Rosemary Foot
Human rights issues have always added a layer of complexity to the China-U.S. relationship since the normalization of ties in the late 1970s. Today that complexity has been magnified for three main reasons. First, geopolitical rivalry between the two states has deepened as a result of China’s emergence as a peer competitor; second, in both countries a rise in illiberal practices has damaged the standing of human rights; and, third, there has been a turn on both sides toward arguments emphasizing that the two protagonists are engaged in a clash of values. The ambitions of the current Chinese leadership include a greater willingness to promote its own beliefs about how rights can best be protected, to confront the notion of the universality and indivisibility of human rights, and to close down any perceived challenge to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including on human rights grounds, in both the domestic and the international spheres. On the U.S. side, the Trump administration shifted from outright dismissal of the value of human rights diplomacy to an unconvincing attempt to present it as a core cause of the breakdown in Sino-American relations. The final stages of the Trump presidency, as well as the start of the Biden administration, came to cast the struggle against a resurgent People’s Republic of China (PRC) as one that pits a democratic against an autocratic way of life, the outcome of which will shape the nature of global order in the decades to come.
This chapter traces the evolution of human rights matters in this bilateral relationship, noting the wider impact of these developments on the progress of the international human rights regime. It focuses first on the forms of leverage on which both the Chinese and U.S. governments have been able to draw when positioning this issue in their relationship. Changing policy priorities have affected not only the extent to which they have focused on rights in their bilateral relations, but also how these two states have operated within such multilateral bodies as the United Nation’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and its forerunner, the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).
This chapter then illustrates two matters that have negatively affected the current vitality of the rights regime. It notes the disruptive nature of the Trump administration’s own attitude toward human rights and how it addressed that issue in relation to China. It next considers the consequences of the coincidence of these disruptive policies with a more ambitious and politically influential Chinese leadership seemingly determined to advance its own beliefs about human rights.
Finally, the chapter argues that the coupling of China’s ideational power with its material assets has generated some support for its policy stance on human rights within UN bodies including the HRC. Beijing has also established additional, non-UN–related human rights bodies, such as the South-South Forum on Human Rights, to underscore the support it receives from some other governments and to afford it additional opportunities to elaborate its perspectives. These developments have added to the difficulties that the Biden administration faces as it attempts to recover U.S. standing in this area, to address the wider repercussions posed by an authoritarian state, as well as to work with China on shared-fate issues. In consequence, the revitalization of the international human rights regime, to which the Biden administration wishes to add its weight, is in peril, and the notion of the universality and indivisibility of rights is significantly challenged.
U.S. Trade-Offs and China’s Levers
From the time of the Sino-American rapprochement, U.S. administrations have been expected, or have had as an objective, to include a human rights dimension in their policy toward China.[1] This has never been an easy task, not least because China, as a major power in global politics, has drawn on its resources to constrain U.S. policy choices, underlining their contingent nature on this issue.
China’s strategic leverage has been manifested in earlier times in relation to the former Soviet Union, and more consistently as a potentially veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council. Later, U.S. calculations and China’s behavior began to be affected by the latter’s growing attractiveness as a trading, aid, and investment partner. With China’s economy continuing to advance after the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and its offer of global public goods—including the inauguration in 2013 of the Belt and Road Initiative and the establishment in 2016 of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—Beijing determined it would become more active in defining its approach to human rights. In particular, it sought various ways to promote economic development as a priority right and to reduce forms of accountability for human rights violations. Successes in these policy areas demonstrated that other states were willing to follow China’s lead.[2]
Beijing’s ability to use these two major levers was plain from the start of the Sino-American rapprochement. President Jimmy Carter, for example, chose to give priority to the rights record of the former Soviet Union, to highlight that both Beijing and Washington viewed Moscow as their major strategic enemy, and to argue that Beijing under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had turned a significant political corner, leaving behind the mass violations of rights associated with the Maoist era.[3]
Inevitably, however, the regime’s bloody crackdown on demonstrators in Tian’anmen Square in 1989 signified a major turning point in Sino-American relations, sharply highlighting the need to hold China to account for its human rights violations. The U.S. Congress took a particularly firm position, and the administration itself quickly determined that it would suspend all sales of weapons and ban diplomatic exchanges between military leaders. It later announced it would curtail all meetings with the Chinese government above the level of assistant secretary. U.S. representatives at the World Bank and Asian Development Bank were instructed to postpone consideration of new loans to Beijing, and some 45,000 Chinese students and senior scholars in the United States had their visas extended.
Nevertheless, Beijing also benefited from having its crackdown on demonstrators occur during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who argued forcefully on strategic and economic grounds that it was necessary to maintain some contact with China. Relatively swiftly, various U.S. bans on diplomatic exchanges were set aside, not least because as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and with veto power, China had bargaining clout. This was used to good effect as Washington sought Beijing’s support of, or abstention on, a U.S.-backed Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to eject Saddam Hussein’s armed forces from Kuwait. Over the course of this Gulf crisis, China voted for all ten UN resolutions that imposed political, military, and economic sanctions on Iraq and, crucially, abstained on Resolution 678, which legitimated the use of force against Iraqi troops. That abstention was enough to persuade President Bush to receive the Chinese foreign minister in Washington.[4]
Strategic developments aided China again during the George W. Bush presidency, highlighting once again the conditional nature of U.S. attention to Beijing’s human rights record. Certainly, the promotion of religious freedom was a prominent part of the administration’s policy: Bush met the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama; spoke out on China’s harsh treatment of Falun Gong practitioners; and condemned a repressive wave in Xinjiang in October 2001. However, China enjoyed positive repercussions from its support for the United States after the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in September 2001. Beijing had voted for UN resolutions condemning the attacks and hosted an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Shanghai in October 2001 that facilitated the negotiation of a supportive statement. More importantly still, China interceded with its close ally Pakistan to persuade it to provide access to U.S. armed forces in their fight against al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan.
China’s rewards included the U.S. decision in August 2002 to designate the so-called East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organization, though few specialists on Xinjiang have ever regarded this grouping as a significant presence in that province. The designation has been used by China, to this day, to justify its claims that the terrorist threat explains its policy of “re-education” with respect to Muslim Uyghurs residing in Xinjiang. Bush also attended the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing even though these had acquired the meme of the “Genocide Olympics” as a result of China’s close relationship with the rights-abusing government in Sudan.[5]
President Barack Obama came into power promising to position human rights “not as a secondary interest” but as a “top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at [the U.S. government’s] disposal.”[6] However, a determination to emphasize the cooperative and not solely the more adversarial areas of the relationship with Beijing led Washington to draw attention regularly to issues where their relationship could be viewed as complementary: for example, conflict resolution in Afghanistan, counterterrorism, climate change, and the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.[7]
Thus, over three decades or more, strategic interventions regularly resulted in a struggle for human rights issues to become a consistent, high-level, priority in U.S. policy toward China. Beijing took its opportunities where it could to protect itself from external criticism and advance its own policy positions (as in the case of the ETIM designation), as well as to highlight that U.S. inconsistencies in this policy area cast doubt on the universality of the rights regime and exposed its politicization. China also started to mimic the State Department’s annual report on human rights practices around the world, producing its own record of U.S. human rights violations, especially highlighting racism and gun violence in American society.
As China’s economic strength grew, U.S. policy toward that country underscored yet further how the powerful could protect themselves from human rights criticisms, while less well-endowed states attracted negative attention. In the 1990s, for example, the United States attempted to make China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status conditional on domestic improvements in human rights protection. However, the U.S. business lobby publicly urged President Bill Clinton to renew MFN unconditionally: some eight hundred representatives of large and small businesses, trade associations, and farming and consumer groups wrote to the president, insisting that U.S. jobs and profits were at stake in the steadily expanding China market. Within a year of the introduction of his linkage policy, the president capitulated.[8]
President Obama similarly found economic issues interfering in efforts to give prominence to human rights questions, particularly as a result of the urgent need to deal jointly with the global financial crisis. The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, controversially implied that “serious exchanges on global issues” with Beijing, including the workings of the international economy, would lead to a sacrifice of attention to human rights.[9] China’s significant holdings of U.S. treasury bonds led her to remark privately to Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, in March 2009: “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”[10]
China’s Trade-Offs and U.S. Levers
However, leverage has not only worked in one direction. Since the start of China’s Reform and Opening policy in late 1978, Beijing has desired American goods and investment, as well as access to the U.S. market. It has also sought to cultivate an image as a “responsible great power,” and one that has complied with dominant global norms.[11]
This concern with image provided the United States and its mainly European partners with leverage in international bodies such as the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR). To some degree “naming and shaming” worked with Beijing. At the CHR, Washington drafted or cosponsored resolutions critical of rights protections inside China nearly every year after 1990 until 2005, some dealing explicitly with the situation in Tibet, others referencing instances of abuse elsewhere in China. In all but one year (1995), China successfully organized a “no-action” motion that prevented further progress on these draft resolutions. But the success of those no-action motions required the use of China’s political and economic capital and strong lobbying tactics.
Moreover, despite the inability to pass these condemnatory resolutions, China’s resort to such a tactic served to keep the issue of its human rights record on the international agenda and helped to draw Beijing into the rights regime. To defuse criticism, Beijing decided to invite the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance, as well as the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, to visit. In 1995 China also produced a new White Paper on Human Rights that described its citizens’ increased abilities to claim their rights as guaranteed by law.[12]
Image mattered in bilateral ties too, with the Clinton administration making use of scheduled summits with President Jiang Zemin to encourage concessions from China. In October 1997, on the eve of Jiang’s visit to Washington, he announced Beijing’s signature of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, ratified in March 2001) and voiced a commitment to the indivisibility of rights. The Sino-American communiqué, while acknowledging “major differences,” also referred positively to the standing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It additionally pledged both to exchange legal experts and legal materials, and to start legal training inside China. Jiang also agreed that three religious leaders from the United States could visit his country, including Tibet. In October 1998, Beijing signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (it has still not ratified this treaty). The signature appeared to be tied to the initiation of a bilateral Sino-American human rights dialogue, the first meeting being held in Washington in January 1999.[13]
One goal of the dialogue was to couple the bilateral discussions with Washington’s UN strategy: as Katrin Kinzelbach has noted, the United States “never dropped the threat of a [UN] resolution and did not agree to an unconditional continuation of the human rights dialogue.” For example, when it tabled a CHR resolution in 2004, it argued that it was doing so because the Chinese government had not fulfilled points agreed at the 2002 bilateral human rights dialogue meeting, including inviting the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit. Beijing extended that invitation in 2005, prompting the United States to refrain from tabling a UN resolution criticizing China that year.[14]
These U.S. tactics dwindled in later years, not least because of their reduced effectiveness in the context of China’s growing economic power, as well as increased developing-world membership in the UNHRC, which thus became geographically more representative than the CHR. However, Washington used other, lower-profile, routes to maintain some pressure. For example, in 2016 Western delegations, together with Japan, issued a statement expressing concern at the “arrests and ongoing detention of rights activists, civil society leaders, and lawyers” inside China as well as the “unexplained recent disappearances and apparent coerced returns of Chinese and foreign citizens from outside mainland China.”[15]
Thus, despite China’s own sources of leverage, it could be induced, at least until the start of the second decade of this century, to undertake actions that implied an acceptance that human rights conditions inside states were rightfully a matter for international attention, and that all states were expected to become members of treaty bodies. However, the resort to mutual bargaining also demonstrated that on the U.S. side, human rights had regularly to compete with a number of other major issues in the Sino-American relationship; and on China’s side, in the absence of normative socialization, this suggested that Beijing’s approach might change if both its dependence on U.S. economic power and its assumption of the status benefits of maintaining a good relationship with the United States were to diminish. Not only could it consider articulating more forcefully its own beliefs on these matters, but it would also be better placed to resist the demands of others.
Indeed, China emerged as the world’s second-largest economy in 2010, the leading trading nation in 2013, the leading destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2012, and the second-largest source of overseas FDI. It is now the largest trading partner of about two-thirds of the world’s economies and accounts for about 19 percent of global output. In these circumstances, its confidence in promoting its own politico-economic model has grown, and that confidence has spilled over into its human rights diplomacy.
President Xi Jinping has several times exhorted the country’s diplomats to lead the reform of global governance, and that includes reform of human rights institutions. As with the regional organizations that Alexander Cooley references in chapter 4 of this volume, Beijing has worked to repurpose bodies such as the UNHRC, and has set up new human rights organizations that align China more closely with the Global South.[16] Moreover, the four years of the Trump administration that seriously damaged U.S. identity as a democratic and rights-protecting state provided opportunities for Beijing to advance its positions in this policy area and to point to the hypocritical nature of the U.S. posture.
The Disruptive Trump Era
It is widely accepted that the Trump presidency seriously tarnished the role of the United States as a leading, if flawed, promoter of human rights. President Donald Trump came to power having campaigned on a promise to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” On taking office, he issued an executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim states from entering the United States and swiftly revoked U.S. membership of the UN’s HRC. Trump also attacked and sanctioned officials working for the International Criminal Court for their decision to investigate alleged abuses in Afghanistan by U.S. service personnel.
Matters were no better inside the United States. President Trump threatened the independence of the media and judiciary, regularly attacked the Black Lives Matter movement, and refused to accept the 2020 election result. The ensuing riot on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington was believed by many around the world to have been instigated by Trump himself.[17]
Known for his admiration of authoritarian leaders, Trump regularly heaped praise on President Xi, describing him as a “terrific guy” in 2017, shortly after the death of China’s human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo.[18] At a private meeting with Xi at the 2019 G-20 meeting, Trump evinced sympathy for the Chinese government’s decision to engage in the mass internment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, apparently describing that as “exactly the right thing to do.”[19] In response to developments in Hong Kong, Trump told Xi in June 2019 that he would not condemn a Chinese crackdown on the unrest.[20] Apart from these empathetic statements, Trump revealed his overriding wish not to jeopardize the ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing, which he clearly prioritized over other elements in the relationship, even as his administration began to toughen its human rights–related China policy.
While President Trump was fixated on the trade deficit and on imposing tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, others within his administration worked to elevate the seriousness of the challenge China was said to pose to the U.S. way of life, depicting it as an existential, ideological threat. Consequently human rights issues became a core part of a “whole-of-government” approach to China. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took the lead in highlighting, along with the national security adviser, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the attorney general, the gravity of the challenge that China represented. Pompeo, in particular, excoriated the CCP-led authoritarian government in Beijing for its secrecy in the early stages of the outbreak of COVID-19, drew attention to its widespread human rights violations, and its use of surveillance technologies to control its population (indeed the Trump administration had already determined it would attempt to constrain developments in this area).[21]
Congress added its weight, passing legislation authorizing sanctions against named Chinese officials in response to mass incarcerations in Xinjiang, and removing Hong Kong’s Special Trading Status after Beijing passed its National Security Law.[22] U.S. public attitudes toward China sank to a historic low, with some 73 percent of those polled in 2020 holding a negative view of the country.[23] Indeed, Andrew Nathan has argued that “values shifted from an ancillary position in the Sino-American relationship to the unifying framework for all elements of the strategic competition between the two countries.”[24] This is of signal importance because, as Jacques deLisle has noted, conflict over values is more zero-sum and “less amenable to compromise than are disputes over more tangible interests.”[25] Whereas previously it had proved possible to modulate the divisions over human rights in Sino-American relations, it was now more difficult to set these matters aside.
By the end of the Trump presidency, the discussion of China’s human rights record had been extended into an ideological battle using language reminiscent of the Cold War. Pompeo’s focus on the CCP and his characterization of the competition with China as between “freedom and tyranny” set the stage for regular references to the challenge that an autocracy like China posed to democratic forms of governance everywhere in the world.[26] Pompeo drove home an uncompromising message that implied an ultimate U.S. goal of regime change. The Trump administration, he said, had “exposed the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and called it what it is: a Marxist-Leninist regime that exerts power over the long-suffering Chinese people through brainwashing and brute force.” He determined that the CCP had committed genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs residing in Xinjiang, warning that if it was “allowed to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against its own people, imagine what it will be emboldened to do to the free world, in the not-so distant-future.”[27]
The problem was that Pompeo and others neglected the perspectives of many governments and peoples outside the United States: that their country had seriously damaged its credibility on these issues, not least because of the administration’s assault on human rights at home. Few took seriously the idea that Trump cared about human rights inside China. As the president of Freedom House told the Washington Post, although “the spread of authoritarianism is a phenomenon that is proceeding quite nicely on its own,” the “outsize role” of the United States made a difference given what he called its status as “one of the world’s oldest and most influential democracies.” A report by Freedom House underlined that authoritarian states now had “ample new fodder” for their criticisms of the U.S. domestic human rights record; crucially, it added, “and the evidence they cite will remain in the world’s collective memory for a long time to come.”[28] Washington had all but surrendered any credibility it might have had to lead on these issues abroad, facilitating Beijing’s efforts to build support for its beliefs on human rights and for the arguments it used to explain constraints on what it termed terrorists and religious extremists inside China.
The Contemporary China Challenge
As noted earlier, this loss in U.S. moral stature has coincided with the emergence of a China that is more ambitious in promoting its perspectives on human rights. In the past, Washington had had some success in building coalitions of support in the UN’s human rights bodies and had kept some leverage on human rights in play in the bilateral relationship. However, that is a more difficult undertaking in a period where China has started to reshape the international human rights regime from within and has cast its authoritarian model, with its emphasis on economic development and social stability under the guidance of strong state institutions, as the best means of protecting people’s rights (rather than the rights of individuals).
Thus, at the highest levels, and in domestic and international gatherings, Chinese officials make the normative argument that legal sovereign equality and noninterference in internal affairs are the most important norms governing state-to-state relations, and that the state is the best guarantor of human rights. Beijing has attacked the universality of rights, arguing that all countries “must proceed from . . . prevailing realities” and go their “own way.” It claims that the CCP has “opened a new path of human rights protection, and added diversity to the concept of human rights with its own practices.” Development is cast as “the key to solving all China’s problems”; as having driven its progress on human rights; and, by implication, as the solution for other developing countries—as shown in Beijing’s introduction of resolutions emphasizing this point at the UNHRC. Beijing has described development as a foundational right from which other human rights may flow, thus challenging the idea of the indivisibility of human rights.[29]
China has also engaged in institutional shaping. It has pressured the UNHRC to reduce attention to country-specific resolutions and attacked Special Rapporteurs for overstepping their mandates. It has worked to turn the Universal Periodic Review process into one where countries such as China are praised for their accomplishments rather than held to account for serious lapses in rights protection. It has moved to constrain the role of independent human rights nongovernmental organizations in UNHRC proceedings and attacked the concept of a “human rights defender.” It has criticized the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for a failure to promote a “culture of diversity” and attempted to restrict funding for human rights posts working with the treaty bodies.
Moreover, Beijing has demonstrated that it can garner support for its stance on these matters, successfully passing resolutions at the UNHRC that refer to the “contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights” and the promotion of “mutually beneficial cooperation in the field of human rights.”[30] Letters and statements critical of Beijing’s egregious behavior in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been countered by China’s supporters, who praise its “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights,” its welcome efforts to counter what Beijing claims is widespread terrorist sentiment among the Muslim population in Xinjiang, and to reestablish security and stability in Hong Kong.[31]
To reinforce the message that Chinese positions receive widespread validation, Beijing has established alternative human rights organizations, such as the South-South Forum on Human Rights, which has met in Beijing in 2017, 2019, and 2021. At its first meeting this body passed a Beijing Declaration on human rights, reflecting China’s vision for human rights governance, and the Chinese foreign minister advocated diversity and localization, claiming China had “blazed an oriental pathway toward modernization.”[32]
Many of those in support of China are recipients of its economic largesse, dependent on a good trading relationship, or concerned that they themselves could be the target of criticism within bodies such as the UNHRC. In addition, China’s achievements, especially in poverty reduction, impress many developing countries, and they too advocate there should be more support for the “right to development.” That China is said to have brought some 800 million people out of poverty is frequently referenced in UN reports and elsewhere. Much as with the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are going to rely mightily on China if the United Nations is to claim any degree of success.
Receptivity to Chinese messages also rests on a congruence of views: many former colonized states are strongly attached to the idea of the legal sovereign equality of states and noninterference in internal affairs. The asymmetrical power relations that characterize the modern international system give particular strength to these normative ideas. It is this fear of the strong imposing their conceptions of justice on the weak that motivates a number of states to support China’s arguments.
A Path to U.S. Recovery?
President Biden came into office promising to do all in his power to reverse his predecessor’s toxic legacy and to repair the damage the Trump administration, as well as Beijing, had inflicted on the human rights regime. The new administration pledged to reinstate U.S. support for multilateralist approaches and institutions and to repair human rights deficiencies at home. It quickly announced the return of the United States to the UNHRC as an “active observer,” with the intention to seek election onto the Council for the 2022–2024 term.[33] Like previous administrations, apart from Trump’s, the Biden administration, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken remarked to the Council, would place democracy and human rights “at the center” of its foreign policy.[34]
In those same remarks, Blinken acknowledged the damage to the U.S. standing on human rights that had to be addressed. He recognized that “any pledge to fight for human rights around the world must begin with a pledge to fight for human rights at home,” referencing the prevalence of “systemic racism and economic injustice” in American society. Perhaps mindful of the June 2020 call by UN independent rights experts for the United States to address these matters, Blinken pointed to the swift action President Biden had already taken to tackle “the root causes of these inequities, including in housing, prison reform, improving the conditions of indigenous peoples, and fighting discrimination against Asian Americans.”[35]
There were also some faint indications that the Biden administration better understood the need to promote economic, social, and cultural rights in rebuilding America’s image as a rights-protecting country. This is important because attention to these matters will appeal to many countries represented on the UNHRC. The United States has never ratified the ICESCR and any attempt to do so now would not get U.S. Senate confirmation. However, intended compliance with these rights made it into the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance” released in March 2021, which acknowledged that for the United States to truly “build back better” at home, and in particular to deal with systemic racism, required “aggressive action to address structures, policies, and practices that contribute to the wealth gap, to health disparities, and to inequalities in educational access, outcomes, and beyond.”[36]
In a striking passage, the Interim Guidance linked many of these same goals with projected U.S. actions overseas, promising development policies that would bolster collective rights, including the provision of good-quality educational opportunities for children and youth, the advancement of gender equality, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex (LGBTQI+) rights, and the empowerment of women, as part of a broad “commitment to inclusive economic growth and social cohesion.”[37] The administration promised a turn away from using its military might overseas to deal with humanitarian crises or to promote democracy: as Blinken noted, U.S. military interventions “often come at far too high a cost, both to us and to others.”[38]
On China, however, the change in stance has not been as stark. A tough policy toward that country stands out as one area of bipartisan consensus in a polarized political environment, and public opinion polling indicates that Americans’ trust of China is at a (new) historic low, with 89 percent viewing Beijing as either a competitor or an enemy rather than a partner. Some 67 percent describe their feelings toward China as “somewhat cold” or “very cold.” When both Democrats and Republicans were asked about the issues that came to mind when they thought about China, human rights came top of the list (20 percent), just above economic matters (19 percent).[39]
These findings indicate that rights have become a prominent source of tension in the relationship, aligning neatly with general U.S. concerns about China’s technological development, particularly in areas of personal surveillance and on the principles of internet governance (see chapter 5 by Rana Moustafa and chapter 8 by Emily Taylor, Kate Jones, and Carolina Caeiro). The Biden administration has maintained that China’s repressive policies toward the Uyghurs represent genocide, and the unfolding of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, together with further evidence of atrocities in Xinjiang, have attracted a wide range of U.S. sanctions.
While there is less emphasis than before on the fact that China is led by the Communist Party, the Biden administration has chosen to stress an essential clash of values. In a series of official statements and documents, it has depicted the world as being at “an inflection point” and “in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate” about the nature of world order—one where there exist powerful forces arguing that “autocracy is the best way forward” versus those “who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges to our changing world.”[40]
Thus, while there is a desire for the U.S. relationship with China to be “collaborative when it can be,” it is plain that it will also be “competitive when it should be . . . and adversarial when it must be.”[41] With that “zero-sum” framing of a clash of values, it will be difficult to find points of agreement with Beijing on other major issues such as climate change, the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, and global health crises. Moreover, past U.S. behavior has shown how difficult it is to demonstrate consistent application of policies linked to values.
A prominent emphasis on contesting values may also weaken the ability of the Biden administration to form a coalition of support behind a policy that firmly criticizes the PRC for its human rights transgressions. Beijing has found supporters within the UNHRC, and many other states do not favor a confrontational framing of relations with China, even if several remain concerned about the evidence of internal repression.
Policy Implications and Recommendations
Maintaining a human rights strategy attentive to the idea of the universality and indivisibility of rights is a particularly challenging proposition at a time of greater Chinese influence, and when powerful memories remain of Trump’s egregious disregard of human rights internationally and domestically. China has built coalitions of support in part as a result of its transactional diplomacy but also through its obviously successful transition from being one of the poorest developing countries in the Maoist era to its current status as the second-largest economy in the world. Many other countries want to accord development a primary place in the human rights canon, as well as to protect a Westphalian vision of state sovereignty. Beijing can be expected to pursue these lines of argument discursively and through its diplomatic actions within the UN and elsewhere.
The United States has rightly decided that it needs to show some humility about the country’s own human rights failings; as President Biden has put it, “We’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”[42] It should also leverage its ability to combine the United States’ own economic strength and political influence with a range of democratic states similarly concerned about the advance of authoritarian practices. Such states should swiftly make good on their offer to provide alternatives to the scholarships, training, economic investments, and aid that China has made available. A U.S. administration committed to multilateralism will also need to work through the difficulties associated with generating a consistent and united message with its partners on human rights matters, including the joint imposition of sanctions when deemed necessary and appropriate.[43]
Beyond that, Washington and other like-minded governments need to remind Beijing of the legal requirements associated with the many human rights treaties it has signed, all of which are built on the assumption that human rights are not solely of domestic concern but also a matter for international scrutiny. China similarly needs to be publicly challenged when its rhetoric threatens the notion of the universality and indivisibility of human rights, as reflected in the UN Charter that it claims to revere, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the SDGs. Its attacks on human rights defenders and on human rights organizations in UN bodies similarly need to be confronted, and additional methods of support for civil society actors operating under heightened constraints need to be identified.
In addition, China’s position on development as a foundational right could be countered, given that Beijing does not actually treat development as a right, but as a policy determined by the party-state. Moreover, a developmental approach that results in negative externalities (such as pollution and rising inequality) has been a marked feature of the Chinese model, impacts that have proved extremely difficult for its leaders to remedy. Beijing’s argument that nationally determined policies provide the most effective means of dealing with the shared-fate issues that now threaten the survival of humanity is essentially outdated in our interdependent world.
Perhaps in response to some of these weaknesses and criticisms, there is some wavering in support for China in bodies such as the UNHRC and the UN General Assembly that could be exploited. For example, although China was voted back onto the UNHRC for a period of three years, the numbers in support of its application were lower than in past bids, most likely as a result of evidence regarding its harshly repressive policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.[44] Developments such as this suggest that an active U.S. presence within the UN’s human rights institutions may appeal beyond the Western group and could lead to the building of successful supportive coalitions.
However, also vital to that success is the challenging requirement for the United States to maintain a position on human rights that attends not only to the source of the inequities within American society, but also to those that exist in so many other countries around the globe.
Notes
1. Rosemary Foot, Rights beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. part 2.
2. Rosemary Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image (Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 6.
3. President Carter chose to do this even though Amnesty International’s first damning human rights report on China was produced in 1978. See Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978); Katrin Kinzelbach, “Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Policy: A Battle for Global Public Opinion,” in Handbook on Human Rights in China, edited by Sarah Biddulph and Joshua Rosenzweig (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2019), pp. 84–102, esp. p. 88.
4. Rosemary Foot, “China and the Tiananmen Crisis of June 1989,” in Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases, 3rd ed., edited by Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield, and Tim Dunne (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 334–55.
5. Rosemary Foot, “Bush, China and Human Rights,” Survival 45, 2 (2003), pp. 167–86.
6. Quoted in Kenneth Roth, “Barack Obama’s Shaky Legacy on Human Rights,” Human Rights Watch, January 9, 2017, www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/09/barack-obamas-shaky-legacy-human-rights.
7. For an outline of areas of agreement, see, for example, the Obama-Xi statement in Washington, September 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/25/fact-sheet-president-xi-jinpings-state-visit-united-states.
8. David M. Lampton, “America’s China Policy in the Age of the Finance Minister: Clinton Ends Linkage,” China Quarterly 139 (September 1994), pp. 597–621; David M. Lampton, “China Policy in Clinton’s First Year,” in Beyond MFN: Trade with China and American Interests, edited by James R. Lilley and Wendell L. Willkie II (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1994).
9. Jeffrey A. Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Brookings, 2012), pp. 15–16.
10. “Secretary Clinton’s March 24, 2009 Conversation with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,” March 24, 2009, Public Library of US Diplomacy, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09STATE30049_a.html.
11. For one analysis of the importance of this designation, see Tiang Boon Hoo, China’s Global Identity: Considering the Responsibilities of Great Power (Georgetown University Press, 2018).
12. Foot, Rights beyond Borders, pp. 183–87.
13. Ibid., pp. 213–14.
14. Kinzelbach, “Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Policy,” p. 95.
15. “Joint Statement—Human Rights Situation in China, Delivered by U.S. Ambassador to the UNHRC Keith Harper,” March 10, 2016, https://geneva.usmission.gov/2016/03/10/item-2-joint-statement-human-rights-situation-in-china/. Confidential interviews in Geneva in December 2018 indicated that this statement stung the Chinese delegation, and Beijing authorities castigated officials in Geneva for not having anticipated it and taken steps to derail it.
16. Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection, pp. 209–12.
17. These are but a selection of the examples that show Trump’s disdain for human rights and democratic practices. See Kathryn Sikkink, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 6; Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr., “The Decline of American Power and Donald Trump: Reflections on Human Rights, Neoliberalism, and the World Order,” Geoforum 102 (June 2019), pp. 157–66, esp. pp. 159–60.
18. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2018, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018.
19. The quotation on the Uyghur mass incarceration is taken from John Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), and was picked up in many news feeds in June 2020, as Bolton promoted the book. See, for example, David Choi and Sonam Seth, “Trump Told China’s President That Building Concentration Camps for Millions of Uighur Muslims Was ‘Exactly the Right Thing to Do,’ Former Adviser Says,” Business Insider, June 17, 2020, www.businessinsider.com/trump-china-detention-camp-xinjiang-2020-6?r=US&IR=T.
20. Cited in Thomas Wright, “Pompeo’s Surreal Speech on China,” Brookings (blog), July 27, 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/07/27/pompeos-surreal-speech-on-china/.
21. “How 2020 Shaped U.S.-China Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, December 15, 2020, www.cfr.org/article/how-2020-shaped-us-china-relations; Jacques deLisle, “When Rivalry Goes Viral: COVID-19, U.S.-China Relations, and East Asia,” Orbis, Winter 2021, pp. 46–74, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2020.11.003.
22. Leslie Vinjamuri, “US Foreign Policy Priorities: What Difference Can an Election Make?,” Chatham House, October 15, 2020, https://americas.chathamhouse.org/article/us-foreign-policy-priorities-what-difference-can-an-election-make/.
23. Pew Research Center, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries,” October 6, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/.
24. Andrew J. Nathan, “Getting Human Rights Right: Consistency, Patience, Multilateralism, and Setting a Good Example,” Brookings, November 2020, www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Andrew-J-Nathan.pdf.
25. deLisle, “When Rivalry Goes Viral,” p. 54.
26. See Mike Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” Speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, U.S. State Department, July 23, 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/communist-china-and-the-free-worlds-future/index.html.
27. Mike Pompeo, “Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang,” U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Turkey, January 19, 2021, https://tr.usembassy.gov/determination-of-the-secretary-of-state-on-atrocities-in-xinjiang/.
28. Freedom in the World Report 2021, Freedom House, pp. 8–9, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege; Ishaan Tharoor, “The ‘Free World’ Keeps Shrinking,” Washington Post, March 3, 2021, https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=596b63639bbc0f403f901289&s=603f16c89d2fda4c88fa4c90&linknum=7&linktot=69.
29. State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “The Communist Party of China and Human Rights Protection—A 100-Year Quest,” Xinhua, June 24, 2021. See also Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection, pp 207–9; “Win-Win Cooperation for the Common Cause of Human Rights,” March 1, 2018, www.china-un.ch/eng/dbtyw/rqrd_1/thsm/t1538784.htm; and “A People-Centered Approach for Global Human Rights Progress, Remarks by H. E. Wang Yi,” February 22, 2021, www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1855685.shtml.
30. Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection, pp. 207–9.
31. Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection, p. 214. For a recent “dueling” statement, see Liu Xin, “More Than 90 Countries Express Support to China amid Rampant Anti-China Campaign at UN Human Rights Body,” Global Times, June 22, 2021, www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226834.shtml.
32. “Advance the Global Human Rights Cause and Build a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind,” Address by H. E. Wang Yi, December 7, 2017, www.china-un.ch/eng/dbtyw/rqrd_1/thsm/t1519207.htm.
33. And “active” it immediately turned out to be: at the March 2021 session of the UNHRC, the U.S. delegation, on behalf of fifty states, rejected statements critical of Western positions put forward by Cuba and Belarus. See Marc Limon, “US-China-Russia Rivalry Spills over into the Human Rights Council,” Universal Rights (blog), March 22, 2021, www.universal-rights.org/blog/us-china-russia-rivalry-spills-over-into-the-human-rights-council/. The United States was reelected to the Council on October 14, 2021, and started serving from January 2022.
34. “Secretary Blinken: Remarks to the 46th Session of the Human Rights Council,” UN Mission in Geneva, February 24, 2021, https://geneva.usmission.gov/2021/02/24/secretary-hrc/.
35. Ibid.; “Independent Rights Experts Urge US to Address Systemic Racism and Racial Bias,” UN News, June 5, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1065722. Human rights experts called for this again on February 26, 2021. See “Rights Experts Call for Reforms to End Police Brutality, Systemic Racism,” UN News, February 26, 2021, https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/02/1085872.
36. “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” The White House, March 2021, pp. 18–19, www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf.
37. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
38. Secretary Blinken, “A Foreign Policy for the American People,” United States Department of State, March 3, 2021, www.state.gov/a-foreign-policy-for-the-american-people/. However, the manner of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 has also been costly, especially for the human rights of many Afghans.
39. Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Most Americans Support Tough Stance toward China on Human Rights, Economic Issues,” Pew Research Center, March 4, 2021, www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/03/04/most-americans-support-tough-stance-toward-china-on-human-rights-economic-issues/.
40. President Biden’s cover letter to the “Interim Guidance.” See too the readout from the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, “How It Happened,” Asia Nikkei, March 19, 2021, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-China-tensions/How-it-happened-Transcript-of-the-US-China-opening-remarks-in-Alaska. Rana Moustafa’s chapter 5 references China’s attempts to tie its political model to its successful control of the COVID pandemic.
41. Blinken, “A Foreign Policy for the American People,” p. 9.
42. “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” U.S. Department of State, Washington, February 4, 2021, www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/04/remarks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/.
43. As happened on March 21, 2021, when the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada announced sanctions on Chinese officials associated with policies toward the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. For a Chinese perspective on this move, see “It’s Not a Fight about Human Rights, but about Hegemony and Anti-Hegemony,” Global Times Editorial, March 23, 2021, www.globaltimes.cn/opinion/editorial/.
44. Rosemary Foot, “The UN High Commissioner’s contentious visit to China,” East Asia Forum, July 8, 2022, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/07/08/the-un-high-commissioners-contentious-visit-to-china/.
