George Osborne has been praised by Chinese state media for focussing on business rather than human rights. The Global Times hailed the Chancellor as “the first Western official in recent years who focused on business potential rather than raising a magnifying glass to the ‘human rights issue'”.
Amnesty International’s latest report into China describes wide-ranging use of arbirtrary detention of activists, with “torture and other ill-treatment” remaining endemic. In March of 2014, four lawyers investigating conditions in a “Legal Education Centre” – in practice, according to Amnesty, the centres operate as detention centres – were themselves detained and tortured. “One of them, Tang Jitian, said that he was strapped to an iron chair, slapped in the face, kicked, and hit so hard over the head with a plastic bottle filled with water that he passed out,” the report reveals.
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