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It is a simple truth that, for any country or nation, the right
to subsistence is the most important of all human rights, without
which the other rights are out of the question. The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to life, liberty
and the security of person. In old China, aggression by imperialism
and oppression by feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism deprived the
people of all guarantee for their lives, and an uncountable number
of them perished in war and famine. To solve their human rights
problems, the first thing for the Chinese people to do is, for historical
reasons, to secure the right to subsistence.
Without national independence, there would be no guarantee for
the people's lives. When imperialist aggression became the major
threat to their lives, the Chinese people had to win national independence
before they could gain the right to subsistence. After the Opium
War of 1840, China, hitherto a big feudal kingdom, was gradually
turned into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. During the 110
years from 1840 to 1949, the British, French, Japanese, US and Russian
imperialist powers waged hundreds of wars on varying scales against
China, causing immeasurable losses to the lives and property of
the Chinese people.
-- The imperialists massacred Chinese people in untold numbers
during their aggressive wars. In 1900, the troops of the Eight Allied
Powers -- Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, France, the United States,
Italy and Austria -- killed, burned and looted, razing Tanggu, a
town of 50,000 residents, to utter ruins, reducing Tianjin's population
from one million to 100,000, killing countless people when they
entered Beijing, where more than 1,700 were slaughtered at Zhuangwangfu
alone. During Japan's full-scale invasion of China which began in
1937, more than 21 million people were killed or wounded and 10
million people mutilated to death. In the six weeks beginning from
December 13, 1937, the Japanese invaders killed 300,000 people in
Nanjing.
-- The imperialists sold, maltreated and caused the death of numerous
Chinese laborers, plunging countless people in old China into an
abyss of misery. According to incomplete statistics, more than 12
million indentured Chinese laborers were sold to various parts of
the world from the mid-19th century through the 1920s. Coaxed and
abducted, these laborers were thrown into lockups, known as "pigsties,"
where they were branded with the names of their would-be destinations.
During the 1852-58 period, 40,000 people were put in such "pigsties"
in Shantou alone, and more than 8,000 of them were done to death
there. Equally horrifying was the death toll of ill-treated laborers
in factories and mines run by imperialists across China. During
the Japanese occupation, no less than 2 million laborers perished
from maltreatment and exhaustion in Northeast China. Once the laborers
died, their remains were thrown into mountain gullies or pits dug
into bare hillsides. So far more than 80 such massive pits have
been found, with over 700,000 skeletons of the victims in them.
-- Under the imperialists' colonial rule, the Chinese people had
their fill of humiliation and there was no personal dignity to speak
of. The foreign aggressors enjoyed "extraterritoriality" in those
days. On December 24, 1946 Peking University student Shen Chong
was raped by William Pierson, an American GI, but, to the great
indignation of the Chinese people, the criminal, handled unilaterally
by the American side, was acquitted and released. Imperialist powers
exercised administrative, legislative, judicial, police and financial
powers in the "concessions" they had set up in China, turning them
into "states within a state" that were thoroughly independent of
the Chinese administrative and legal systems. In 1885, foreign aggressors
put up a signboard at the entrance of a park in the French concession;
in a blatant insult to the Chinese people, it read, "Chinese and
dogs not admitted."
-- Forcing more than 1,100 unequal treaties on China, the imperialists
plundered Chinese wealth on a large scale. Statistics show that,
by way of these unequal treaties, the foreign aggressors made away
with more than 100 billion taels of silver as war indemnities and
other payments in the past century. Through the Sino-British Treaty
of Nanking, the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, the International
Protocol of 1901 and five other such treaties alone, 1,953 million
taels of silver in indemnity were extorted, 16 times the 1901 revenue
of the Qing government. The Treaty of Shimonoseki alone earned Japan
230 million taels of silver in extortion money, about four and a
half times its annual national revenue. The losses resulting from
the destruction and looting by the invaders in wars against China
were even more incalculable. During Japan's full-scale war of aggression
against China (1937-45), 930 Chinese cities were occupied, causing
US$62 billion in direct losses and US$500 billion in indirect losses.
With their state sovereignty impaired and their social wealth plundered
or destroyed, the Chinese people were deprived of the basic conditions
for survival.
In face of the crumbling state sovereignty and the calamities wrought
upon their lives, for over a century the Chinese people fought the
foreign aggressors in an indomitable struggle for national salvation
and independence. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Boxers
Movement and the Revolution of 1911 which overthrew the Qing Dynasty
broke out during this period. These revolutionary movements dealt
heavy blows to imperialist influences in China, but they failed
to deliver the nation from semi-colonialism. A fundamental change
took place only after the Chinese people, under the leadership of
the Chinese Communist Party, overthrew the Kuomintang reactionary
rule and founded the People's Republic of China. After its birth
in 1921, the Communist Party of China set the clear-cut goal in
its political program to "overthrow the oppression by international
imperialism and achieve the complete independence of the Chinese
nation" and to "overthrow the warlords and unite China into a real
democratic republic"; it led the people in an arduous struggle culminating
in victory in the national democratic revolution.
The founding of the People's Republic of China eradicated the forces
of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in the Chinese
mainland, put an end to the nation's history of dismemberment, oppression
and humiliation at the hands of alien powers for well over a century
and to long years of turbulence characterized by incessant war and
social disunity, and realized the people's cherished dream of national
independence and unification. The Chinese nation, which makes up
one-fourth of the world's population, is no longer one that the
aggressors could kill and insult at will. The Chinese people have
stood up as the masters of their own country; for the first time
they have won real human dignity and the respect of the whole world.
The Chinese people have won the basic guarantee for their life and
security.
National independence has protected the Chinese people from being
trodden under the heels of foreign invaders. However, the problem
of the people's right to subsistence can be truly solved only when
their basic means of livelihood are guaranteed.
To eat their fill and dress warmly were the fundamental demand
of the Chinese people who had long suffered cold and hunger. Far
from meeting this demand, successive regimes in old China brought
even more disasters to the people. In those days, landlords and
rich peasants who accounted for 10 percent of the rural population
held 70 percent of the land, while the poor peasants and farm laborers
who accounted for 70 percent of the rural population owned only
10 percent of the land. The bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisie who
accounted for only a small fraction of the population monopolized
80 percent of the industrial capital and controlled the economic
lifelines of the country. The Chinese people were repeatedly exploited
by land rent, taxes, usury and industrial and commercial capital.
The exploitation and poverty they suffered were of a degree rarely
seen in other parts of the world. According to 1932 statistics,
the Chinese peasants were subjected to 1,656 kinds of exorbitant
taxes and levies, which took away 60-90 percent of their harvests.
The people's miseries were exacerbated and their lives made all
the harsher by the reactionary governments who, politically corrupt
and impotent, surrendered China's sovereign rights under humiliating
terms and served as tools of foreign imperialist rule, and by the
separatist regime of warlords who were embroiled in endless wars.
It was estimated that 80 percent of the populace in old China suffered
to varying degrees of starvation and tens of thousands -- hundreds
of thousands in some cases -- died of it every year. A major natural
disaster invariably left the land strewn with corpses of hunger
victims. More than 3.7 million lives were lost when floods hit east
China in 1931. In 1943, a crop failure in Henan Province took the
lives of 3 million people and left 15 million subsisting on grass
and bark and struggling on the verge of death. After the victory
of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the reactionary Kuomintang
government launched a civil war, fed on the flesh and blood of the
people and caused total economic collapse. In 1946, 10 million people
died of hunger countrywide. In 1947, 100 million, or 22 percent
of the national population then, were under the constant threat
of hunger.
Ever since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949,
the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government have always
placed the task of helping the people get enough to wear and eat
on the top of the agenda. For the first three years of the People's
Republic, the Chinese people, led by their government, concentrated
their efforts on healing the wounds of war and quickly restored
the national economy to the record level in history. On this basis,
China lost no time to complete the socialist transformation of agriculture,
handicraft industry and capitalist industry and commerce, thus uprooting
the system of exploitation, instituting the system of socialism
and, for the first time in history, turning the people into masters
of the means of production and beneficiaries of social wealth. This
fired the people with soaring enthusiasm for building a new China
and a new life, emancipated the social productive forces and set
the economy on the track of unprecedented growth. Since 1979, China
has switched the focus of its work to economic construction, begun
reform and opening to the outside world, and set the goal of building
socialism with Chinese characteristics. This has further expanded
the social productive forces and enabled the nation to basically
solve the problem of feeding and clothing its 1.1 billion people.
Tilling 7 percent of the world's total cultivated land -- averaging
only 1.3 mu (one mu equals one-fifteenth of one hectare) per capita
as against 12.16 mu in the United States and the world's average
of 4.52 mu -- China has nevertheless succeeded in feeding a population
that makes up 22 percent of the world's total. Contrary to some
Western politicians' prediction that no Chinese government could
solve the problem of feeding its people, socialist China has done
it by its own efforts. The past 40-odd years have witnessed a marked
increase in the average annual per-capita consumption of major consumer
goods despite a yearly average population increase of 14 million.
A survey shows that the daily caloric intake of food per resident
in China was 2,270 in 1952, 2,311 in 1978 and 2,630 in 1990, approaching
the world's average.
The life-span of the Chinese people has lengthened and their health
improved considerably. According to statistics, the population's
average life expectancy increased from 35 years before liberation
to 70 years in 1988, higher than the average level in the world's
medium-income countries, while the death rate dropped from 33 per
thousand before liberation to 6.67 per thousand in 1990, which was
one of the lowest death rates in the world. China's 1987 infant
mortality of 31 per thousand approached the level of high-income
countries. The health of the Chinese people, especially the physical
development of youngsters, has greatly improved as compared with
the situation in old China. An average 15-year-old boy in 1979 was
1.8 centimeters taller and 2.1 kilograms heavier than his counterparts
living during the 1937-41 period; and an average girl of the same
age in 1979 was 1.3 centimeters taller and 1 kilogram heavier. Since
1979, the health of the Chinese people has improved further. The
label on old China, "sick man of East Asia," has long been consigned
to the dustbin of history.
The problem of food and clothing having been basically solved,
the people have been guaranteed with the basic right to subsistence.
This is a historical achievement made by the Chinese people and
government in seeking and protecting human rights.
However, to protect the people's right to subsistence and improve
their living conditions remains an issue of paramount importance
in China today. China has gained independence, but it is still a
developing country with limited national strength. The preservation
of national independence and state sovereignty and the freedom from
imperialist subjugation are, therefore, the very fundamental conditions
for the survival and development of the Chinese people. Although
China has basically solved the problem of food and clothing, its
economy is still at a fairly low level, its standard of living falls
considerably short of that in developed countries, and the
pressure of a huge population and relative per-capita paucity of
resources will continue to restrict the socio-economic development
and the improvement of the people's lives. The people's right to
subsistence will still be threatened in the event of a social turmoil
or other disasters. Therefore it is the fundamental wish and demand
of the Chinese people and a long-term, urgent task of the Chinese
government to maintain national stability, concentrate their effort
on developing the productive forces along the line which has proven
to be successful, persist in reform and opening to the outside world,
strive to rejuvenate the national economy and boost the national
strength, and, on the basis of having solved the problem of food
and clothing, secure a well-off livelihood for the people throughout
the country so that their right to subsistence will no longer be
threatened.
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