Beijing Uses Human Rights Forum to Distort Norms, Mask Repression, US Says

The U.S. State Department has criticized Beijing’s recent human rights forum, saying Chinese authorities used the event to distort internationally recognized human rights concepts while concealing abuses at home and abroad.The department told Voice of America via email that it remains deeply concerned about abuses targeting religious groups, dissidents, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians, and others. It also said it opposed Beijing’s transnational repression, saying such actions violate the sovereignty of the United States and other countries.Beijing held its 2026 Forum on Global Human Rights Governance from June 11 to June 12. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it co-hosted the forum with the Chinese State Council Information Office and that it was built around the 40th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration on the Right to Development.The forum fit a broader effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to redefine human rights around state-directed development and political control rather than individual freedoms, experts told The Epoch Times.Tseng Chien-yuan, a board member of the Taiwan Association for Democracy in Mainland China, said Beijing’s rights framework makes the state the center of human rights—not the individual.“In Western democracies, the individual is the subject of rights,” Tseng said. “In Beijing’s view, the state is the subject, acting as the arbiter of priorities and claiming to solve survival issues through the exercise of state power.”He said that approach allows the CCP to treat civil and political rights as secondary to what Beijing calls the right to survival and development.Sheng Xue, a Canadian-Chinese writer and commentator, said human rights cannot be reduced to material survival.“Under international law, human rights are more than just freedom from hunger,” Sheng told The Epoch Times. “Without freedom of speech, personal safety, and a free press, the so-called ‘right to survival’ is a sham.”She said the CCP has no standing to host a human rights forum, citing its record of repression against dissidents, religious believers, and rights defenders.Transnational RepressionThe State Department’s criticism was levied a week after the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) held a hearing on the Chinese regime’s expanding use of transnational repression and malign influence in the United States.The commission said diaspora communities, companies, universities, cultural institutions, public officials, and civil society organizations have faced pressure in recent years when their words or actions challenge the CCP’s preferred narratives.The Falun Dafa Information Center, in written testimony submitted for the CECC’s June 4 hearing, said the CCP has intensified its transnational repression campaign against Falun Gong practitioners in the United States and other countries since 2022.The group documented 388 incidents across 25 countries from March 2024 to May 2026, including 218 cases in the United States.Those who provided the testimony said the campaign included espionage, surveillance, lawfare, disinformation, impersonation, hoax threats, sabotage, assaults, physical intimidation, diplomatic pressure, and proxy mobilization.It highlighted that Shen Yun Performing Arts, a New York-based classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners, has become the primary target, accounting for the majority of documented incidents.Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, consists of meditative exercises and moral teachings centered on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It was introduced publicly in China in 1992 and gained popularity quickly. The CCP began to view the practice’s popularity as a threat to its authority, and in July 1999, launched a persecution campaign to eradicate the practice.According to Minghui, a U.S.-based nonprofit that documents the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, 5,339 Falun Gong practitioners have been confirmed to have died as a result of the persecution. The website says the true death toll is much higher, but many cases remain unreported or require further investigation because of strict censorship in China.Minghui’s persecution archive includes accounts and records related to deaths, torture, organ harvesting, imprisonment and forced labor, disappearance, persecution outside China, perpetrators, and CCP propaganda.The CECC also held a hearing in mid-May, titled “A Market Built on Victims: Stopping Illegal Organ Trafficking in China and Beyond.”The commission said the systematic, widespread, and nonconsensual removal of human organs for transplantation—often described as forced organ harvesting or illegal organ trafficking—remains one of the gravest human rights concerns associated with China.The commission said reports by researchers, rights advocates, and medical ethics experts have raised serious concerns that prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and other prisoners of conscience, have been targeted within a state-enabled transplant system.UN DevelopmentThe U.N. Declaration on the Right to Development says every person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural, and political development.It also says development should take place in a framework in which “all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”Human Rights Watch Asia Deputy Director Maya Wang told VOA that social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights together make up the international human rights system. She said Beijing has pledged to protect those rights but is instead trying to redefine them in a way that weakens their effect.Human Rights Watch’s 2026 world report said Chinese authorities systematically deny freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion, and persecute government critics.China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998 but has not ratified it.Tang Bing and Yi Ru contributed to this report.