I have friends who tell me about how bad things are in China in the area of human rights. Most of them have never been to China, but they have read a book or heard something from someone, or just generally remember how bad communists have always been. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

I’m sure abuses exist. I’ve lived in China almost four years and have never actually seen any abuses, nor have I ever heard any first-hand accounts of any. But I know something about human nature, so I believe they must exist. People are probably shaken down by crooked cops, and people with little power are probably beaten without good cause. However, if this were a widespread phenomenon, I think it would be reflected on the faces of the people. I would expect to see fear in the eyes of citizens of a police state. Instead I mostly see people living out normal, uneventful lives. The ambitious ones are mostly busy trying to get into a good university. If they have graduated, they are mostly busy trying to get into graduate school or get a good job. Some are busy trying to get rich. The peasants are busy doing the boring sorts of things that peasants normally do. I’ve never seen anyone look like they feared anyone in uniform here. Rather, I see people constantly cutting in front of cop cars on the streets and mostly ignoring the police.

What makes me look at this issue differently from most people is that I have lived with a plate in my forehead for nearly four decades. You see, around 1971 I was in a city park in Rockford, Illinois, when the cops busted a friend of mine for no other reason than that his hair was too long. I protested this illegal arrest and promptly got handcuffed. All the way to the police station a patrolman with the nametag R BAST kept taunting me about my own hair, accusing me of being a queer. This to me suggested that the officer had struggles with his own sexual orientation, and was trying to hide it with an excessive display of macho. Anyway, at the police station he started beating up my friend. I peered around the corner to witness it, and promptly got thrown to the floor and kicked around.

Now the next episode is probably the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life, but a good cop should have never reacted the way he did. Assuming that R BAST was in fact a latent homosexual, I blew him a kiss right in front of his fellow officers. I had great fun with that for about three seconds. Then he started pounding my head repeatedly onto the concrete floor of the police station. Right above me was a sign prominently advising me of my rights, one of which was my alleged right not to be abused. All during this time about a dozen of Rockford’s Finest were laughing. This included a guy wearing sergeant’s stripes. So I guess you can tell me people get tortured in China, but I would have to reply, “So what? How is that any different from what happened to me in democratic America?”

The next day they put me in a holding cell with a black guy who had been badly worked over the night before. The cops had covered his body with welts, probably with a rubber hose. I suspect it was partly intended as an object lesson for me. They also added a bunch of extra charges to my initial disorderly conduct, none of which had any legal merit. When they brought me before a judge, the judge simply handed me a paper to sign. In exchange for my immediate release, I agreed to never press charges against the city or police force of Rockford. I had little choice. I suspect if I hadn’t signed, I would have ended up like that black guy. So I signed and they released me. In 1973 I had to have part of my skull replaced with plastic and steel because the fracture had created a situation where the spinal fluid was seeping through and filling up my forehead. This led to a whole series of other problems, but that is a different story.

Epilog:  R BAST became one of the elite SWAT team some time later. One day he was suspended for a week for beating up some Mexican fellow he caught sleeping at the Colonial Bakery, where, surprisingly, the Mexican was employed. A few years later my dad sent me a news article about Richard Bast, Junior, who was arrested for armed robbery. I guess people really do reap what they sow.

None of this actually proves that the Chinese population is not being systematically abused, but whenever I hear those accusations, I have to think back on my own experience. My opinion is that we should clean up our own house first before we presume to clean up our neighbor’s. Or, to borrow someone else’s metaphor, perhaps we should remove the log from our own eye before we try to remove the speck from the other guy’s eye.

October 22, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China