U.S. Double Standard Seen on China Rights

Last June, during a press conference in Beijing, former President Jimmy Carter was asked about Wei Jingsheng, China’s best-known political dissident, then in his eighth year in prison for “counterrevolutionary” crimes.

“I’m personally not familiar with the case that you described,” Carter replied.

During that same trip, Carter, who had made an avowed commitment to human rights one of the most distinctive aspects of his foreign policy, gave an interview to Chinese newspapers in which he lavished praise upon China’s treatment of the Tibetan people. Three months later, riots and demonstrations against Chinese rule broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.

Carter’s performance in China was not particularly unusual. During the 15 years since President Richard M. Nixon’s milestone trip to China, the United States and leading U.S. officials have paid considerably less attention to human rights problems in China than in, say, the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

Chinese political dissidents such as Wei, who led a short-lived campaign for democracy in China in the late 1970s and has been imprisoned ever since, get far less public recognition in the United States than do Soviet dissenters.

In 1978, by contrast, when Soviet activist Anatoly Shcharansky (who now calls himself Natan Sharansky) was convicted of charges strikingly similar to those against Wei, the White House immediately condemned the action. “We are all sobered by this reminder that, so late in the 20th Century, a person can be sent to jail simply for asserting his basic human rights,” Carter declared then.

The U.S. policy toward human rights in China came to the fore last month, when the State Department vigorously opposed a Senate resolution condemning China for its handling of the demonstrations in Tibet.

State Department officials contended that the resolution was based on inaccurate information and inappropriately called upon the U.S. government to act in support of the Tibetan people. The resolution passed anyway.

A Double Standard?

“Is there a double standard in the United States concerning human rights in China?” California Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), the head of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, said in an interview. “I don’t think there is any question about this.”

Lantos bemoaned the fact that while his caucus has compiled a computerized file of dissidents in the Soviet Union, “we just don’t have the telephone book for (dissidents in) China.”

Among American scholars and policy-makers, even those who defend Washington’s position concede that the United States does not apply the same rigorous standard in judging human rights abuses in China as it does with respect to the Soviet Union.

“Our relationships with different countries are different,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Stapleton Roy, one of the senior U.S. policy-makers for China, explained last month when he was asked at a Senate hearing why the United States is not more critical of China.

He said the United States has “a differentiated approach to try to find the most effective way of advancing human rights interests that we stand behind.”

Other scholars and U.S. officials point out that the United States sees foreign policy reasons to avoid offending the Chinese government, whose troops confront Soviet forces along a 4,000-mile border.

“We are in strategic conflict with the Soviet Union, and we’re not with China,” said one ranking U.S. official, who declined to be quoted by name.

‘We’re in Quasi-Alliance’

Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute, noted that “we’re in a quasi-alliance with China, and we don’t want to get them upset.”

In addition, some scholars point to cultural and racial differences at work in the American attitudes towards China.

Because China is not a Western country, they say, Americans are less able to identify with political dissidents or other victims, and U.S. officials are more reluctant to express judgments about human rights abuses there than in the Soviet Union. Congressmen say there is no domestic constituency lobbying on behalf of human rights in China in the way that Jewish groups do for the Soviet Union.

“The Soviets are Western,” added one U.S. official involved in American policy toward China. “They claim to be a part of the West, and so they get judged by Western standards. The Chinese have never claimed to be part of the West.”

Finally, many scholars and policy-makers say that Chinese officials can withstand criticism of their current human rights practices simply by observing that conditions now are better than during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

‘Total Estrangement’

“The standard for judging China is the Cultural Revolution, the absence of a legal system and the total estrangement from the West for a period of 25 years,” said University of Michigan Prof. Michel Oksenberg, who was the China specialist on Carter’s national security staff. “That presents a different situation from the Soviet Union, which has not been so estranged from Western currents.”

Still, the mere fact that conditions in the Soviet Union have improved since the worst days of Stalinist terror has not prevented the United States from repeatedly condemning Soviet human rights abuses of the 1970s and 1980s. And notwithstanding the improvements in China since the Cultural Revolution, human rights groups say China’s policies in this decade fall far short of international norms.

“Amnesty International’s main concerns in the People’s Republic of China are people in prison because of their political or religious activities, torture and ill treatment of prisoners and executions,” a spokesman for the London-based human rights group testified at a Senate hearing this fall. According to Chinese estimates, at least 10,000 people have been executed in China since the regime began a crackdown on crime in 1983.

A 1984 report on China by Amnesty International lists a series of specific cases of individuals considered “prisoners of conscience” who are being held in Chinese jails because of their political or religious beliefs. Among them are Roman Catholic priests, Tibetan nationalists and a number of workers and students who, along with Wei Jingsheng, took part in the drive for greater political freedom called the “Democracy Wall” movement in 1978-1979.

Hard-Line Policy

China has taken a hard-line policy toward the complaints from abroad about human rights abuses.

The sorts of discussions or negotiations about human rights policies that Western officials such as Secretary of State George P. Shultz regularly carry out with Soviet leaders rarely take place with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government generally refuses to discuss its policies and practices.

Instead, Beijing has repeatedly challenged the motives of those who complain about human rights abuses. Last September, when Amnesty International released a new report on the use of torture in China, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry replied:

“During the process of perfecting the legal system, it is inevitable that some people will resort to practices which are unlawful. . . . The motive of Amnesty International in quoting these incidents (of torture) is different from that of the Chinese press in exposing them. Its motive is to attack China.”

Last week, in response to complaints by U.S. congressmen about Chinese policies in Tibet, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington issued a written statement saying that matters in Tibet “are entirely China’s internal affairs. . . . We would like to point out in all seriousness that there are no political prisoners in Tibet or anywhere in China.”

The latter assertion is based on China’s contention that all those confined in its prisons are criminals because they have violated Chinese law, which makes it a criminal offense to take part in “counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation” or to organize and take part in a “counterrevolutionary group.”

Curbs on News Coverage

China also has limited information about its human rights policies by imposing restrictions on foreign correspondents covering China.

During the turmoil in Tibet in October, Chinese officials suddenly summoned more than a dozen Western correspondents in Lhasa to a midnight meeting at which they were ordered to get out of Tibet within 48 hours.

China said the correspondents violated rules requiring them to submit applications 10 days in advance before going to Tibet--rules that the correspondents had never seen and that had not previously been enforced. Since this action in early October, no American reporters have been allowed to visit Tibet.

A Chinese government spokesman insisted last week that Tibet is not completely closed to the press because two Norwegian reporters have been allowed to travel there.

In addition, three foreign correspondents representing the New York Times, the French news agency Agence France-Presse and the Japanese agency Kyodo have been expelled from China over the last 18 months.

James Seymour, a researcher at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute, noted that it became a major issue in the United States last year when the Soviets first imprisoned and then expelled Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report.

‘Thrown Out All the Time’

“Reporters get thrown out of China all the time,” he said, “and there’s barely a ripple. The issue here is access to news about China.”

Administration officials and members of Congress concede that so far, at least, issues of human rights in China have not attracted much political interest in the United States.

“On (issues involving) South Africa, you have a huge domestic constituency, a black constituency,” said Lantos, the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. “When it comes to (treatment of) Jews in the Soviet Union, you also have domestic groups heavily involved.”

By contrast, Lantos said, “the Chinese community in the United States has not been in the forefront of a movement for human rights in China in the way that Jews have been for the Soviet Union.”

Now, the political climate in Washington seems to be shifting a bit. This year, both the House and the Senate adopted resolutions criticizing China’s human rights policies, particularly in Tibet.

The Senate resolution calls upon President Reagan to meet with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader. It would also require the President to certify that China is making progress on human rights in Tibet before the United States sells or transfers any new weapons systems to China.

Funding for Exiles Urged

The milder House resolution does not contain these requirements; instead, it calls upon the secretary of state to provide funds for Tibetan exiles.

China has angrily denounced such resolutions as an interference in its internal affairs, and officials at the State Department acknowledge that the increased congressional interest in the subject of human rights in China has become an irritant in current Sino-American relations.

Some members of Congress warn that the United States must be extremely careful in its criticism of China. “Some countries we can demand things of, and some we have to treat in a different way, obviously,” asserted Sen. Terry Sanford (D-N.C.) last September at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on China’s human rights policies.

Others argue, however, that the scope of U.S. relations with China over the last decade--which have grown to encompass trade, commercial, military, educational, scientific and educational links--is broad enough to be able to permit discussion of human rights issues. Indeed, some scholars suggest that China has been extremely skillful in fending off any debate about human rights abuses inside its borders.

“The Chinese have been able to convince us, I think, that they will not respond favorably to our intervention (on human rights questions) and that this would damage our relations,” says Columbia University’s Nathan. “I think they’ve convinced us of this more than it is really true.”

Mann is The Times’ former bureau chief in Beijing.