Time for new dialogue for China human rights

After initially scoring some successes, such as political prisoner releases and changes to PRC laws criminalizing certain political behavior, however, these dialogues increasingly became empty bureaucratic exercises. The cramped agendas proceed on the basis of the “equality” of the human rights practices of the two sides, and with an out-sized focus on legalistic issues where China could claim substantial gains and sharpen its critiques of its dialogue partner. Dialogues with European countries increasingly focused on their “technical assistance” programs, and some of the most useful dialogues with formerly communist Eastern European countries were shut down altogether. China successfully pressured dialogue partners to exclude critical NGO voices that had previously participated in talks, and certainly never engaged its own growing grassroots NGO sector in the dialogue process. As a result, the dialogues were transformed into heavily scripted government-to-government exchanges that relegate human rights issues to a bilateral backwater.

Several recent events, however, have demonstrated the serious dangers posed by a China that achieves economic preeminence and military parity with the developed West while resisting political liberalization at home, and exposed the need for a renewal of international human rights strategies on China. As a result, there is growing interest among advocates—and new potential partners outside the human rights community—in identifying and employing a more effective approach to human rights in China.

This opening has, in a real sense, been created by China’s increasing intransigence and belligerence on the world stage, and the Chinese authorities’ severe retrenchment on human rights issues at home. The long-time mantra of the human rights community – that the authoritarian nature of China’s regime has consequences beyond the fate of a few dissidents and Tibetans – is starting to resonate. The convergence of these forces can be seen most vividly in the Google spying and censorship case. Google’s announcement that it would no longer censor its search engine results in China as required by the government, and its concurrent charge that Chinese hackers had penetrated its secure servers, both to steal proprietary code and to snoop into human rights activists’ private email accounts, was a perfect illustration of how China’s illiberal government policies and practices impact those hoping to do business under this regime. More broadly, recent opinion polls have shown increasing dissatisfaction with Chinese economic policies among multi-national corporations, and China’s approval ratings dropping in other countries. The willingness of some businesses to go public with their concerns and even explicitly link the harm their business suffers to China’s political model is a sea change from the past.

The challenge for the human rights community now is to take maximum advantage of this potential opening to rebuild a more durable, effective coalition in support of human rights in China. They should do this through vigorous outreach to groups outside the traditional human rights community who are increasingly attuned to the downside of Chinese autarky: the business community, security analysts, internet freedom advocates, faith communities, environmental activists, and especially local and regional activists in Asia. Once the coalition has been expanded, it needs to be more strategic and targeted in its approach. This means developing strategies that play to the strengths of a loose-knit, diverse group working across open societies, and similarly exploits the weaknesses of China’s brittle, top-down authoritarian structure and political culture. There also needs to be a considered effort to find ways of supporting the most vulnerable activists working for change inside China.

The human rights community should not look to or wait for the U.S. and other governments to lead this effort. Instead, they should go back to their roots and push these governments to reexamine their own practices in dealing with China, using the many and varied available political forums to point out the hypocrisies and dangers of ignoring China’s rampant human rights problems. The unraveling of the wishful thinking that China’s economic development would lead to political liberalization is creating a unique opportunity for those who care about human rights and freedoms in China, and we must seize it. Let the dialogue begin.

Ms. Currie is a Senior Fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington, D.C. think-tank.