A leading Chinese human rights expert yesterday lashed out at a US report accusing China of widespread rights abuse, dismissing the report as "completely groundless" and its authors as being imbued with a Cold War mentality.

Human Rights Watch, a US-based group, yesterday released its annual report which criticized a handful of countries including China for poor rights records. However, the group's judgment of China "has no basis in fact", said Dong Yunhu, secretary-general of the China Society for Human Rights Studies.

"This group (Human Rights Watch) always turns a blind eye to China's progress in human rights protection, no matter how remarkable it is," Dong said, adding that the group is imbued with Cold War mentality when it comes to China, leading to inevitable bias in its reports.

The Washington-based group criticized China for rights abuse in a wide range of fields, particularly focusing on the country's tightened control over the Internet, press and aid groups.

"The report is politically motivated," Dong said. "In reality, China has made huge progress in human rights protection in the past year."

"Human rights protection" was included in the guidelines for the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10) and "the development of individual political rights" sits atop of the country's development goals for the next five years, Dong said.

He pointed out that China had scrapped millennia-old agricultural taxes, promised to provide free nine-year education and tightened control over the death penalty.

Dong further defended the government's supervision of the Internet, calling the measure an attempt to facilitate citizens' right of expression, not to suffocate freedom of speech.

"No matter how much China improves its human rights, Human Rights Watch will always claim that rights abuses are getting more serious," Dong said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 12, 2007)