Like many Americans I watched the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao this week with great interest. My original intent had been to focus on defense related issues like China’s rising Pacific naval presence and their relations with North Korea; but an item in the 20 January issue of the Washington Post unexpectedly caught my interest: “President Obama used his summit Wednesday with Chinese President Hu Jintao to place the issue of human rights front and center in the U.S. relationship with the world’s preeminent ascending power. And Hu, in a rare concession, acknowledged that China needs to make more progress. On a day that combined billion-dollar deals with talks on nuclear proliferation and trade imbalances, Obama’s calls for a freer China constituted a significant shift from his previous statements playing down U.S. concerns. In a series of public remarks made in Hu’s presence, Obama urged his counterpart to allow more freedom and to open a real dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, arguing that only countries that respect the rights of all their citizens can be truly stable.”
On January 14th Secretary of State Clinton gave a rundown of Chinese Human Rights abuses. She stated:
I know that many in China, not just in the government, but in the population at large resent or reject our advocacy of human rights as an intrusion on sovereignty. But as a founding member of the United Nations, China has committed to respecting the rights of all its citizens. These are universal rights recognized by the international community.
So in our discussions with Chinese officials, we reiterate our call for the release of Liu Xiaobo and the many other political prisoners in China, including those under house arrest and those enduring enforced disappearances, such as Gao Zhisheng. We urge China to protect the rights of minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang; the rights of all people to express themselves and worship freely; and the rights of civil society and religious organizations to advocate their positions within a framework of the rule of law. And we believe strongly that those who advocate peacefully for reform within the constitution, such as the Charter 08 signatories, should not be harassed or prosecuted.
We believe also that when China lives up to these obligations of respecting and protecting universal human rights, it will not only benefit more than one billion people. It will also benefit the long-term peace, stability, and prosperity of China. For example, an independent, impartial judicial system and respect for the rule of law would protect citizens’ property and guarantee that inventors can profit from their ideas. Freedom of expression for everyone, from political activists to academics and journalists and bloggers, would help foster the open exchange of ideas that is essential to innovation and a creative economy. A vibrant civil society would help address some of China’s most pressing issues, from food safety to pollution to education to health care. This promise is already apparent in the work of individuals and NGOs who volunteered after the Sichuan earthquake. The longer China represses freedoms, the longer it will miss out on these opportunities and the longer that Nobel Prize winners, empty chairs in Oslo will remain a symbol of a great nation’s unrealized potential and unfulfilled promise.
I know that China’s leaders believe that political reforms could shake the stability of their country and get in the way of its continuing essential economic growth. But we have seen nation after nation, from South Korea to Indonesia to many parts of the world, where once they realize that denying people the right to express their discontent can easily create more unrest, while embracing reforms can strengthen societies and unleash new potential for development. It is clear that we cannot paper over differences; nor should we try to do so. But the future of our relationship can be strong if we each meet our responsibilities as great nations.”
One might say that Human Rights issues are not necessarily relevant to national security policy. I think it is relevant because in the past it has been used to debate whether nations should or should not intervene with military force in a country that is either conducting or allowing and/or unable to prevent major human rights abuses. The situation in Rwanda in the 1990’s comes to mind where nearly one million people died as a result of ethnic cleansing in less than a month while the world stood by and let it happen.
What disturbed me about the statements by politicians and media coverage of the Chinese President’s visit was that it could leave some with the perception that Human Rights are a Chinese problem. What I would have liked to have seen from our policy makers during the Chinese President’s visit was to put the Human Rights issue discussion in the context of a world problem. January 20th was the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s inauguration address. I’m reminded of one of the lesser known quotes from that speech, “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. “
I believe in many areas, to include Human Rights, the United States of America is one of the greatest nations the world has known; but that doesn’t mean we have not dealt with Human Rights issues. According to an April 23, 2008 article in the New York Times, “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners….The United States has…2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London. China…is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousand of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)”
I should do a disclaimer and say I grew up in a high crime area in a major U.S. city so firmly believe if you do the crime you do the time. In recent years, increased use of DNA evidence has proven many men were innocent of crimes they were accused of and spent years in jail for. I wonder how many other innocent people are in U.S. jails because they could not afford a good lawyer.
In their excellent book Half the Sky, which look at Human Rights abuses against women, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn state: “The worst of these abuses tend to occur in poor nations, but the United States and other Western countries are not immune. In America, millions of women and girls face beatings or other violence from their husbands or boyfriends, and more than one in six undergoes rape at some point in her life, according to the National Violence Against Women survey.”
In Germany it’s against the law to say the Holocaust never happened; yet, 150 years after the Civil War, Americans continue to debate the war’s cause and many refuse to believe slavery played a major role. Congress did not apologize for slavery and the follow on “Jim Crow” segregation and the atrocities committed against Native Americans until 2008. Because of state laws that said only those who owned property could vote, all white males did not get the right to vote until 1856. American women did not get the right to vote until 1920 and were only given full civil rights in the 1960’s when they were included in the Civil Rights Bill as a joke some say.
You get the picture. Here’s what I’m trying to say. There is no doubt that China has some major Human Rights issues but that said they have certainly come along way from the days of the Cultural Revolution. When researching this blog I tried to get figures on how many people died during this period and saw no firm figures but estimates ranged from hundreds of thousand to 20 million. China has come a long way sense those days. In 2004 they amended their constitution to guarantee human rights.
By their own admission they still have a long way to go. It’s taken the U.S. over two hundred years to get to where we are on human rights issues. I think it is unrealistic to expect other nations to change over night or make their governments a cookie cutter version of ours. The governments of some of our closest democratic allies do not mirror ours. Should there be lines drawn in the sand? Absolutely, but we need to work these as international solutions.
Think I’ll end here. I’ll probably do a blog on some defense issues we have with China in the next few days. As always my views are my own.
