Wall Street Journal: China Thinks Human Rights Are Just a Power Game

April 17, 2001

While Americans were fuming over the detention of the EP-3E air crew on Hainan Island last week, Chinese President Jiang Zemin was enjoying the hospitality of Fidel Castro. The man from Beijing crooned "Guantanamera" and some snatches of Chinese opera to Fidel at a state dinner. Fidel seemed to like the serenade, not to mention $374 million in Chinese credits to enable Cuba to modernize telecommunications, build a new luxury hotel in Havana, and buy a million Chinese TV sets, presumably all pre-tuned to the Fidel channel.

It's no surprise that the two hit it off so well. They preside over the two most insouciant of the few [party's name omitted] remaining in power. They both treat their subjects like dirt. Their countries are at the top of all lists citing gross abuses of human rights. But does that trouble their dreams? Well, only a little. Both shrug off the problem as just another bit of carping from the democratic West that can best be countered by propaganda and bluster about outside interference with sovereign rights.

One of the main purposes of Mr. Jiang's Latin American tour -- which happened to coincide with the 11-day EP-3E crisis -- was to spike the annual U.S. effort to win United Nations condemnation of China's human-rights record. Before Cuba, he had stopped off in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. From Cuba he was off to schmooze the leftist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who endeared himself to the Chinese in Beijing in 1999 with a denunciation of "savage capitalism." All along the way, Mr. Jiang was dropping off favors in the form of trade agreements. Most likely he got what he wanted, at least tacit Latin support for China's position before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

The commission will consider a U.S. resolution tomorrow asking it to censure China. Human-rights groups don't hold out much hope that the 53-nation commission will vote for censure. The U.S. has put forth such a resolution for nine years, and for those nine years it has been defeated by a Chinese "no-action" counter-resolution. The Chinese typically lobby developing nations before the vote, using both political and economic muscle. This year, the lobbying was particularly intense because China has put in a bid to stage the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and was worried that a censure vote would queer its chances.

But while the Chinese leadership is sensitive to anything that might damage its prestige, it shows very little sensitivity to the substantive issue: the rights of human beings to live in dignity and freedom from fear. It regards its jousting with the West on this issue as simply another arena where the relative power of the two sides is being tested. It has blithely signed two U.N. covenants, one dealing with economic, social and cultural rights and the other with civil and political rights, but with little apparent intention of observing them.

In a new book titled "Human Rights and Chinese Foreign Relations" (University of Pennsylvania Press), Professor Ming Wan of George Mason University writes that such concessions are "not really meaningful." He adds that "Chinese writing on China and U.N. human-rights institutions and actual Chinese behavior indicate tactical learning by which highly specialized Chinese human-rights diplomats have learned how to work the U.N. system to China's advantage."

That seems like a fair appraisal. Signing those two covenants, in 1996 and 1998, has brought no improvement in China's behavior. The U.S. State Department's lengthy annual human rights report issued in February said that in 2000, the Chinese government's already poor human rights record worsened. The report said that "thousands of unregistered religious institutions had been either closed or destroyed, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners remained in detention or were sentenced to reeducation-through-labor camps or incarcerated in mental institutions. Various sources report that approximately 100 more Falun Gong practitioners died as a result of torture and mistreatment in custody."

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The U.S. resolution will, among other things, call on China to live up to its obligations "under the human rights conventions to which it is a party" and to release "persons imprisoned for the non-violent expression of their political, religious or social views." China has responded with a "white paper" variously citing its progress in economic development, the explosion of Internet use, and greater access to the legal system. But the paper exaggerates economic improvements and neglects to mention the blocking of any Web site messages that challenge the government's policies.

The State Department report acknowledges that China has made efforts to improve its judicial system, but it is not clear that those moves have any relationship to human rights. The regime recognized some years ago that continuing economic development would require a more reliable system for resolving commercial disputes. Companies were relying on arbitration clauses in contracts that were not always enforceable. So a drive was launched to put better-trained judges in courtrooms. But that hasn't stopped prosecutors and police from arresting people on such vague charges as "endangering state security" or "spying."

Indeed, there seems to have been an open season on Chinese scholars from America lately. In a Los Angeles Times article, Bei Ling, a poet and researcher at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, estimates that there have been more than 100 cases of overseas Chinese residents arrested or detained by security forces in the last five years.

Jiang Zemin may be a charming presence when he decides to warble a song at a Castro dinner party. But China shows few signs that it is evolving into a truly liberal state. Indeed, mounting evidence of unspeakable cruelties to human beings, simply because they refuse to let the party bend their minds, points in the opposite direction.

Some observers think this may be a sign that the party fears it is losing control as the Chinese people become better educated and gain access to more knowledge of the outside world. Could be. The party has a serious problem. If it tries to turn back the clock to the internal terror of the Maoist era it might wreck the economy, precipitating an explosion of popular unrest. But don't rule out the possibility that there may be some people in the leadership who are willing to take that risk, just to hold on to their power awhile longer.