In her policy outline, presented last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that if China did the work of upholding human rights, it would “benefit the long-term peace, stability, and prosperity of China.”
She also cited examples of this, such as the ability of an impartial judicial system and the rule of law to protect citizens’ property and guarantee that investors could benefit from their ideas.
It is unclear what administration officials expect to gain with such comments, considering China’s notable absence of impartial juries, and the rampant problems of intellectual property theft. But it is expected that China will respond to U.S. officials by promising to make “improvements” in a wide range of areas related to the economy.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told a gathering of the U.S.-China Business Council last week that he wanted China to deliver on its promises, offering specific advice for the implementation of change for that society, and indicating that empty promises would no longer suffice.
But on the issue of human rights, China typically rebuffs such warnings.
In a written response to questions submitted by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Hu Jintao offered the following suggestion, “We both stand to gain from a sound China-U.S. relationship, and lose from confrontation.”
No Rights Compromise
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) regime, what Hu Jintao tries to whitewash as a “socialist democracy,” is largely sustained with violent force and crackdowns on critics of the CCP. That includes any group or religious movements that threaten to draw allegiance away from the CCP.
According to this year’s Freedom in the World survey, released by the influential NGO Freedom House, human rights in China are abysmal and continue to decline.
A highlight of the report notes the “increasing truculence of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes” as illustrative of a “growing inability or unwillingness on the part of the world’s democracies to meet the authoritarian challenge.”
Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees with Freedom House’s assessment of authoritative governments’ increasing aggression.
“[Authoritarian governments] are no longer being hypocritical, they are saying in essence drop dead when they [are] criticized by human rights NGOs and by democratic governments for the terrible human rights abuses that exist,” noted Abrams.
China has faced such criticism over its aggression in the South China Sea and its defiance of transparency on its military buildup. The timing of the stealth jet test flight during a visit by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Beijing recently was seen as deliberately provocative toward the United States.
U.S. Human Rights Policy Zigzagging
In 2009, at the height of the global economic crisis, Secretary Clinton expressed that the United States was willing to set aside contentious human rights issues in favor of progress in areas of the economy, climate change, and international security.
Later that year, China was credited with sabotaging an international agreement on climate change and orchestrating it in such a way as to ascribe the blame to Obama and other developing countries.
Next: Obama signaled that U.S. human rights policy would shift focus
During the U.N. General Assembly last September, Obama signaled that U.S. human rights policy would shift focus. In comments that did not mention China by name, but appear to be related, he said economic growth cannot come at the expense of freedom, and the United States has seen “democratic reforms deferred indefinitely.”
“We see leaders abolishing term limits, crackdowns on civil society, and corruption smothering entrepreneurship and good governance,” he reported.
Obama promised that in the years ahead, the United States would focus on engaging with members of civil societies in oppressed countries as fomenters of liberty, and put less faith on the authoritarian governments for real change to happen.
He said that America would voice concerns when others’ rights are violated.
In an effort that appears to follow from this new strategy, Obama met with Chinese dissidents at the White House for an hour last week. It was the first time such a meeting has taken place in that venue, according to a Washington Post report.
Senior administration officials later suggested to reporters that Obama was looking for ways to engage citizens directly.
At the same time, Hillary Clinton started to raise specific concerns in her recent speech. Of note is Chinese human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, who has been in and out of detention for years, who is known to have suffered beastly tortures while imprisoned, and has not been heard from for over eight months.
Clinton also called for China to live up to its obligations as a member of the United Nations.
Congressional Concerns Raised
A coalition of 32 members of Congress sent a letter to the president on Jan. 14, calling on him to include “China’s egregious human rights record ... as a key issue” in discussions with Hu.
They called for the release of all prisoners of conscience in China, for the need for China to recognize and respect rights of free speech and association, to respect the rule of law, to recognize and respect religious freedom, and to end the sale of arms to the Sudanese.
“We urge you to speak with a strong and clear voice in representing the American people in holding China accountable for its troubled human rights record and demanding improvement,” they stated.
The World is Watching
Wherever China’s leaders travel they are met with spirited and large-scale protests from a host of groups that have long been targeted by the regime—Tibetans, the Uyghur ethnic group, Taiwan and democracy advocates, and members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement are most common.
These groups, as well as the world will be watching to see whether the United States does what it says it will do during Hu’s visit.
T. Kumar, Amnesty International USA advocacy director for Asia and the Pacific, says that he won’t know until the summit itself how much emphasis the U.S. government is willing to put on human rights.
“What the president says to Hu, publicly where the Chinese and American peoples can hear it, will be a good test of whether administration officials are ‘playing a long game’ on freedom and human rights, or sitting on the sidelines,” writes Abrams on his blog at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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