China and the Human Rights 'List'

It seemed to be a case of bad timing: Last week, lawmakers, activists and editorial writers blasted the State Department for dropping China from a list of the "most systematic human-rights abusers" in its annual human rights report, just as Beijing launched a brutal crackdown against Tibetan protesters. Just one problem: The existence of such a list is a myth, one perpetuated by newspaper reports, including those in The Washington Post. Starting in 2005, the State Department restructured the introduction to its annual human rights report to highlight key themes, which have not been consistent over time. Often a country such as China would appear in more than one place in the introduction. In last year's report, for example, Sudan, one of the world's most abusive regimes, was not grouped with other systematic human rights violators -- but was singled out for practicing genocide. This year, State Department officials decided to highlight China as a country undergoing economic reforms but still denying citizens "basic human rights and fundamental freedoms." State Department officials say they did so to show how claims that economic reform would lead to political freedom were mostly hollow, but media accounts instead focused on how China was discussed one paragraph lower compared with last year's report. A close reading demonstrates that State's bottom-line assessment of China has barely changed, as these excerpts show.- Glenn Kessler