Human Rights in China - Essay Example

Research Proposal Human Rights in China: A Hermeneutically Designed Research For an Objective and Impartial Study 1. Research Design An investigation of the human rights situation in China is a daunting task in terms of producing a detached and unbiased research. Such a study can be easily influenced or misled by preconceived ideas nurtured in people’s minds by the long and uninterrupted international reports about the systematic and widespread human rights abuses in China. As a result of these negative portrayals of its human rights records, China has become a pariah in the community of nations such that is despised by world society and gives it a hard time gaining a seat at the United Nations. The proposed study thus adopts the hermeneutical design of research not only because it promises a high degree of objectivity but also because it is considered the most appropriate methodology for a study of the social sciences. Empirical evidence will be gathered, interpreted and analyzed to disprove or confirm prior conceptions (Schostak, 2002) about the prevalence of human rights abuses in China. Hermeneutics is the art or science of interpretation, which is often used in the interpretation of biblical passages and their applications on day-to-day living. In the same manner, research using the hermeneutical approach describes the practical problem, the processes of data collection and analysis as well as its interpretation and application. When a study asks what something means, the hermeneutically designed research focuses on the entire context within which it happens. Hermeneutics requires that in reading a text, examining a word or phrase will not make sense if the reading does not consider the whole text of which the word or phrase is a part. The “whole” may be a hospital and the “part” could be a waterborne or maternity clinic, in which case the relevant study must discuss how the specialized clinic and the hospital as a general treatment center relate to each other. Thus, the proposed research on human rights in China examines how the parts articulate the whole, and how the whole makes the parts possible and vice versa. The parts here refer to specific instances of human rights violations within China, which will be studied and interpreted according to their place in the overall picture. 1.1 The Problem China is equated with arbitrary detentions, lack of legal safeguards to ensure fair trial, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and association, lack of religious freedom and human rights violations specific to women. This unsavory image of China has been established through the years not only by such “outside” organizations as the Washington-based Amnesty International but also by “insider” groups such as the Human Rights in China (HRIC), an organization of overseas Chinese professionals and intellectuals established after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and now work out of New York. A common thread that run through their almost yearly reports attributes the abuses to the government’s adherence to four basic principles: the Chinese Communist Party leadership, dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism, and Marxist-Leninist thought. Pursuit of these principles is embodied in the preamble to the 1982 Constitution, which supposedly serves to negate a new provision on enhancing freedom of the press and expression. The government itself acknowledged that in 1995, for example, Chinese prisons held 1.2 million people including those sentenced to reeducation or reform camps. According to reports, many of these prisoners were arrested just for peacefully exercising their rights to association and expression, religion and to receive and impart information. On religious activities, Amnesty International reports that hundreds of house churches have been ordered closed since 1989 because their faith did not fall under four state-recognized religions, which are Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and Christianity. uman After adopting an open market policy, China’s human rights records should have improved as part of the criteria for its accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and its hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games. However, no substantial changes have been observed to this day. For example, the HRIC reported how 77-year-old Wang Xiuying and 79-year-old Wu Dianyuan were sentenced to one year of reeducation through labor (RTL) after they applied for permit to protest their eviction from their Beijing homes in 2001 to make way for the construction of the Olympic venue. The sentence was handed down to the two elderly women on August 29 while the Olympics was underway. During the Olympic Games itself, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China reported 30 cases of official interference in media reporting, the deportation of a number of foreign protestors and detention of others until the closing ceremony. On August 18, 10 days into the Olympics, authorities reportedly received 77 applications for permit to rally at the government-designated “protest zones” near the Games venues but none of these materialized. The official attitude seemed to be that if the protest applications were approved, it would lead to an avalanche of protests. The problem that should be addressed then is whether such human rights violations are the rule rather than the exception and, if so, what is the prevailing sentiment of the Chinese people. 1.2 Conceptual Framework Since the conceptual framework of the proposed research is based on hermeneutics, it will highlight the critical variables and how they relate to each other. Hermeneutics also fulfills a tradition in qualitative methodology and as such, the study takes the form of a research methodology that seeks to achieve accurate and precise results from known sources and direct information (Schostak, 2002). In effect, it will give less importance on the generation of secondary data through a review of previous literature and will instead rely on primary data to be collected through actual surveys and person-to-person interviews. The primary data of research is gathered specifically for the problem or issue at hand, and is normally collected either by observation, experimentation and survey questionnaires or all of these methods combined. Thus, the research on human rights in China will be based on experiments, surveys and observational studies. Experiments may be done through laboratory or fieldwork, while surveys are usually conducted through personal interview, telephone or postal means. As for observational studies, it may be personal or mechanical. All the data to be yielded by these research processes will be analyzed based on the theoretical framework. 1.3 Theories & Assumptions The research will seek to evaluate the validity of the theory that human rights violations occur in China in greater frequency than others because of a system of governance that entrusts too much power on the ruling Communist Party. As a result of this bureaucratic monolith, there is lack of accountability and a system of check-and-balance in government. For example, the Party maintains a vast censorship bureaucracy that employs a wide range of controls on freedom of the press and expression. The CCP Propaganda Department, which issues licenses for all media outlets and approves all books before publication, supposedly requires that the editorial contents of publications must be 80 percent positive and only 20 percent negative. If this balance is not achieved, those responsible will receive official criticism, fired or imprisoned and the offending publication banned or closed. There is another assumption on the part of Chinese officialdom that needs to be examined because this is the official line often invoked to justify the harsh treatment of offenders. Every time outside criticism of human rights violations within China intensifies, the CCP leadership would cite the need to discipline parts of the citizenry in order to create a harmonious society as a whole (Sitaraman, 2008). This policy is supposed to be based on Asian values that place the welfare of the many ahead of that of a few. In this view, giving citizens too much freedom is dangerous and that government must not show weakness or else social deterioration will ensue (Cheng, et al., 2003). The Chinese point to the problems that plague Western societies where freedom is unchecked – rising crime rate, family breakdown, vandalism, political extremism. To the Chinese leaders from Mao Tse Tung to the present, the notion of human rights should include measures of health and economic prosperity. 1.4 Overall Approach Evaluation and analysis of the data collected from the research will use the mixed methodology approach consisting of the deductive, inductive and abductive methods. Deduction is a form of inference that finds a relationship between existing facts and draws a conclusion on that basis, while induction draws a conclusion from one or more facts and pieces of evidence uncovered during the research process. The inductive method of analysis is appropriate when the research finds many answers or alternatives to the research problem. As for the abductive method, its use is necessary when the research expects a result that is not 100 percent accurate and has only some probability (Schostak, 2002). The study calls for these particular methods of analysis for the following reasons: 1) as a hermeneutically designed research, it intends to find the relationships between the facts to be collected; 2) the surveys, experiments and observational studies will span the cross section of Chinese society and expect to uncover one or more facts and pieces of evidence from which a single conclusion will be drawn; and 3) the research results may not be 100 percent accurate considering that in a study involving individual human subjects, attitudes and beliefs are likely to be different. 1.5 Specific Methods The data collection methods will likewise use a mixed approach to gather as much parts as possible to fill up and articulate the whole. As proposed in the subsection on Conceptual Framework, the research will gather the relevant data through observation, experiment and survey. Observation is conducted through personal or mechanical means and, for the research, this will be done by collecting data from periodic reports produced by Amnesty International, HRIC and other international human rights watchdogs, including those issued by the Chinese government, which are important to achieve balance. For the experiment, the effort will concentrate on field research involving such samples as the local bureaus of people’s religious affairs, censorship and those that regulate the protest parks and approve rally permits. As for the survey, personal interviews will be conducted with a randomly picked sample of Chinese citizens. 1.6 Reliability & Validity Reliability in research refers to the consistency or stability of findings, such that if the research process is repeated under the same circumstances, the results remain the same. The results then acquire validity according to how well the research measured what it set out to measure, how comprehensive has been the measurement, and how effectively has the research used the measurement tools and instruments. In our view, the research on the human rights conditions in China will also have questionable reliability if the results of the observations differ from the results of the surveys, or if the opinion expressed by one group of Chinese interviewees disagrees with that of another group. In the proposed interviews related to the survey, the research aims to measure the attitude of the average Chinese towards the protection of their human rights. Hence, the interviews will be the structured type, which has the least interviewer bias. The measurement tools will come in the form of open-ended questions to enable the respondents to answer in their own words. 1.7 Ethical Issues Research on human beings requires three ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence and justice. According to Callahan, et al. (1998), each participant must be treated with respect as a person capable of making informed decisions about his participation in the research, which is what autonomy means. Beneficence refers to the duty of the researcher to maximize benefit for the participant and society while minimizing the risk of possible harm to that individual. Justice, on the other hand, means the proper selection of subjects by taking care that no one is coerced into participating in the research. In effect, a research is ethically valid if the process emphasizes disclosure (the nature, purpose, benefits and risks), clarity of language, voluntariness, competence (the subject has no mental deficiency or diseases) and consent. The researcher will observe all these components of ethical research, and the safety of potential subjects will be a primary concern. Once the consent of a participant is obtained, he will be given guarantees of privacy and confidentiality, any information that he volunteered will be protected from unauthorized observation. This is critical in the research of such a sensitive subject, given that Chinese authorities are said to be prone to harassing persons critical of government policy. 1.8 Expected Contribution of Study If the above research design and methodologies are followed to the letter, the study is expected to put the issue in its proper perspective and hopefully eliminate many of the biases common in media reports about human rights in China. If these reports are to be believed, foreign investors will avoid China like the plague but it is a fact that China is now the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment and its stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen are the fastest growing stock markets in the world. 2. Influence of Chalmers The research on human rights in China deals with a problem of consciousness. People outside China look at this country with fear and misgiving as a result of mental conditioning developed through the years by negative and often blanket reports about the issue. According to David John Chalmers, such condition of consciousness arises from any information-bearing system. The sciences involving humans differ from natural sciences in that the former take as objects the features that appear as phenomena to the consciousness. In the natural sciences, on the other hand, the object comes from within and appears as a reality and as a vivid original whole. Thus, the connectedness of the psychic life is given as an original and general foundation in social sciences. 3. Political Science Interpretivism is precisely one of the approaches to the study of political science, of which the research on human rights in China is an example. Such a study concerns the allocation and transfer of power in decision-making, the roles and systems of governance, political behavior and public policies. Since political science is a study of human behavior, observations in a controlled environment like China may be difficult to reproduce or duplicate (Roskin, et al., 2007). This is one of the barriers that the research will try to avoid and overcome. 4. Scientific Revolution The scientific revolution discards the Aristotelian model of scientific study that emphasizes that the internal nature of physical objects and its final causes are connected with this internal nature (Banach, 2006). The new view holds that this theory is circuitous and empty, contending that the only explanation for an object’s internal nature is in terms of the object’s actions. This scientific revolution gave rise to a methodology that has the following characteristics: 1) the Platonic emphasis on formal mathematical properties that lie beneath the appearance of an object; 2) a tendency to use efficient causality, explain events in terms of the properties of an extended matter and their external relationships; and 3) a method of hypothesis and simplified experiment to discover the laws governing the properties of extended matter. References 1) Banach, D. (2006). “The View of Nature of the Scientific Revolution.” Department of Philosophy, St. Anselm College. 2) Callahan, T.C. & Hobbs, R. (1998). “Research Ethics.” University of Washington. 3) Cheng, L., Rosset, A. & Woo, L. (2003). “East Asian Law: Universal Norms and Local Cultures.” Routledge Curzon. 4) Roskin, M., Cord, R.L., Medeiros, J.A. & Jones, W.S. (2007). “Political Science: An Introduction.” New York: Prentice Hall. 5) Schostak, J.F. (2002). “Understanding, Designing and Conducting Qualitative Research in Education: Framing the Project.” Open University Press. 6) Sitaraman, S. (2008). “Explaining China’s Continued Resistance Towards Human Rights Norms: A Historical Legal Analysis.” ACDIS, University of Illinois. Read More