This is a transcript from The World Today. The program is broadcast around Australia at 12:10pm on ABC Local Radio.
By John Taylor
HAMISH ROBERTSON: We start the program in Beijing, where the Prime Minister John Howard is today beginning a series of meetings with China’s top leaders.
The focus of the visit is a series of talks between Mr Howard and China’s new President, Premier and Head of Parliament, who were all appointed in the country’s first peaceful and ordered leadership transition this year.
Also on the agenda are bilateral trade and the North Korean nuclear crisis but, as our China Correspondent John Taylor reports, one topic that’s likely to get little discussion today is human rights and Tibet.
JOHN TAYLOR: Prime Minister John Howard says his meetings with China’s top leaders are about bilateral trade, the ongoing North Korean nuclear crisis, and just plain old “getting to know” the new Communists appointed earlier this year in a leadership reshuffle.
Relations between China and Australia seem particularly good. Trade is booming and there have been no public upsets in many years, and in Mr Howard’s meetings today with China’s President, Premier and other leaders, he won’t want to create any.
China’s treatment of its own people is an ongoing international blight on China’s reputation. Foreign governments and groups regularly document authoritarian China’s often brutal treatment of minorities, dissidents and anyone the Communist rulers view as a threat to their ongoing rule. China detests such accounting.
Prime Minister John Howard last night indicated detailed human rights talks wouldn’t be high on his agenda today. As he briefly met Australian media in Beijing, Mr Howard was asked if he had plans to raise the issue of the Burmese regime’s detention of dissident Aung Sun Suu Kyi, given China’s leverage with the nation?
JOHN HOWARD: Well it’s not as important as some of the other issues but it may well come up.
JOHN TAYLOR: As to human rights generally:
JOHN HOWARD: Well we have a human rights dialogue and I will be indicating that we’re well pleased with the progress that’s being made on that. It’s a much better way of achieving things on that front than the old habit of putting your hand up in favour of a resolution and never actually talking to each other about human rights.
JOHN HOWARD: One issue that various groups in Australia have hoped the Prime Minister would raise during his China visit is Tibet.
China has been accused of trying to wipe out Tibet’s Buddhist-based culture through political and religious repression and a flood of ethnic Chinese immigration, something China’s leaders fiercely deny.
But this May, for only the second time in a decade, a delegation from the “God king”, the Dalai Lama, arrived in Beijing to discuss Communist China’s continuing rule of Tibet.
With China then still focused on battling SARS, observers thought the visit at such a time was a hopeful sign that some top leaders may be wishing to see a settlement of the protracted dispute.
Paul Bourke, from the Australia Tibet Council, is still hopeful that John Howard will mention Tibet. He says Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, did so when recently visited China, welcoming the recent contact between Chinese authorities and the Dalai Lama’s representatives.
PAUL BOURKE: The Australia Tibet Council isn’t asking him to engage in a long dialogue on Tibet. All we’re asking him to do is to take the opportunity to encourage the Chinese to enter into dialogue with the representatives of the Dalai Lama on the Tibet issue.
They’ve sent some signals in this direction with the recent visits of the envoys from the Dalai Lama. All we’re asking Mr Howard to do is encourage that action.
JOHN TAYLOR: Mr Howard says, though, that Australia does have a human rights dialogue where such things are discussed in detail, and one of those recently concluded, a meeting in Beijing. Why then is it necessary for him to raise this at all?
PAUL BOURKE: Well, if dialogue is so important, then every opportunity should be taken to move the issue of Tibet and human rights in China forward. We don’t believe that it’s constructive to quarantine this discussion only to this once a year bilateral dialogue.
Surely it makes more sense when Mr Howard’s meeting with the Chinese leaders to encourage progress in this area.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Paul Bourke of the Australia Tibet Council speaking to John Taylor.
