Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The special point of view of our book
is to look at China's foreign policy as an expression of China's security situation.
So, instead of looking at China from an outside point of view—
whether its rise threatens us and so on—
we try to look at their policy from the point of view of the security problems
that they're trying to deal with,
and we see those security problems as being pretty severe.
They have a lot of security problems inside the country
that are connected to foreign policy:
they have a lot of security problems
around their borders and in the Asian region,
and, increasingly, they have security concerns out in the wider world,
where they need oil,
copper,
they need many other products,
and they need markets and so forth.
That's why we call the book "China's Search for Security."
Well, China used to, under Mao Zedong,
just reject the idea of international human rights.
But as they entered the world,
getting re-admitted to the United Nations in 1971,
when the UN is really the central institutional focus for international human rights.
And then as China has become more and more of a global power,
they've really entered into the international human rights regime:
they've acceded to many of the main treaties;
they participate in the Human Rights Council;
they actively report to the various treaty bodies.
So they've become active participants.
And they're not against any longer the idea of international human rights—
at least they don't take that position.
And, of course, they have many rights—
although they call them "citizens' rights"
written into their own constitution.
In various treaty bodies,
China by and large pursues the line that
"each nation interprets for itself the meaning of these international human rights treaties."
How its criminal procedure works,
they say,
"It's for us to decide whether it complies with international human rights law."
"Whether our prison system engages in torture, that's for us to decide."
So they have tended to try to push back against interventions by international institutions.
Whereas the professional staff of the UN human rights system
and the members of the treaty bodies
and others are engaged in an opposite effort,
which is to try to create an international standard,
an international interpretation.
So, part of the role of the treaty bodies is to spell out,
sort of like a court might do,
what these norms mean in application to all kinds of different circumstances.
And that's where I think the Chinese resist and say,
"It's under the norm of sovereignty;
it's for us to decide."
A lot of that depends on how the U.S. conducts itself.
Whether the U.S. continues to make human rights an issue.
It is always tempting
I think for American administrations to sort of downplay the human rights issue
because the Chinese make it quite painful,
and they argue that it's not a legitimate state-to-state topic.
If Chinese diplomats had their way,
the human rights issue would be placed off of the bilateral agenda.
And as I say that's tempting
but I think at the same time,
it is difficult for American administrations to bury the human rights issue
because American society keeps bringing this issue up in various forms—
through the media, through human rights groups, through religious groups, and so forth.
So, if the U.S. continues to press that issue,
and if the Chinese government doesn't change fundamentally—
that's another question here, if it goes democratic or not—
but if we have the same two kinds of governments up against each other,
then I think the answer to your question is that
the contention around values is going to be focusing a lot on human rights,
and on American concern for human rights violations.
And this crops up in all kinds of forms:
you know famous cases like Chen Guangcheng's
that become headline news and U.S. society is concerned about,
religious repression, incidents that take place, scandals that arise, people getting beat up,
and all kinds of cases that HRIC reports all the time.
Those kinds of things will continue to enter into the U.S.-China relationship
because the U.S. side will insist on bringing them in.
They're not going to do rule of law, accountability,
and openness out of some idealism.
I sympathize with the Chinese leaders in a way.
They are ruling over a society that is very unstable,
turbulent, rapidly changing, demanding,
[undergoing a] revolution of rising expectations,
conflict over resources.
You know, it's a hard job.
And they are kind of trying to survive day by day and also do something for the public service.
I don't see the Chinese leadership as 100% selfish
in trying to keep this country together and grow the country.
And so I think that when they make changes toward rule of law,
toward more open media,
or toward more protection for land rights,
or more protection for disabled people,
or as they've recently announced,
more equal distribution of wealth.
When they do those things they do it
because they think that's going to help them keep stability,
govern the society, stay in power for themselves.
It's done out of a kind of a Machiavellian calculation.
But I think that's how democracies have always been built.
And despite all the setbacks that we see in China and all the resistance,
it seems to me this is the trend—
society changing and demanding these things.
And that if you're going to eventually stay in power and govern this massive society,
you're going to have to do some of these things that we and Human Rights in China are also promoting.
It's the internal pressure for change that's decisive in the end for China
and not the external pressure.
I mean, China is not a country that's really dependent on any other country.
Certainly, it's got a lot of foreign trade
and it's embedded in the international economy.
But it's not like, let's say, Taiwan years ago
that was really a kind of client state of the United States,
or South Korea, or the Philippines, all of which were,
to a significant extent, client states of the United States.
And American pressure had a lot to do with
those authoritarian regimes finally democratizing.
There were different scenarios, but in every instance, the U.S. pressure was important.
China won't respond that way to U.S. pressure because it doesn't have to.
But it does have to respond to the anger of its own population,
the anger at corruption, the anger at land seizures,
the anger at the deterioration of the environment.
There's this kind of meta instability of China—
that there's a constant expectation of dramatic system change,
that the timing of that event is inherently unpredictable
because it requires some kind of triggering event to take place.
It could be anything: it could be an outside foreign event,
a public health crisis, an earthquake, an economic crisis,
somebody being beaten up by the police, that triggers something,
the way that Tiananmen was triggered in Spring of 1989 by the death of Hu Yaobang.
And we just can't tell what that triggering event would be and when it would happen.
All of the sort of resentment and anger, and desire for change
and alienation and everything, is all there.
It's been there for a long long time. But people are afraid.
And it's when people's anger is more than their fear that perhaps things break out
And we just don't know when that magic moment would take place.
There is constant debate about what kind of a system China should have,
so you have the feeling that the China political story is not over yet.
Now if that big change took the form of chaos,
disorder, a deterioration of the state—
that would have a big impact on international security.
It would have an impact through refugees, through instability.
I mean it would be like Syria.
I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of times bigger than Syria,
or millions of times bigger than Syria China is.
But I don't expect that to happen.
So I think, if that doesn't happen,
then I don't see China's human rights problems as having a direct effect on international security.
What I do think though is that
the Chinese' attempt to interpret the international human rights norms
in a way that weakens, from my point of view, weakens those norms—
this is very consequential.
Because I think that we are engaged in a long multi-decade effort to try to consolidate those norms, expand those norms,
so that increasingly the world is governed everywhere by these basic human rights norms.
and they are contested, norms about freedom of speech, norms about the role of women,
norms about freedom of religion, norms about torture, are constantly being contested—not only by China
but by some of our own politicians in this country as well.
I wouldn't say that this is the only important fight
that is going on for the future of the universe.
But I think it is quite an important struggle that China is,
in general, playing a negative role in.