I think you'll understand if I stay away from the directly political issues. As a civil servant, it wouldn't be appropriate.
You've put your finger on some very difficult questions, and I can't give you facile or easy answers. One of the problems is, of course, that we're not alone working on this. There are a host of other countries, some of which work in loose coordination with us, that are pushing on the door at the same time.
If, for example, we see minor policy improvement released this last weekend about a slightly more open system for journalists visiting in the run-up to the Olympics, is that an important change? Well, in some ways, yes, and in some ways, perhaps not that important. Who achieved that? Was it because freedom of information has come out in our discussions? Well, I certainly couldn't say that it was us in meeting X on day Y. Was it the criticism and pressure from the outside world and western countries broadly? Perhaps.
I understand your frustration. In a business model you want to have clearly quantifiable outcomes, and in a place as large as China and with the relatively short levers that we have, it's not easy to measure progress. One can construct benchmarks. We do track individual cases of dissidents who've been jailed. We note sometimes that conditions improve after we've made representations, but the Chinese don't do us the favour of coming to us afterwards and saying, well, because you've complained in this case, we've now decided we're going to treat Mr. or Ms. X or Y better. It doesn't happen. There is a lot of guesswork, unfortunately, and as we all are, I'm open to ways in which this can be improved.
Maybe this isn't the best model. We commissioned Dr. Burton to have a look at it, to make his own recommendations. We're looking carefully at what NGOs have said. Good ideas are always welcome as to what is doable.
I do believe that China has improved in some important and measurable ways, if you look at day-to-day life. Having said that, there are huge gaps, and as this honourable member mentioned as well, it's very uneven. There's a saying in Chinese that heaven is high and the emperor is far away. There are regions that are unrecognizable from others in terms of the daily life. I'm not suggesting there's any place that's completely free in China, but there is tremendous variance within China itself. It's 20% of the earth, and the application of justice or the law is very unequal. There are some areas, minority areas in particular, where the record is terrible--I think of Tibet and Xinjiang in particular--and other areas where it may be a bit better.
I don't mean to give a rambling response, but I understand your difficulty and I share the same in terms of how you quantify progress.