Quote from Hatla Thelle’s oral history

“I was very upset by the attitude of both European scholars and European civil servants or European bureaucrats in the sessions of Human Rights Dialogue between European Union and China – this is just in general. I was upset by the attitude of Europeans during the sessions. Often, it was not China scholars who participated from the European side, so the participants did not know anything about China and many of them had a picture of China which was very biased. That would be, for instance, lawyers or sociologists from different European countries, they were coming to China where they were meeting with the Chinese scholars with such arrogance…They thought they knew that China was such a horrible country and that kind of things…I would just say that it showed me how difficult it is to get an atmosphere where you can get true information, where we can meet each other with a kind of confidence. And I think that in the big picture, that influence also the research possibilities. And that’s, of course, also because this was a human rights area, which is, of course, very, very sensitive.”