Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, I will say that I started my political career as a human rights activist. It feels difficult to be defending the Chinese government on their human rights record, and I don't want to. But at the same time, with the approach we've been taking.... I was Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific) from 1993 to 2000--that's seven years--and the Liberal government continued governing until 2006. In all of those years, I think the engagement approach that we had on human rights and on all the different fronts with China has been very productive. I would say that, yes, there continue to be a lot of human rights problems, political problems, corruption problems, social disparity problems that we have to help them with, that we have to work with them to overcome. At the same time, I think that if we move away from the engagement approach that we've been taking, it will be a wrong decision.
In 1991 I risked my life and led an international delegation to China. I sneaked in there. I was detained for five hours and I was asked to leave. After I came back from China, I decided that the problem of human rights in China is not only a problem with the government. Replacing that government, replacing that leadership, would not bring human rights and would not bring democracy to China. We have to start from the grassroots. We have to start with the people. This is why engagement works.
During the 12 or 13 years of the Liberal regime, yes, we did not use human rights as a political showcase, but every time I had a bilateral meeting with China, I raised human rights. When I came out of those meetings and went into press conferences, I talked about human rights. I'm the first minister from a western democracy who ever visited Tibet, and I met with the dissident lamas in Tibet. At the same time, we raised those issues all the time. I just want to put that record straight.
The other thing is that with those kinds of dialogues between the two countries, we support a lot of NGOs locally, and the universities, to work with China, and it's the work of our legal experts with the judicial administration in China that has been able to convince the Government of China to implement the presumption of innocence in the legal system. It's a major change in their approach of dealing with judicial reform.
Also, if you go to China now, on the TV there will be a lot of government programs to educate civilians about their rights, and how not to go with Kwan Si to resolve a case. Also, on the radio, there are phone lines people can call to complain to local officials about what went wrong.
Jonathan Manthorpe, who is the Asia-Pacific reporter for the Vancouver Sun, recently, just two weeks ago, wrote an article about the more than 130,000 NGOs, civic societies, that are now operating inside China. Those 130,000 civic societies have a lot of impact on the lives of the citizens inside China.
He cited one big example of how, in Fujian province, they were to build a chemical plant close to an urban centre; and how the citizens of that city used the telephone for short messages and were able to amass over 110,000 people to walk on the bank of the river in the form of a protest; and how the representatives in the people's congress and in the people's consultative assembly from that city were able to make the government change their decision. Now they will try to build the plant somewhere else. Now the people in that new location are trying to do the same thing.
What I'm trying to say, Mr. Chairman, is that the engagement is working. There are still a lot of challenges in China, but we should not turn our back on the very successful approach that we are conducting right now.