John Kamm

John Kamm is an American businessman and Human Rights activist. He is the founder of The Dui Hua Foundation, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that promotes universal human rights in well-informed, mutually respectful dialogue with China. He is credited with having helped more than 400 political and religious prisoners in China.

Since his first intervention on behalf of a Chinese prisoner in May 1990, Kamm has made more than 100 trips to China to engage the government in a dialogue on human rights issues, focusing on the treatment of prisoners and prison conditions. He has made 10 visits to Chinese prisons and has submitted requests for information on more than 1,000 prisoners. In an article about Kamm for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Tina Rosenberg wrote: “No other person or organization in the world, including the State Department, has helped more Chinese prisoners.”

Kamm received an AB from Princeton University (1972) and an AM from Harvard University (1975). He served as the Hong Kong correspondent and representative of the National Council for US-China Trade (1975–1979) and vice president (1989) and president (1990) of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. Kamm also managed business operations for Occidental Chemical Company in China and East Asia (1981–1991).

With no background in human rights, Kamm took his first activist stance as vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong by convincing the majority of chamber members to pass a resolution condemning China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Despite strong opposition from many who thought the chamber should avoid making political statements, Kamm’s initiative was a success.

As president of the chamber the following year, Kamm pressured Beijing to release individuals who were imprisoned for their participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. He also advocated for the extension of China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status, arguing that engagement with China is more effective than sanctions at improving the status of political detainees.

From 1991 to 1994—the year US President Bill Clinton unconditionally renewed China’s MFN trade status, Kamm started doing advocacy work full-time. Traveling frequently to China, he raised the names of hundreds of prisoners and received verbal information from the Chinese government on more than half of them. In 1995, China’s State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Justice agreed to receive from Kamm quarterly prisoner lists of up to 25 names and began providing written responses on many of the cases.

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