had been arrested, though other estimates were as high as 4,000. Beijing has still not accounted for those killed, injured or imprisoned.

Hu was among the first communist provincial secretaries to express support for the crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement. The People‘s Republic of China, led by the benign looking Hu, has an appalling human rights record. It tortures and ill-treats prisoners. It conducts more executions than all other countries combined. It carries out forced abortions and sterilizations on women.

It continues to persecute the people of Tibet. It tramples on the rights of political activists. It represses the rights of workers and stops people freely expressing their religious and spiritual beliefs.

So what does our leader of a thriving democracy do? He rolls out the red carpet for the leader of an evil regime.

Amnesty International reported that China executed more people in ther past three years than all other countries combined. Estimates range as high as 20,000 executions per year.

A US Congress human rights committee has heard evidence of the horrifying practice of organ harvesting from executed prisoners. Skin, corneas, kidneys and other tissues were harvested and sold for profit.

Now China is deliberately cloning human embryos to experiment on them.

Apparently there‘s good news on executions in China, according to an Australian report. The Chinese Government‘s official Human Rights magazine offers the reassurance that “the transition from firing squad to lethal injection means the elevation of the degree of human civilisation and social progress."

Lethal injection apparently can reduce “the psychological and physiological pains added to the condemned in the deprivation of life. This is no doubt a respectfor human rights.” Go figure.

China carries out violence against women through the most barbaric population control policy in the world. Forced sterilization, forced abortion, forced fitting of IUDs, female foeticide and infanticide and sex selection are the result.

According to Chinese Government statistics, 230,000 Chinese citizens are incarcerated inre-education-through-labour camps. China has 20 high-security psychiatric hospitals run by theMinistry of Public Security. A number of dissidents are jailed in these hospitals.

Martin and his predecessors have always been lured by China‘s might and money telling Canadians it is better to engage the dragon in constructive relations to serve the national security interests of both nations.