Human Rights Card Plays to Beijing

The human rights issue remains the great wall between China and America. As both East and West count down to the upcoming Washington summit with Presidents Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton, it’s hard to see how the issue will cause anything but misunderstanding, confusion and trouble.

China’s leaders don’t understand why Americans fail to recognize and honor their progress in economic and social rights. They insist that their people enjoy greater freedom of action today than at any time in recent memory, and, reflecting back on the long history of Western exploitation, they suspect our motives, which of course we regard as the purest imaginable. Why don’t we clean up our own act first, they ask? Explains John Bryan Starr in his new book “Understanding China,” China’s leaders will always resent our intrusiveness: “And their position is not irrational: Imagine the reactions of the American government were the Chinese to make continued American investment in joint ventures contingent on Congress’ strengthening affirmative action programs.” Overstretched as it is, the analogy does reflect the Chinese mentality.

What does the West expect? Basically, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we’d say that we want China to be more like the West. So what’s wrong with that? Just this: Our desire for China’s government to start treating political opponents like human beings may have the unintended effect of getting in the way of that happening. American public opinion being what it is--idealistic and prone to single issues--the dissident issue becomes almost all that many Americans know or care to know of China.

If nothing else, that gives Beijing leverage over us. Concludes Harvard research associate Robert S. Ross in the current National Interest quarterly: “Our making clear to China that the release of dissidents is the quid pro quo for improved U.S.-China relations gives Beijing a vested interest in keeping dissidents in jail until it can secure a payoff for releasing them.” Beijing, after all, could just as easily let them out of jail to be followed around by hovering security officers as to leave them rotting in jail. The effect would be the same: denial of freedom. Ross is so certain of the unintended harm of disproportional human-rights advocacy that he excoriates U.S. idealism as “self-indulgent”: It reduces “China’s democracy advocates to political pawns in U.S.-China relations and increases their jail time by so doing.”

Even if that is true, it is hard to envision America ever containing its idealism, no matter if that were in our national interest and in the ultimate interest of China’s political prisoners. Former Bush administration official Richard Haass, in a penetrating review of Clinton’s policies in the current Foreign Policy quarterly, voices this complaint: “The Soviet-American relationship defined the previous half century; Sino-American ties are likely to define the next. . . . To narrowly focus on human rights is an unjustifiable luxury.” He’s right: Downplay the dissident issue, downsize the weapon; overplay the issue, play into Beijing’s hands. But those who would argue that U.S. fury over human rights must be kept more proportional lest it become increasingly exploitable inevitably risk being attacked as apologists for China, when in reality the effect of their advice, were it followed, would be to deny Beijing this immoral and insidious weapon.

Let’s see how the dissident issue affects the upcoming summit. Will China release a few tokens? If so, what will it get in return? Clinton is said to be leaning toward permitting China to buy U.S. peaceful-use nuclear power technology. But first he must certify that Beijing is adhering to antiproliferation policies, notwithstanding allegations of technology shipments to Pakistan and Iran. In return, will the president get China to play the dissident card, thus making him look good to human rights groups and critics on Capitol Hill?

When I run that question by my Asian contacts--do they think China will return any summit favors with a few marquee-quality dissident releases?--they shake their heads no. They feel that China would lose face if it did. Perhaps. But China has saved plenty of face since the Tiananmen Square massacre: Thousands of political prisoners still languish in jail despite constant worldwide appeals of conscience. Now China can save what’s left of a few lives--and save Clinton’s face in the process--by doing the smart thing and showing up in Washington with something to give our president. Which in this case and for once would be the right thing to do as well.

Such symbolic tokenism won’t change the essential nature of China overnight, of course. The real question is whether the People’s Republic 10 years from now will be different from the China of today. “I recognize that the Chinese government is changing,” said Emily Lau, the outspoken Hong Kong democracy advocate, at a recent USC-UCLA Joint Center in East Asian Studies dinner in her honor. “But it is not changing fast enough.” If Jiang does dress up the summit with a dissident-release show, it hardly will be proof positive that China is changing that fast. But if he goes home with those cards still in his back pocket, it will suggest that Lau is right. Or worse: that China won’t even bother with a face lift.