Human Rights by Horse Trading

Before last month’s Sino-American summit in Washington, a senior official in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said that the Chinese side had been told that the release of some dissidents--he did not say “all” or “most” or even “many”--was “one of the most effective things that could be done to help neutralize the human rights question.” No wonder the Chinese think the Americans are cynical about human rights.

If the official had any one individual in mind, it was no doubt Wei Jingsheng. Sunday brought the exhilarating news that Wei is a free man--in relative terms at least, since the Chinese have released him through the expedient device of “medical parole,” which they have often invoked to allow ailing dissidents to travel to the United States.

In purely humanitarian terms, Wei’s release is wonderful news. The word may be overused, but it is genuinely accurate to call him a hero. However, the last thing his release should do is “neutralize the human rights question.” And the last message it should send to human rights activists is that further personality-driven horse trading is the preferred means of improving human rights in China.

A decade ago, the Chinese democracy movement was an abstraction. Since Tiananmen, it has steadily acquired a human face--none better known than Wei Jingsheng, who has become a virtual household name in the West even while he remains largely unknown inside China. But in the process, something has gone terribly wrong. Giving a movement a human face is one thing; turning individuals into high-priced bargaining chips is another. When U.S. officials hint that multibillion deals for the future of China’s nuclear power industry can be swung if Wei Jingsheng exchanges his Chinese prison cell for a bed in a Detroit hospital--deprived in either case of his right to speak freely to his compatriots--we have plumbed the depths of cynicism.

Wei Jingsheng’s release should be the beginning, not the end, of the story. It should clear the stage for a long-term strategy to improve human rights in China, one that is not limited to trading for the release of dissidents. It should now be possible to develop a strategy that is tougher and more comprehensive and yet at the same time more palatable to the Chinese--and thus more likely to be productive. This may seem paradoxical, but it also suggests the significant opportunity that is at hand if policymakers have the imagination to grasp it.

The long-term goal should be to bring Chinese law and practice into full compliance with international human rights standards. All parts of the U.S. administration--the Commerce Department as much as the State Department--should be instructed to pursue that goal with the same single-mindedness with which they now pursue nuclear power plant deals for Westinghouse or airplane contracts for Boeing.

The key is international human rights law. To listen to the China-bashers in Congress, we are dealing here with a new evil empire, a renegade state whose leaders are to be compared to Saddam Hussein and Hitler. This is ludicrous, both because it is counterproductive and because it has no basis in fact. Preaching is often the preferred American way of dealing with the outside world, but in this case it is preaching to the unconvertible. Little wonder that Jiang Zemin should retort that “American democracy and freedom are not absolute concepts.”

International human rights law, however, is by definition universal. China continues to resist signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in large part no doubt because of the articles that deal with freedom of conscience and expression, on which U.S. critics have focused to the virtual exclusion of all other rights. But China has now signed a range of other human rights treaties, including the Convention Against Torture and the Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. Chinese leaders have even accepted some that the United States declines to ratify, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child--a distinction the U.S. shares only with Somalia.

The importance of this treaty regime to the future of U.S.-China exchanges is twofold. First, it allows the discussion to take place on a level playing field, rather than as a shouting match about the relative virtues of different political systems. Second, great leverage can come from recognizing that the spectrum of rights guaranteed by these treaties is indivisible. China’s advances in moving masses out of poverty and disease are nothing short of stunning and should be acknowledged. However, if the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that economic development cannot be sustained unless legal systems work fairly, arbitrary conduct by officials is ended and government becomes accountable to the population.

There is thus a direct (and so far completely unexplored) pathway from human rights as China understands them to the rights of individual dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng. China’s economy will not work properly if financial journalists seeking to analyze the budget are jailed for “stealing state secrets.” Its mega-projects, like the Three Gorges Dam, may lead to environmental catastrophe unless critics are free to speak up. The overhaul of China’s state industrial monolith may create the very chaos that China’s leaders dread unless workers are free to associate.

And human rights in China will not really advance when dissidents like Wei Jingsheng are released--only when the laws and practices exist to guarantee that the next Wei Jingsheng will not be jailed in the first place.