Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Op-Ed Contributor

When TV Takes Part in Human Rights Abuse

Mr. Dahlin is a Swedish human rights activist who was detained by Chinese authorities in 2016.

Police walk past a missing person notice for Gui Minhai, left, a bookseller who was detained by Chinese authorities.Credit...Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Every once in a while people ask me about it. Journalists and diplomats who talk to me for the first time usually open with it. When I meet new people I don’t mention it at all, and yet somehow the next time I see them they know all about it: the “confession” I was forced to make on Chinese television in 2016.

The Chinese media has been long known to work with the state, or rather, China’s Communist Party, to spread propaganda. It is now clear that the media outlets have also become active players in China’s foreign policy. I didn’t think about it that way when I first viewed, in extreme discomfort, my own televised confession. At the time, I thought of the scene as mere propaganda and an attempt to scare other foreign human rights workers.

But in February, when I watched Gui Minhai, a brave independent bookseller and a fellow Swede, paraded for the third time in front of the media, it became clear: These televised confessions are actually weapons of foreign policy.

Image
Peter Dahlin, who was detained and then deported from China, poses for a portrait in the garden of his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand in 2016.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

They fit a clear pattern. A new report by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders, for which I was asked to provide testimony, reveals what goes on backstage. My experience, and that of the others who went through this ordeal, shows that these so-called confessions are produced in close collaboration with Chinese media outlets, usually before any legal proceedings have begun. They often follow a similar script: The subjects “confess,” denounce others, praise the party and, most important, undermine foreign criticism of China’s human rights abuses. Gui Minhai’s latest “confession” was a point-by-point rebuttal of Sweden’s objections to China’s handling of his case.

Occasionally, there are moments of comedy. I found it difficult to keep a straight face as I spoke to the journalist sent by China Central Television, or CCTV, the state television network. Both of us were sitting there holding pieces of paper, and my script had all the questions and answers written out for us to recite. It was absurdly stage-managed, with state security agents directing how I was to behave and speak.

The theater hides a grim reality: I read the script in exchange for freedom for me and my girlfriend. We were both held in solitary confinement inside one of China’s secret prisons, which operate under the euphemism “residential surveillance at a designated location.” Because of a severe medical condition, I feared that I would not survive in custody. Many victims endure far worse, including prolonged physical and mental abuse and the harassment or detention of their children and siblings.

The use of these secret prisons has been expanded under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, and they are only one example of his efforts to hold power ever more tightly. Television and other media are crucial tools of the Chinese Communist Party in its soft power push around the world. CCTV’s American unit, for example, claims to reach about 30 million households in the United States and won an Emmy Award in 2016.

These same Chinese media outlets, as well as some in Hong Kong, air forced confessions, which are illegal under Chinese law and are in violation of principles of human rights. After Iran’s government allegedly collaborated with security services and prosecutors to broadcast forced TV confessions, the European Union in 2013 imposed a visa ban and asset freezes on the head of the state-run broadcasting authority, which was also blacklisted by the United States. When American intelligence agencies said RT America, a television station backed by the Kremlin, had participated in a campaign to manipulate the 2016 election, the Justice Department forced RT America to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires it to regularly disclose financial information.

The United States should enforce similar requirements on all Chinese media outlets in the United States. And the United States should invoke the Global Magnitsky Act to impose sanctions on the people in power at Chinese media companies, as well as those within the Chinese police and state security apparatus who are responsible for these televised humiliations. The Magnitsky Act offers great power to target individuals, by freezing their U.S. assets and banning them from traveling to the United States.

America has applied the Global Magnitsky Act to people in China before for other human rights violations, and it should do the same for these abuses. With sanctions as leverage, the United States could also push for greater access to American media within China.

We should welcome and encourage Chinese media outlets to play a bigger role in a competition of ideas. The United States should not abandon its belief in free expression — that’s why Americans have access to Chinese television. But the United States should also recognize that China’s leaders are engaged in a sophisticated foreign policy game, using the reach of the media to multiply the impact of the abuse it directs at critics. The American response should be no less forceful.

Peter Dahlin is a human rights activist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He was the director of the Beijing-based human rights group China Action, which closed in 2016.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: China Turns TV Into a Weapon. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT