ABSTRACT
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was instrumental in bringing an end to the brutal occupation of the Japanese in China, but CCP rule in China since 1949 has included various government campaigns that also inflicted human rights abuses on its citizens, including arbitrary detentions, the use of torture and executions. However, it was not until the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 that there was any significant international criticism of such abuses in China. In the wake of the massacre, international human rights organizations, some domestic and exiled Chinese human rights actors and various UN human rights agencies continued to investigate and report on human rights abuses in China. Some of the efforts of these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN human rights agencies, particularly in the first year after the massacre, led to many liberal democratic states being critical of China’s actions and imposing largely symbolic sanctions and supporting resolutions on China at the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).1 Thus, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, this transnational network of human rights actors had proven powerful enough to define what were the most important human rights abuses in China and to secure expressions of condemnation of the Chinese government from many other states.
