Yesterday I had the good fortune of attending a meeting at Sweden’s Foreign Ministry with John Kamm and William McCahill, from the Duihua Foundation. Mr. Kamm was here to accept an award for his foundation from the Swedish government. What I heard yesterday was the most inspiring presentation I have attended.

I would like to share some of what John Kamm spoke about, although this article will not do justice to the simple and powerful message of a very gifted speaker.

First of all, who is John Kamm? He is the former president of the American Chamber of Congress, an extremely successful businessman who had a revelation in 1990 at a banquet in Hong Kong while being toasted at a banquet by a top Beijing official. He interrupted the toast and asked China to release a specific prisoner of conscience. His action not only created quite a scene, it changed his own life (and that of the prisoner, who was released). Read more about John Kamm’s story here.

The Basis of the Duihua Foundation's Work

John Kamm has based his work on two fundamental ideas:

1. Asking the Chinese government about a political detainee is likely to improve the situation of that detainee. (This is the same idea Amnesty works on.) Not only does the Duihua Foundation now have ample evidence that this is true, in the thousands of cases they work with, they have not had any evidence that international concern for a prisoner has harmed the detainee.

2. To ask about detainees, you need to know their names. John Kamm believed their names could be found in government lists, although many experts and scholars said that such lists did not exist.

The Methodology of the Duihua Foundation

John Kamm has worked since 1990 on a few basic principles:

1. He is not a spy. Kamm's work is two-fold: (1) compiling lists of political detainees and why they are detained; (2) asking Beijing for information about these detainees. His work has often made Beijing unhappy, but a key to his success has been that they cannot accuse him of spying or illegally acquiring state secrets. John Kamm found the lists he was looking for, the lists people thought didn't exist, at the library. Believe it or not, Kamm dug up year after year of provincial public security records at the library in Hong Kong.

2. Use only official Chinese sources. In his dialog with Chinese authorities, John Kamm only uses the information he has found in official Chinese government documents, which makes it impossible for China to deny the existence of the cases Kamm discusses with them.

3. Mutual respect. Kamm's work is a dialog, in which he personally engages, travelling frequently to Beijing to meet with authorities. He also knows and respects Chinese culture.

4. Cooperation. Kamm cooperates closely with numerous governments and NGOs, including Amnesty International, the EU, the UN, the Swiss and U.S. governments, etc., thus multiplying the effect of his research results.

The Results of the Duihua Foundation

The Duihua Foundation has had a direct hand in the release not only of well-known cases like Rebiya Kadeer and Wang Youcai, but has also had success in lesser-known cases.  His research has led to a database revealing 4,000 previously unknown political prisoners, and an additional database of thousands of political prisoners from alternative sources that he is hoping to complement.

Kamm and McCahill Speak about China's Recent Trackbacking on NGOs

China's authorities had been exhibiting increasing tolerance for the formation of NGOs until a violent backswing recently. Kamm and McCahill discussed this change of winds, tracing it back to a meeting between Putin and Hu Jintao in 2005, at which Putin and Hu apparently discussed....Color Revolutions: their dangers and how to avoid them. NGOs are called "the smokeless guns of the color revolution", and the result of this has been a stringent crackdown on NGOs and increased surveillance and statistical analyses of all forms of "social disturbances," closing of internet chat rooms and bulletin boards that provide space for civil society to flourish and networks to build, and increased censorship.

Kamm Speaks about Investigation of Political Crimes in China

Kamm's research has also turned up a vast amount of previously unknown information about China's criminal legislation, police methodology and criminal statistics. Kamm talked about the disproportionate amount of resources police put into investigating political crimes, while murder cases and other "ordinary" crimes received relatively little resources. Kamm said that hundreds of officers could be assigned to finding a single dissident. In one example, he mentioned the "train hopper" case:

The "train hopper" was a man from Sichuan who listened often to foreign radio such as BBC, and whose mind was thus "poisoned." He began writing letters to foreign and local media, taking trains to send them from different provinces and cities. The police, having of course confiscated the letters (China's postal system is censored), searched for him for 7 years before arresting him. In such cases, police spare no effort, gathering writing samples from the entire local population where a letter was sent from, for example.

What's in it for the police, making them so motivated and dedicated to finding political criminals? Status. According to Kamm's research, the high status involved with solving these cases is so alluring, that The Public Security and State Security Bureaus vie bitterly for the cases.