August 24, 2016
BEIJING — An adviser to the United Nations has sharply criticized President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on dissent in China, warning on Tuesday that the Communist Party’s tight grip on civil society was undermining basic rights and risking mass unrest.
The adviser, Philip G. Alston, said that the party’s dominance of the legal system had left Chinese citizens with few avenues to complain about issues like pollution and inequality. He dismissed the process for filing grievances as “window dressing,” and said party officials had suppressed meaningful policy debates.
“The government is coming at this from many different directions,” Mr. Alston, a special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the United Nations, said in an interview at the organization’s offices in Beijing. “That is a recipe for serious problems.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has worked to expand the Communist Party’s reach across virtually all aspects of Chinese society, sidelining lawyers, journalists, academics and activists who stand in the party’s way.
But Mr. Xi has also pledged to improve China’s human rights record, and the government has said it has made progress in reducing the use of torture and the death penalty. At the same time, officials have deflected criticism by highlighting police brutality and other abuses in developed countries like the United States.
Still, China lacks many of the checks needed to ensure justice for its citizens, Mr. Alston said. The authorities announced this week that they had punished more than 2,000 officials for failing to enforce environmental laws. But Mr. Alston, a New York University law professor, said the government should not be the only watchdog.
“There must be ways for those whose rights are violated to initiate action,” he said.
Mr. Alston said Mr. Xi’s government too often promoted party ideology over accountability. He called a series of high-profile trials of human rights activists this month a “major mistake,” and he expressed concern about the government’s efforts to limit the activities of foreign nongovernmental organizations.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a faxed request for comment on Tuesday.
Mr. Alston, who was wrapping up a nine-day visit to China, also offered praise for the Chinese government, calling its achievements in reducing poverty, one of Mr. Xi’s priorities, admirable.
But he said he was leaving China with mixed feelings. The government took him to Yunnan Province in southern China and offered a highly choreographed tour of a minority village, he said, apparently trying to dispel notions of ethnic tensions.
During his visit, Mr. Alston said, the government prevented him from meeting with several scholars. Everywhere he went, he was followed by a Chinese security detail, he said, and at one point, an activist seeking to meet him was detained by the police outside the front gates of the United Nations offices in Beijing.
