Chinese Hidden Scandal

Beautiful country, gorgeous landscapes, one of the richest cultures around the globe, the world’s biggest population and one of the next economic leaders of the planet ... a very bright picture, wouldn’t you say? However, where there is bright, there is also dark. Because of censorship, what is happening now inside China is unknown to many people. Many Westerners hear stories, right or wrong, about alleged torture cases, death penalties and labor camps in China. Mostly since the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Chinese Communist Party is supposedly using censorship to keep their power and eliminate possible threats. According to the Human Rights In China Group (HRIC), a typical Chinese has no liberty of speech, traffic, or education. The government controls what you read, what you study and what you see. Even the Internet is controlled by the Chinese Government. Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. For the Google Company and Microsoft start operating in China, they had to banish from their articles words like “freedom”; “liberty”, “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square Protest”. Protests against the government are strongly restrained by the Communist Regime. Sometimes hard power is used to control the protesters. The most famous and a particularly sad case was the massacre in 1989 in the Tiananmen Square where many students decided to stand up for basic rights such as liberty, the end of corruption, equal rights and respect. According to international journalists who were in China, approximately one hundred thousand students, intellectuals and workers marched peacefully in the streets of Beijing. The government reacted with power. The army and tanks invaded the Tiananmen Square and allegedly killed more than 3,000 people, according to the Red Cross. The Chinese Government said that only 200 were killed. Western countries softly criticize the Chinese Government, but most  foreign countries are afraid that their criticism may jeopardize their economic relations with China, so they simply ignore the human rights violations. Unfortunately most of the critics only come from non governmental organizations (NGO’s) such as Amnesty  International  (AI) which every year criticizes China in its annual report for being the country with the highest rate of prisoners killed by the death penalty. Although Amnesty International claims that China still uses capital punishment against political prisoners, stating in its latest report:    “thousands of innocent people were being executed by a dysfunctional criminal justice system,” China's Foreign Ministry has reacted by saying that the government is in no position to abolish the death penalty, which it said is applied with the “utmost caution”. Canada is one of the few countries to publically criticize China and has already denied a visa to a Chinese Government employee accused of spying and pursuing Falun Gong practitioners, a religious group hunted and eliminated by the Chinese government. Many Chinese Falun Gong practitioners are in illegal detention; consequently, there is no proof that they are in jail.  For these kind of prisoners, NGO’s can do almost nothing. Every month a list of political prisoners is published on the website hrichina.org.