Pushing for Improved Human Rights in China

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At a Center for American Progress event yesterday, CAP Senior Fellow William F. Schulz presented a new report, “Strategic Persistence: How the United States Can Help Improve Human Rights in China,” which he said “offers concrete recommendations to advance [human rights] efforts in China.” Schulz, the report’s author, moderated a panel to discuss the fundamental principles which should guide U.S. policymakers in their efforts to confront this issue.

Panelists agreed that China continues to profoundly violate the rights of its own people. For example, as many as a half million Chinese citizens are incarcerated in re-education labor camps without trial throughout mainland China. Schulz’s report argues that greater respect for human rights within China is in the United States’ best interest, and that the United States should work to convince China that suppression of basic freedoms will harm its ability to become the highly respected global leader it aspires to be.

However, U.S. human rights policy toward China has often been uncoordinated and unfocused. “U.S. policy has vacillated,” Schulz noted, “from harsh condemnations to flimsy passivity.” Harry Harding, professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, added that the United States has rarely spoken with one voice on the matter. One of Schulz’s recommendations in the report is to create an interagency working group that would provide that one voice, coordinating U.S. policy toward China in a strategic, non-ideological fashion.

Louisa Coan Greve, program director for East Asia at the National Endowment for Democracy, believed that the long-term challenge of changing China’s outlook on human rights should be at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Greve, a well-known supporter of democracy promotion around the world, reminded the panel that China will not change overnight—and we cannot force them to change. She said that private cooperation with change agents in China, such as pioneering lawyers and journalists, might be the most effective way to progress human rights policy in the country.

The panelists emphasized the strategic importance of changing China’s human rights policy since states that hold themselves accountable to people tend to be more stable partners. Schulz echoed Greve’s assertion, however, that while China is not impervious to change, such change may be a long-time coming and the United States and its allies should commit themselves to persistence.

Ultimately, China must be persuaded that democracy and human rights would best serve its own people and the nation as a whole. The panelists pointed to the 2003 SARS epidemic that killed over 750 people throughout China, noting that if the state-controlled media been quicker to report on the epidemic, many more people could have been saved. They agreed that it was events such as this that might eventually motivate the Chinese people to pressure their own government for human rights reform.

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