User:Cerejota/chinese-apartheid

A number of authors have use the words "apartheid" or "apartheid-like" in descriptions of various practices in the People's Republic of China. The practices so described include China's hukou system of residency permits,  and the treatment of Tibetans, foreigners, and ethnic and religious minorities.

Treatment of rural workers
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China's hukou system of residency permits, introduced in the 1950s, has effectively discriminated against China's 800 million rural peasants for decades, and has been described as "China's apartheid".

In November 2005 Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, said this system has been "one of the most strictly enforced 'apartheid' social structures in modern world history." He stated "Urban dwellers enjoy a range of social, economic and cultural benefits while peasants, the majority of the Chinese population, are treated as second-class citizens."Commenting on reports that abolition was proposed in 11 (of 23) provinces, mainly along the developed eastern coast, he added that such measures were long overdue. The law has already been changed such that migrant workers no longer faced summary arrest, after a widely publicised incident in 2003, when a university-educated migrant died in Guangdong province. This particular scandal was exposed by a Beijing law lecturer, Mr Xu, who claims it spelt the end of the hukou system. He further believes that, at least in most smaller cities, the system had already been abandoned. Mr Xu continued: "Even in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it has almost lost its function".

The discrimination enforced by the hukou system became particularly onerous in the 1980s after hundreds of millions of migrant laborers were forced out of state corporations and co-operatives. The system classifies workers as "urban" or "rural", and attempts by workers classified as "rural" to move to urban centers were tightly controlled by the Chinese bureaucracy, which enforced its control by denying access to essential goods and services such as grain rations, housing, and health care, and by regularly closing down migrant workers' private schools. The hukuo system also enforced pass laws similar to those in South Africa, with "rural" workers requiring six passes to work in provinces other than their own, and periodic police raids which rounded up those without permits, placed them in detention centers, and deported them. As in South Africa, the restrictions placed on the mobility of migrant workers were pervasive, and transient workers were forced to live a precarious existence in company dormitories or shanty towns, and suffering abusive consequences. Anita Chan argues that, like South Africa under apartheid, China's hukou system was primarily a means of regulating and exploiting cheap labor.

David Whitehouse divides what he describes as "Chinese apartheid" into three distinct phases: The first phase occurred during the state capitalist phase of China's economy, from around 1953 to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The second "neoliberal" phase lasted from 1978 to 2001, and the third lasted from 2001 to the present. During the first phase, the exploitation of rural labor, the passbook system, and in particular the non-portable rights associated with one's status, created what Whitehouse calls "an apartheid system". As with South Africa, the ruling party made some concessions to rural workers to make life in rural areas "survivable... if not easy or pleasant". During the second phase, as China transitioned from state capitalism to market capitalism, export-processing zones were created in city suburbs, where mostly female migrants worked under oppressive sweatshop conditions. The third phase was characterized by the weakening of the hukou controls; by 2004 the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture counted over 100 million people registered as "rural" working in cities.

Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan, and Zhang Ping of the Committee for Asian Women argue this system oppresses women more severely than men, and see seven distinct elements giving rise to what they describe as "[t]he regime of spatial and social apartheid" which keeps rural Chinese in their subordinate status: They agree that the gradual relaxation of some of the more repressive aspects of the hukou system since the mid-1990s has largely eliminated the spatial aspect of the apartheid; for example, workers can now buy one year permits to reside in cities, and since 2003 the police no longer jail and deport people who lack local hukou passes. However, they point out the still-hereditary nature of the hukou system, and state that the "substance of the social apartheid in general and the hukou system in particular remains intact." Migrant workers are permanently marked as outsiders and remain second-class citizens, and are denied access to good jobs or upward mobility, thus forcing their eventual return to their place of origin.
 * 1) The repressive regime at the factory level;
 * 2) the paramilitary forces at local level;
 * 3) the ‘local protectionism’ of local governments;
 * 4) the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the local press;
 * 5) the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the branches of ACFTU;
 * 6) pro-government local courts; and
 * 7) the discriminatory hukou system.

Whitehouse sees the analogy to South Africa's apartheid system breaking down in two areas: First, under a system called xia fang, or "sending down", individuals or even entire factories of urban workers were sometimes re-classified as rural workers and sent to live in the countryside (at lower wages and benefits). By contrast, white workers in South Africa were never sent to work in Bantustans. Second, the ideology driving China's apartheid system was Maoism, not racism, as is South African apartheid. Anita Chan agrees with Whitehouse on this point, noting that while the hukou system shares many of the characteristics of the South African apartheid system, including its underlying economic logic, the racial element is not present.

The Chinese Ministry of Public Security justified these practices on the grounds that they assisted the police in tracking down criminals and maintaining public order, and provided demographic data for government planning and programs.

Apartheid "pass system" in treatment of migrant workers
According to Peter Alexander, China's export-oriented growth has been based on the labor of poorly paid and treated migrant workers, using a pass system similar to the one used in South Africa's apartheid, in which massive abuses of human rights have been observed.

An article in The Washington Times, reported in 2000 that although migrants laborers play an important part in spreading wealth in Chinese villages, they are treated "like second-class citizens by a system so discriminatory that it has been likened to apartheid." Another author making similar comparison is Anita Chan, who suggests that China's household registration and temporary residence permit system has created a situation analogous to the passbook system in apartheid South Africa, which were designed to regulate the supply of cheap labor.

The embassy of China in South Africa posted a letter to the editor of The Star dated February 22, 2007, under the title Article on China presents racism rumours as fact, in which a reader stated that "It's pure incitement to proclaim 'Chinese apartheid' in reference to migrant labour being kept out of the cities."

Treatment of Tibetans
In 1991 the Dalai Lama alleged that Chinese settlers in Tibet were creating "Chinese Apartheid":

"The new Chinese settlers have created an alternate society: a Chinese apartheid which, denying Tibetans equal social and economic status in our own land, threatens to finally overwhelm and absorb us."

In a selection of speeches by the Dalia Lama published in India in 1998, he refers again to a "Chinese apartheid" which he believes denies Tibetans equal social and economic status, and furthers the viewpoint that human rights are violated by discrimination against Tibetans under a policy of apartheid, which the Chinese call "segregation and assimilation"

A report by the Heritage Foundation discussed some of the reasons for the use of this term:

"If the matter of Tibet's sovereignty is murky, the question about the PRC's treatment of Tibetans is all too clear. After invading Tibet in 1950, the Chinese communists killed over one million Tibetans, destroyed over 6,000 monasteries, and turned Tibet's northeastern province, Amdo, into a gulag housing, by one estimate, up to ten million people. A quarter of a million Chinese troops remain stationed in Tibet. In addition, some 7.5 million Chinese have responded to Beijing's incentives to relocate to Tibet; they now outnumber the 6 million Tibetans. Through what has been termed Chinese apartheid, ethnic Tibetans now have a lower life expectancy, literacy rate, and per capita income than Chinese inhabitants of Tibet."

In 2001 representatives of Tibet succeeded in gaining accreditation at a United Nations-sponsored meeting of non-governmental organizations. On August 29 Jampal Chosang, the head of the Tibetan coalition, stated that China had introduced "a new form of apartheid" in Tibet because "Tibetan culture, religion, and national identity are considered a threat" to China. The Tibet Society of the UK has called on the British government to "condemn the apartheid regime in Tibet that treats Tibetans as a minority in their own land and which discriminates against them in the use of their language, in education, in the practice of their religion, and in employment opportunities."

These tensions have spilled over into the tourist industry. According to Peter Neville-Hadley: "Hotels practice a form of apartheid. Han-run hotels overcharge foreigners and don't want your business. Equally perverse are Tibetan-run hotels with signage only in English, sending a clear message to Han would-be patrons."

Africans
For decades African students in China have been treated with hostility and prejudice. Their complaints regarding their treatment were largely ignored until 1988-9, when "students rose up in protest against what they called 'Chinese apartheid'". African officials, who had until then ignored the problem, took notice of the issue. The Organization of African Unity issued an official protest, and the organization's chairman, Mali's president Moussa Traoré, went on a fact-finding mission to China. The issue was so severe that, according to a Guardian 1989 Third World Report titled "'Chinese apartheid' threatens links with Africa", "'Chinese apartheid', as the African students call it, could threaten Peking's entire relationship with the continent."

Taiwanese
A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times accused China of fostering an "apartheid" policy toward Taiwan. Dr Tan Sun Chen, Taiwan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, asserts that China's obstruction in the international community has led to a "political apartheid" which "harms the human rights, interests, and dignity of Taiwan’s people.".

Weili Yang has expressed concern about the health consequences of Taiwan's exclusion from the World Health Organization, which he attributes to Chinese opposition. Yang states that "Taiwan is refused access to the vast resources and latest information on AIDS prevention that WHO can provide", a situation he describes as "health apartheid".

Treatment of ethnic and religious minorities
According to Mark C. Elliott, "The apartheid policy in China's Manchu cities seems to have been fairly effective for at least a century in Beijing, and longer in the provinces."