“THE Chinese dream is the Chinese people’s dream of human rights.” That was not uttered by one of China’s beleaguered dissidents, who are now suffering the most intense crackdown on human-rights activists that the country has waged in many years. They were, in fact, the words of a foreign ministry official, in a speech this month marking the 50th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of two covenants on the protection of a wide range of political, cultural and other freedoms. As a signatory to the documents, China has little choice but to parrot their language, even though it often shows little regard for what the covenants mean.

China signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in the late 1990s in an effort to improve its image abroad, which was badly tarnished by the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The government has embraced neither document with enthusiasm, but in 2001 its rubber-stamp legislature ratified the more palatable of them, the ICESCR. It has yet to take that step with the meatier ICCPR. In November a court in the southern province of Guangdong sentenced an activist, Sun Desheng, to two-and-a-half years in prison for the crime of touring the country holding up banners calling for ratification of the ICCPR, and circulating photographs of them on the internet. It also jailed another dissident, Guo Feixiong, for six years, partly for organising the banner campaign.

So squeamish is China about both covenants that it prefers to use its own, alternatively phrased, translations of them rather than the official Chinese-language versions approved by the UN in 1966. China’s seat in the General Assembly was then held by the (also, at the time, human-rights averse) government in Taiwan. The unofficial versions began circulating in 1973, a couple of years after the Communist government in Beijing took over the seat. China does not dispute that the versions of 1966 are valid. But its diplomats and scholars usually quote the unofficial ones.

There are significant differences between the two sets. “In far too many cases the revised drafts do violence to the plain meaning,” write James Seymour and Patrick Yuk-tung Wong of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in a recent paper on the topic. Where the authentic versions say governments “must make every effort” to observe rights, the alternative ones say only that they “should promote” them. The right “to serve in public office” is downgraded to a right to “participate in public affairs” (ie, choosing which Communist Party-approved candidate will serve in a toothless local legislature). There are also omissions in the unofficial versions, for example of a stipulation that members of the ICCPR’s human-rights committee “serve in their personal capacity” (China would balk at allowing its delegates to do so, lest they feel emboldened to criticise their own government). There are also formulations in the unofficial texts that are entirely invented, such as one requiring that “international remedies” be exhausted before any human-rights case is brought before the committee.

Scholars argue over the importance of these discrepancies, but there is no denying that they were introduced in a most irregular manner. Mr Seymour says the alternative versions may have been produced by Chinese diplomats who were not aware at the time that UN-approved translations already existed. But he also believes China has been deliberately promoting the unofficial versions in the years since. “It was probably very innocent in the beginning and then it took on a life of its own,” he says. In public, the UN has avoided wading into the issue of rival translations; privately, one UN official calls it “a rather delicate matter”. Both sets can be found on the sprawling UN website. That may be helpful for Chinese diplomats seeking wiggle-room, though they would prefer to be pinned down to neither.