I could venture a general answer. This is not a simple question. This is 20% of the world's population. It's possible both may be true at the same time, and I'm not trying to be facetious. It is simply that with increasing prosperity in China, although relative--and we've just noted a couple of hundred million people who are living close to abject poverty--certainly their conditions of life have improved.
At the same time, we see no signs that the grip of the Communist Party, the authoritarian nature of the political system, is changing or mellowing in any fashion. On the other hand, many Chinese now have limited access to the Internet. They're able to travel. These are not insignificant things. They used to be limited in the places they could travel and fixed in their addresses. They had to have permission even to get on a train and go to another part of China, let alone go outside China.
It's a very mixed message, but what concerns us is that particular groups, defenders of human rights in particular, people who raise their hands and protest, people in minority groups who try to organize to improve their condition, these people are in very difficult straits or find themselves very quickly under arrest or in detention. Any sort of political organization quickly seems to bring the hand of the authorities down upon it.
I would submit that both are true. There are ongoing problems, some of which have got worse. On the other hand, there have been some very substantive improvements, particularly on the economic side. How do we measure this? It's not easy to measure it in exact numerical fashion, but there are groups that attempt to do that. We certainly exchange views with other countries, other western countries in particular. I was in Washington last week and spoke to the American government and institutions there on their take on human rights as of 2006. My colleague has just come back from Europe, and we travel regularly and exchange, of course, through e-mail and correspondence. We read each other's reports, and by that, one gathers an overall picture, but one has to share it because the resources are incomplete.
We do the best we can to gauge the overall state. Of course we ask each mission, including Beijing, to produce an annual human rights assessment for our government as to particular improvements or degradations in the state of human rights in China, and policy-makers use that as a guide as well.