China’s Rights Record Fails to Spark Outrage

Has America lost all sense of outrage over China’s human rights abuses?

That question must be asked as China completes what is, by any reckoning, its worst year in human rights since the beginning of the 1990s.

Let’s briefly sum up what has happened in China over the last 12 months.

The Communist Party regime has carried out its nationwide crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, detaining an estimated 35,000 people and sentencing four to as much as 18 years in prison. It has virtually destroyed the fledgling China Democratic Party by sending the leaders to jail for lengthy terms. And it has carried out similar crackdowns in the minority areas of Tibet and Xinjiang.

What hasn’t happened is even more significant. Despite earlier promises, Beijing hasn’t ratified either of the two U.N. covenants on human rights it agreed to sign before President Clinton’s trip to China in 1998. It hasn’t taken any steps toward dialogue with the Dalai Lama. And it has cut off all official dialogue with the United States on human rights.

“If you look at China’s record, we don’t have anything to hang on to,” observes one State Department official. “There’s nothing. They’re not even throwing us any bones.”

In fact, China seems almost to be going out of its way these days to show how little respect it has for American sensitivities. After a U.S. diplomat in Beijing met with a Chinese democracy activist earlier this month, the Chinese man was detained for five days, beaten, punched and kicked.

The conclusion seems inescapable that the Chinese leadership makes gestures on human rights only as a short-term tactic when it wants or needs something big from Washington that it might not obtain otherwise.

When China wanted President Clinton to come to Beijing for official ceremonies in Tiananmen Square, it freed dissidents Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan from prison, said it would sign the U.N. human rights conventions, dangled the prospect of a more conciliatory policy on Tibet and allowed a brief political opening. Soon after Clinton’s 1998 trip, China reversed course.

China also used to make some significant concessions in the months before congressional votes on annual extensions of its trade benefits. And there’s a big vote coming up next year that would make these benefits permanent.

But China stopped worrying about loss of trade with the United States after it figured out that the American business community wouldn’t let that happen.

When it comes to China, America’s top business executives are considerably more timid than either the Bush or the Clinton administration. When Fortune magazine sponsored a forum for America’s leading CEOs and China’s top leaders in Shanghai last September, the American sponsors didn’t even let a discussion of human rights occupy a place on the agenda.

Those who seek to explain away China’s behavior have sometimes argued that the repression falls only on those who engage in political activity, not on ordinary Chinese.

The argument is an odd one from the start, because it seems to be based on stereotypes. Why should anyone assume that ordinary Chinese don’t want to take part in politics in the same way as ordinary Americans or Europeans or other Asians?

Moreover, there’s plenty of evidence that Chinese repression does affect ordinary people--such as, for example, the elderly or unemployed members of Falun Gong.

Last September, Human Rights in China issued a study of the little-known Chinese system of “custody and repatriation.” Under it, authorities in Chinese cities have authority to lock up people for any reason or no reason at all if they don’t have residency permits.

China has used this system to conduct sweeps of millions of migrant workers, as well as beggars and street children, the study found. They are detained in more than 700 special detention centers around China. “If people have no money to bail them out, they stay there for a long time,” observes Xiao Qiang, the executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China.

This study got little attention in the American press or in Congress. Since Wei was freed and sent into exile more than two years ago, the subject of Chinese human rights has increasingly been treated as passe.

The Clinton administration is now considering whether to sponsor a condemnation of China next spring at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. The United States and the European Union came within a vote of winning approval for such a resolution in 1995. Since then, however, the EU has been unwilling to sponsor one.

“If we support a U.N. condemnation and the EU would co-sponsor it again, the Chinese might sit up and take notice,” says one U.S. official.

For its part, the EU will meet in Brussels next month to decide what approach it should take. Over the last couple of years, the Europeans have said they prefer dialogue with China on human rights, rather than a U.N. condemnation. Based on China’s recent conduct, such dialogue seems like nothing but idle chatter.

“I can see how hard the United States and other countries negotiate with China . . . to get them to obey the economic rules,” observes Xiao. “I don’t see any effort to get China to obey the rules on human rights. It’s only talk.”