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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
Accommodating a rising China has become one of the most difficult challenges for the foreign policies of the West and Japan. A consensus has formed in the United States that progress can be made on issues involving trade, intellectual property rights, arms proliferation, and Taiwan by taking clear stands in favor of core Western interests. But division over both ends and means has brought human rights policy to a state of crisis.
In the last few years, as outrage over the government's response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising receded and U.S.-China economic ties grew, a clash emerged between perceived business and human rights interests in China. In 1994, at the urging of the business community, President Bill Clinton abandoned his attempt to link human rights progress to China's trade privileges and turned instead to "comprehensive engagement." China's rights performance then worsened, poisoning the atmosphere in which the administration pursued other policy issues.
The United States shifted in 1996 to a policy of "strategic dialogue." The new approach quickly ran into trouble as the Chinese government sentenced Wei Jingsheng to fourteen years in prison, sent Liu Xiaobo for three years' labor re-education without trial, and gave harsh sentences to other prominent dissidents.
On the eve of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher's November 1996 visit, the Chinese government staged a show trial that sentenced Wang Dan to an eleven-year prison term on flagrantly flimsy grounds, thus signaling Beijing's refusal to consider human rights a serious part of the bilateral agenda. At the start of his second term, President Clinton found himself trying to negotiate the conditions for a summit meeting with Chinese leaders who exile, imprison, and torture the very dissidents whose names have topped the White House's and State Department's list of human rights concerns for years.
China human rights policy has been a failure not because China is intractable on the issue. Indeed, during the years when public consensus allowed the White House and Congress to push the issue vigorously, China responded by releasing some 881 Tiananmen prisoners; lifting martial law in Beijing; permitting Fang Lizhi to go abroad from his refuge in the U.S. Embassy; initiating a human rights dialogue with U.S. officials; and freeing such big-name prisoners as Han Dongfang and Wang Juntao (both of whom are now in exile), and Wei Jingsheng, Chen Ziming, and Wang Dan (who have since been re-imprisoned and, in Chen's case, re-released). China signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States to restrict export of prison labor products to the United States, provided information on political prisoners, and held talks on prison visits with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Beijing dispatched two human rights delegations to the West in 1991-92 to talk with nongovernmental organizations and specialists and to gather information; the Chinese government later issued a series of White Papers on human rights to respond to international concerns. China's official statements moved further than before toward accepting human rights as a valid subject of international dialogue. Progress slowed (and on political rights, reversed) only when U.S. irresolution convinced the Chinese authorities that they no longer needed to take the issue seriously.
The United States today is divided over the importance of human rights, how hard to fight for the issue, and what a human rights policy toward China should be expected to achieve. In government and out, many believe that the United States can no longer afford to hold larger issues hostage to the fate of a few dissidents; that it should not overlook long-term favorable trends because of the regime's harshness toward the few who challenge it directly; and that it must not let petulance over violations of Western values blind Washington to the chance to improve the lives of large numbers of people and reduce the risks of war in Asia by developing closer relations with China's leaders.
These views now dominate U.S. policy. They dovetail with business fears that human rights pressure will spoil the environment for trade and investment. Human rights remains on the list of U.S. diplomatic concerns with China, but it has slipped to the bottom--after security on the Korean peninsula, arms proliferation to Pakistan and Iran, the trade deficit, and other issues. The United States defends its human rights concerns half-apologetically, as if attempting to leaven necessary realpolitik with a measure of fidelity to its parochial values.
China has become the hard case for U.S. human rights policy as a whole, and human rights has become the toughest issue for China policy. Without a credible position on human rights in China, U.S. rights policy in Asia and the rest of the world risks incoherence, and Washington may lose a historic post-Cold War opportunity to strengthen the international human rights regime that a succession of U.S. presidents since World War II has worked so hard to build. As Clinton's second term begins, the administration must think through fundamental U.S. interests in Chinese human rights and find ways to promote U.S. goals.
China policy in other areas has produced results by proceeding from the insight that China is a realist power with which one can reach accommodation through hard bargaining over real interests. U.S. human rights policy should be reconstructed on the same basis. It should concentrate on fundamental U.S. interests in China's responsible international behavior, domestic prosperity and stability, and participation in the international human rights regime. The United States should separate human rights from democratization, focus on abuses that are illegal under international law, and preempt the charge of cultural imperialism by framing the issue as one of compliance with international norms.
The State of Human Rights in China
The international law of human rights centers on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, and on the two covenants--one on civil and political rights, the other on economic, social, and cultural rights--adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. Like all nations, China is bound by the Declaration. Although it has not acceded to the two covenants, they represent appropriate standards against which to evaluate any country's behavior. China has acceded to and is bound by nine UN human rights conventions, including the one against torture, and a number of International Labor Organization conventions related to workers' rights.
The international human rights regime requires individual liberty, but it does not require any particular kind of political or economic system. As the product of negotiations among all nations, the regime is not a weapon in the clash of civilizations. In light of Chinese fears of Western subversion it is important to separate human rights from democratization and treat it as the international idea that it is, not as a code word for Westernization.
Under Mao Zedong, and even more rapidly since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's reform, China made progress in supplying its citizens with economic and social rights. Living standards have increased, compulsory education has been extended to nine years, adult literacy stands at 79 percent according to official figures, and life expectancy at 69 exceeds that of many middle-income countries. Nevertheless, the record may not be as good as it is generally thought to be: A recent World Bank study finds that more than 350 million Chinese live in conditions of grinding poverty. 1 But pending more research, the focus of foreign concerns is appropriately on the deprivation of civil and political rights.
In this realm, pervasive and systematic violations occur, many of them carried out as matters of government policy. 2 The violations that should be of central international concern are those that are conducted by government agents, transgress China's international obligations, and are indefensible under even the most culturally relativist standards. The fact that such violations are sometimes carried out under the auspices of Chinese law should not mislead policymakers. Many abuses transgress the clear language of the Chinese Constitution, the law of criminal procedure, and other enactments. Governments apply their own laws, but when they stretch the law beyond all sense they abuse, not interpret, it. A good example is Wang Dan's illegal pre-trial detention and the four-hour show trial at which he was convicted.
Nor should the United States be dissuaded from recognizing rights violations by the fact that many Chinese citizens have gained new liberties of personal movement and of private political expression under Deng's reforms, or by the fact that the victims of rights abuses are a minority. As in U.S. history, rights are not rights when they are limited to actions the government chooses to tolerate, or to speech by persons with whom the government agrees.
The major categories of rights abuses are as follows.
Imprisonment, arbitrary detention, or forced exile of people who have not used or advocated violence, but whose political beliefs counter those of the government. 3 The victims include democracy movement activists arrested for such acts as writing articles and petitioning the National People's Congress, Tibetans detained for verbally supporting independence, Mongols detained for a cultural revival movement, people detained for protesting about personal grievances, and people accused of divulging state secrets for circulating publicly available information. 4
Religious repression , including the arrests and beatings of adherents of the autonomous Catholic and Protestant movements; detention of Tibetans for religious practices; the house arrest of a six-year-old child who was designated by the Dalai Lama as the incarnation of the Panchen Lama. 5 Religious victims are often charged as counterrevolutionaries, yet in many instances they have carried out no political acts.
Violations related to criminal procedure , including lack of procedural safeguards against police abuse, especially during the process of "shelter and investigation" (shourong shencha ); insufficient safeguards against unlimited detention without trial; failure to provide fair trials (no publicity, insufficient provision for notice to family and preparation of a defense, lack of a presumption of innocence); lack of independence of the judiciary; and the widespread use of "re-education through labor" as a form of imprisonment at police initiative without benefit of trial (as in the recent case of Liu Xiaobo). The 1995 Judges Law and 1996 amendments to the 1979 Criminal Procedure Law addressed some of these issues, but they did not resolve them.
Torture and abuse of inmates of prisons and labor camps , and imposition of forced labor on inmates. The Chinese government has signed the convention against torture, has intermittently campaigned against the use of torture by police and jailers, and reiterated the outlawing of torture in its 1994 Prison Law. But the practice remains prevalent. In the case of many political prisoners it is evidently condoned by the central authorities. Prominent political prisoners recently or currently mistreated in prison included Wei Jingsheng, Liu Gang, and Xu Wenli; those denied adequate medical care included Chen Ziming and Bao Tong.
Forced resettlement , suppression of dissent, and violation of labor rights in connection with work on the Three Gorges project. 6
Forced abortion and sterilization as part of population planning practices. These acts violate declared central government policy, yet are carried out by local officials on what appears to be a widespread basis.
Other civil and political rights violations have been less noticed in the outside world but are also appropriate subjects of concern. These include denial of the right to strike, denial of the freedom of the Chinese and foreign press, mistreatment of homosexuals, eugenic practices, and state interference in the practice of Islam and Buddhism.
A number of issues that have drawn foreign attention are more debatable as rights violations. In dealing with them, Western policy should focus on the ways in which these actions clearly violate international law. Such issues include the following:
Capital punishment . Its use is not against international or Chinese law. Yet China uses the penalty exceptionally widely and with grossly inadequate safeguards. Moreover, international law considers public execution, still widely practiced in China, to be a violation of human dignity.
Harvesting of organs from condemned prisoners for transplantation . Organ transplant does not violate international law. But in China the need for organs reportedly leads to frequent violations of due process, and the authorities seldom obtain donor consent. 7
Kidnapping, trafficking, and abuse of women and girls . The government has campaigned against these practices, yet they continue on a widespread basis, and some analysts plausibly argue this is only possible with the cooperation of local officials.
Export of prison labor products to the United States . This violates U.S. law but not international law. But when prison labor is compulsory, as appears to be the case in Chinese prisons and labor camps, it is prohibited by ILO conventions.
Human Rights as Realpolitik
It is often noted that human rights represent Western values, and that no China policy that ignores them can achieve stable public support. It is less widely realized that promotion of human rights serves Western interests. Humanitarian sympathy and moral outrage can drive human rights policy, but consistency of purpose and clarity of focus must come from thinking through human rights as realpolitik.
The United States has devoted increasing effort since the end of the Cold War to strengthening the international system of rules that benefit the West in such areas as arms proliferation, trade, and the environment. It should give equal attention to fortifying the international human rights regime, which was one of the earliest regimes the world started building after World War II. This regime provides the framework for countries to intercede peacefully against domestic abuses in other states that potentially have serious international consequences. It has growing utility in the post-Cold War world as part of an emerging new international order.
First, the theory of the "democratic peace" that goes back to Immanuel Kant remains a good guide to policy, even though it is not universally accepted by political scientists. The exercise of political rights by citizens is conducive both to reducing governmental misjudgments in foreign affairs and to creating a more peaceful, rational, and predictable foreign policy. Countries that respect the rights of their own citizens are less likely to start wars, export drugs, harbor terrorists, or generate refugees.
In China's case, respect for human rights is a precondition for peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue and successful management of Hong Kong's transition to sovereignty by the People's Republic on July 1, 1997. The human rights gap is a source of Beijing's difficulties in both situations. Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui cites human rights violations as a reason for his government's reluctance to accept unification. Hong Kong citizens protested the Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan trials; they were similarly horrified when China's foreign minister responded that their freedom of speech after 1997 would exclude the right to criticize mainland policy on dissidents. A blowup in either situation will involve U.S. and other Western interests. Besides its economic stake in both places, the United States is committed to peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, and to supporting Hong Kong's freedom and prosperity by the McConnell Act of 1992. In promoting human rights in China, the United States helps prevent these situations from exploding in its face.
Second, China's stability and prosperity have been declared interests of the West since the early 1970s when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State and Richard Nixon was the first president to travel to Communist China. A stable and prosperous China will anchor a stable Asia and contribute to global prosperity through trade. A corrupt, unstable, economically stagnant China will contribute to regional disorder, pollution, and refugee flows, and in the extreme case could heavily tax outside resources for relief. China's rapid development has created such a mobilized and sophisticated population that the government can no longer legitimize itself without allowing a measure of political freedom and participation, and without legitimacy its political stability is at risk. The latest repressions testify to the fragility of the regime, which sees a handful of peaceful dissenters as an intolerable threat to its survival.
This is not to say that China should be pushed to adopt a particular model of political system. But long-term stability will elude it until it honors the political freedoms so wisely recognized in all four of its own Constitutions since the founding of the People's Republic. This argument has been propounded within China by party reformers since the mid-1980s. It is now being promoted by officials who are experimenting with village-level elections aimed at consolidating, not undermining, Chinese Communist Party power.
Third, it is sometimes argued that human rights violations are a necessary, temporary tradeoff to achieve economic development. But few Chinese rights violations (for example, mistreatment of prisoners or violations of due process) have any plausible link to development. The few that have--such as deprivations of freedom of speech and political action, which may be considered necessary to keep political order--more often lead to developmental mistakes than to developmental achievements. Others, such as coercive population planning practices, are shortcuts to achieve targets that could be achieved equally well or better by legal methods, and probably with more secure results. Meanwhile, the violations in themselves worsen the quality of life and constitute a form of underdevelopment unmeasured in gross domestic product (GDP) and other statistics. 8
The relationship between human rights and development is in fact the reverse. Systems that violate political rights tend to generate distorted communications and commit policy mistakes. Suppression of information contributed to a vast famine during the Great Leap Forward, devastation of forests, salinization of farmland, and a series of dam collapses in 1975. 9 Repression need not be widespread to send a signal to all Chinese that they should remain silent. Rights violations throttle the channels of discussion that China desperately needs to manage its problems in the midst of rapid economic and social change. Enforced silence worsens corruption, removes checks to environmental damage, and clears the field for potential megadisasters like the Three Gorges Dam, which specialists think may do extensive ecological damage. Nor can China compete successfully in world markets in the age of information when it filters Internet access, tries to control financial reporting, censors the domestic and foreign press, and otherwise interferes with the flow of ideas.
Fourth, human rights diplomacy is often erroneously presented as standing in conflict with Western business interests. In fact, even at the height of the Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) debates in the United States, U.S.-China trade boomed. In 1995, placing orders for European-made Airbus Industrie airplanes, Premier Li Peng indicated that the Chinese government was penalizing the competing U.S. supplier, Boeing, for U.S. human rights pressure. But most observers believe the Airbus decision was made for business reasons, with the human rights linkage tacked on later. I know of no other case in which the Chinese government discriminated against a U.S. company because of U.S. human rights activism.. Continued U.S. division over human rights, however, may encourage the Chinese to start enforcing such linkages.
So far, maintaining the human rights issue on the bilateral agenda seems to have strengthened the U.S. hand in a number of trade and other negotiations. After Tiananmen, the anti-China atmosphere weakened Beijing's negotiating position in talks over intellectual property rights and market access. In both negotiations, faced with a threat of trade sanctions made credible by the general U.S. willingness to be tough on China, Beijing made concessions to Washington's demands. The fact that China was on the defensive on human rights weakened its ability to block U.S. and French arms transfers to Taiwan, probably helped explain the replacement of a conciliatory Hong Kong governor with one who confronted Beijing on the issue of Hong Kong democratization, and may have accelerated China's accession to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT). Western pressure on human rights did not prevent and may have facilitated progress over issues like arms proliferation, Korean denuclearization, and global environmental degradation, as China sought to improve its image and to escape international isolation.
Rule of law is essential to protect U.S. and other foreign interests (business and otherwise) in China. Today, those Chinese who make and enforce the laws (legislators, procurators, and judges) are chosen, promoted, and kept or fired at the pleasure of political authorities. They write, adopt, revise, and apply the laws under party supervision, with little independent input.
Enforcement of the laws is arbitrary and the courts have no autonomy. The lawlessness of the Chinese legal system is experienced as much by foreign business people as by Chinese dissidents. What happened to Wei Jingsheng has happened in different forms to the Australian businessman James Peng, International Monetary Fund official Hong Yang, Royal Dutch Shell employee Xiu Yichun, and others. 10
If the law is a system of rules that are known in advance and enforceable by appeal to independent arbiters, then China's legal system will become a rule of law only when it incorporates respect for human rights. Expanding the legal code will not solve the human rights problem. Rather, making advances toward a true rule of law and guarantees of human rights will solve the problems with the legal code. A human rights-neutral improvement of the Chinese legal system is impossible.
The community of nations has a strategic interest in improving the human rights regime in all countries, not just in China. But China's demographic and geographic size, its strategic and economic importance, its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and its position of leadership in the developing world make international interest in Chinese human rights practices greater than interest in many other nations' practices.
The difference between a China and a Vietnam, a Zaire, or a Saudi Arabia--or even an Indonesia or an India--is not the international standards applied to it, but the country's potential impact on Western and global interests. China should be held to the same standards as other countries, but its international importance justifies giving its rights violations more urgent and sustained attention than the world can afford to spend on every offending country.
The United States is not alone in its concern for human rights in China. 11 Strong NGOs focused on human rights can be found in Britain, France, Australia, and to a lesser extent in Japan and Germany. Paris and London have interceded intermittently on human rights issues; Bonn and Tokyo occasionally. The European Parliament has passed numerous resolutions and in 1996 awarded Wei Jingsheng the Sakharov Prize, an award that recognizes contributions to freedom. France, Britain, and Australia will no doubt take steps to defend human rights in China even if the United States does not, but their pressure can seldom be effective without U.S. involvement. Japan and Germany are less likely to act on their own, and even if they act in concert with the United States they will usually tailor their actions to be less conspicuous than U.S. actions. In this as in so many other areas, U.S. leadership is essential.
The outside world's interest in Chinese human rights presents no threat to Chinese interests, properly understood. The goals of the international human rights regime are consistent with China's announced internal goals of rule of law, prosperity, stability, and more open decisionmaking. As a weaker power, China stands to benefit from strengthening international regimes that impose limits on stronger powers and buttress the prerogatives of sovereign states as regime participants and makers. China benefits from the norms of proceduralism and multilateralism that are embedded in international regimes. Only through active participation can China take a hand in shaping regimes further to serve its needs. All these arguments apply as much to the international human rights regime as they do to regimes in such areas as trade and nonproliferation of arms.
To be sure, the Chinese government fears it will be criticized and even overthrown when citizens are able to exercise freedom of speech. But repressing criticism is not a long-term strategy for stabilizing power, as many in the ruling party know. An old Chinese proverb says, "You can dam a river forever, but not the mouths of the people."
Shaping Policy
If the goal is to change China's behavior, the best means is to enforce and strengthen the international human rights regime. By disentangling human rights from democratization and "Western values," such a policy can avoid stimulating reactive nationalism and regain the polemical initiative lost to proponents of "Asian values" in China and Southeast Asia. By multilateralizing the human rights issue, the United States can work more successfully with allies and can more readily enlist the cooperation of sympathetic policymakers within the Chinese bureaucracy. Multilat-
eralism would make it harder for the Chinese government to divide its critics abroad. But fundamentally, multilateralism is important because a major goal of human rights policy is to strengthen multilateral institutions.
Representations on human rights issues should be accurate and within the ambit of international law. The stress should not be on U.S.-China or West-China value differences, but on Chinese compliance with international norms and Chinese cooperation with international human rights mechanisms. The human rights agenda is damaged when it is mixed with other goals, including opposition to communism, antagonism to population planning, or promotion of Tibetan independence. If promoting democracy is a goal of the West's China policy, it should be justified on its own grounds and pursued by separate agencies and actors.
Washington should take the lead in coordinating G-7 and other approaches to China on human rights. The United States should hold regular high-level consultations with individual European allies, the European Union (EU), and Japan, and it should provide energetic leadership to forge common policies toward common goals. The Clinton administration should employ more resources than it did in 1996 to sponsor and pass resolutions at meetings of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva condemning Chinese human rights violations.
The United States and its allies should seek China's enhanced participation in the institutions of the international human rights regime. It should press China to ratify the two international human rights covenants and encourage China to extend invitations to the UN "thematic mechanisms," such as the special rapporteurs on torture, freedom of expression, independence of the judiciary, violence against women, and religious intolerance. It should press China to meet its treaty obligation to honor the two UN human rights covenants in post-reversion Hong Kong.
Grounding its China rights policy in the international regime will bring pressure on the United States to enter more fully into compliance with the regime itself. It should accede to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (it has already joined the civil and political convention), and remove the excessive reservations it lodged against a number of UN conventions it signed. Joining the regime more fully involves some sacrifice of U.S. sovereignty, but no more than did accession to the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the Law of the Sea, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other international agreements. In each case, the United States has to decide whether making other governments subject to these agreements is worth making itself subject to them as well. In most cases involving human rights, the answer should be yes, both because the United States' own human rights record is generally good and because the end in view is to build an international system of law and justice that will serve Western interests.
Exposure and stigmatization of Chinese abuses is a valuable tactic and should be used more effectively. President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore should publicly condemn human rights violations and personally intervene when necessary with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other top officials via letter or telephone. The Chinese are adept at distinguishing between pro-forma and real interventions. In certain circumstances private contact may be best; in other circumstances only public interventions have credibility.
But Western policy also needs to have teeth. MFN conditionality is dead, but World Bank and WTO-related conditions are worth considering--not to interfere with trade or development but to communicate Washington's sense of the importance of human rights improvements to its own interests and to China's development. At a time when China is retrogressing in the area of political rights, the United States should use its influence at the World Bank to suspend or to delay for consideration loans to Chinese government-sponsored development projects except for those serving basic human needs; Washington should also seek to condition China's WTO entry on specific, relevant human rights improvements.
Substantial human rights improvements should be a precondition for a U.S.-China summit. Summits are valuable to the West in pushing forward negotiations on a wide range of issues, but they are even more valuable to Chinese leaders for the face they give and the opportunity to seek U.S. concessions on long-standing issues. Negotiations for a summit therefore offer the West the opportunity to bargain for progress on matters it believes are important.
Moreover, the international human rights regime is a system of norms, and norms become established through symbolic communication. The diplomacy of human rights heavily depends on symbolically recognizing the legitimacy of government policies and leaders associated with progress, and the illegitimacy of those associated with retrogression. Symbols of regard and support, such as state visits and heads-of-state summits, should not be awarded without adequate human rights progress. Hard bargaining over a summit does not mean having no summit; it means getting what the administration needs out of a symbolic exchange that gives the other side something it wants.
The human rights agenda with China should include both immediate and longer-term issues. Certain goals deserve tactical priority not because they are intrinsically more important than other goals, but because of their human urgency; their importance at the center of the human rights idea; their conformity with development trends within Chinese reform; and their political, ideological, and cultural bases of support inside and outside China. Progress on these issues will open the way to progress on other topics. Priority issues include the following:
Release of political prisoners and international access to prisons . Although progress on individual prisoner cases may seem to make for only superficial improvement in China's human rights situation, such cases (like that of Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan) have crucial symbolic significance and must form a focus of Western human rights diplomacy if such diplomacy is to make sense to concerned publics in China and abroad. Because of their symbolic value, such cases should be viewed as involving more than the fate of individuals. Initiatives on individual cases should be pursued in concert with efforts to open the Chinese prison system to international humanitarian organizations such as the ICRC. This would help the central government in its goal of improving conditions of detention of all prisoners, political and otherwise.
Legal reform and institution-building . The outside world can support and accelerate Chinese legal reform and the construction of Chinese legal institutions. The West should maintain a focus on key problems such as arbitrary detention, procedural safeguards in criminal trials, reform of provisions of the criminal code that violate international norms, and international access to trials. These issues touch on the basic nature of the Chinese legal system and reform in these areas already commands substantial support within China. Pressure from outside helps focus the minds of the leaders on proposals they are already receiving from internal sources. 12
Ending religious repression . This is an area of deep concern to many Western publics, and the repression is out of proportion to any realistic threat to the interests of the Chinese state.
Guaranteeing the continuity of civil and political rights in Hong Kong after its reversion to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997.
Western policy should combine negative sanctions with constructive efforts such as educational and technical assistance, exchanges of specialists, and institution-building. Both government agencies and nongovernmental foundations, universities, and exchange organizations can contribute. Promising areas of institution-building include deepening Chinese involvement in the UN thematic mechanisms, building the court system, reforming legal codes, training the legal profession, upgrading prison administration, and improving social welfare systems. Businesses and other nongovernmental actors in the West (foundations and universities, among others) should maintain and enhance educational and exchange programs that assist Chinese agencies in fulfilling the Chinese government's declared human rights policies.
A policy of economic engagement is an adjunct to, not a substitute for, a human rights policy. Economic development and the opening to the West have helped raise living standards in China. But by themselves they will not solve China's human rights problems. On some fronts, economic development makes things worse (consider, for example, labor conditions in some foreign-invested and locally owned factories, abuse of migrant labor, eviction of farmers from land needed for development, and victimization of ordinary people by rising corruption). 13 In some areas, development helps improve human rights but it works slowly--too slowly, for example, to save prisoners now being mistreated in Chinese prisons--and on some human rights problems it has no effect; for example, lack of funds is not the cause of the high death rates in some Chinese orphanages. 14
Economic development did not alone bring human rights improvements in South Korea or Taiwan--this required a long political and diplomatic struggle--and it has done little so far to improve human rights in Indonesia. The linkage between development and rights is too loose, the threshold too high, the time frame too long, and the results too uncertain to make economic engagement a substitute for direct policy intervention on human rights. A policy of economic engagement is neither an alternative to, nor a substitute for, a human rights policy. The West can walk and chew gum at the same time: Participate in China's economic development while at the same time working to improve China's compliance with the international human rights regime.
The Western business community cannot respond effectively to the human rights issue by wishing it would go away. Western businesses encounter not only practical difficulties but also public relations risks when they work in an environment that is abusive of fundamental human rights. The need to manage the issue more actively will be all the greater to the extent that the Chinese government begins to link business dealings and human rights. The business community should help the Chinese government respond constructively to Western human rights concerns, especially in areas in which business has an interest, responsibility, and experience like child labor, prison labor, women's rights, social welfare, independence of the judiciary, media freedom, and due process. Business approaches need not be confrontational. Working through technical assistance, personnel training, institution building, and grants, businesses can encourage Chinese reform to move in directions that are good for the business climate.
For its part, the human rights community should encourage consumers to take some responsibility for the conditions under which the goods they use are produced. Consumers should learn to look at labels and ask about labor rights, forced labor, and child labor in the factories that produce the goods they buy.
Human rights are not invariably the highest priority of China policy, but their importance is greater than the present administration gives them. Unless human rights are pursued consistently, Washington will lose a prime opportunity for change. When tradeoffs must be made to pursue other interests, the costs of failing to build a vital international human rights regime need to be weighed more accurately in the balance than they have been in the past.
Patience and persistence are crucial to a successful human rights policy, as they are to building any other international regime. The Chinese sometimes complain that Western human rights negotiators keep increasing their demands. In fact, the negotiation process regarding human rights should be no different from negotiating with China (or any other country) on issues related to other international regimes, such as arms control, intellectual property rights, or market access. Both sides should realize that the regime-building process is a long one; they should acknowledge long-term goals while pursuing urgent or achievable goals. The regime-building process has achieved much so far. Its further progress should not be sacrificed to a desire for smooth, conflict-free relations.
Conclusion
The Chinese government has succeeded in convincing many analysts that human rights pressure is counterproductive. Beijing has signaled that the subject cannot be part of normal diplomacy because of its need to save face, succession politics and the rise of the military, national pride in recovered sovereignty after a century of neocolonialism and exploitation, and the nationalistic "feelings of the Chinese people." Beijing has persuaded many that it cannot negotiate over human rights.
It is always useful for a government to convince its interlocutors that it is too rigid to bend on an issue. But in fact, in its human rights diplomacy as in other areas of foreign policy, China has behaved as a realist power, making those concessions it perceived as necessary to influence states with which it was interacting, and not making them when they were deemed unnecessary. Since the late 1970s, a Western human rights policy combining pressure and assistance has successfully supported an internal Chinese evolution toward improved human rights, achieving greater results when it was firm and lesser results when it was weak. The historical record suggests that the main obstacle to maintaining an effective human rights policy toward China is not Chinese intransigence but Western indecision.
China today understands the U.S. human rights policy as one of hostility, restriction, containment, and punishment. The policy should instead be articulated in a way that conveys that the United States accepts China's legitimate security and other needs but wants China to play by the international rules. 15 It should also stress that the desire to build an international human rights regime is not a code word for subverting the Chinese system of government. At home, the Clinton administration needs to articulate its strategic rationale and thus build a domestic consensus for including human rights in its China policy.
Of all the international regimes with which the outside world wants a rising China to comply--the missile technology control regime, intellectual property rights, the WTO, and others--the international human rights regime is the oldest and the best established in international and domestic Chinese law. Less real conflict of interest exists between Chinese interests and the international regime in human rights than is the case with other areas of dispute. Moreover, the human rights regime is easily grasped by the relevant domestic publics--U.S., Chinese, European, Japanese, and others--and it can serve as a symbolic anchor for the otherwise somewhat elusive idea that the West wishes both to acknowledge China as a great power and to insist on China's obeying world rules as a great power should. In dealing with a realist power like China, the West will do better in building the human rights regime if it acts as a realist itself and maintains a consistent stand on behalf of its own interests.
Note *: This essay is drawn from a longer version that was commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations and will be published in a book edited by Michel C. Oksenberg and Elizabeth Economy. The views in this essay are those of the author alone, not those of any organization. Back.
Note 1: Patrick E. Tyler, "In China's Outlands, Poorest Grow Poorer," New York Times , October 26, 1996, p. A1. Back.
Note 2: Most documentation on this subject can be found in Andrew J. Nathan, "Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Policy," China Quarterly 139 (September 1994), pp. 622-643. In this article, I have provided references to material that has come out since the China Quarterly article was written. Back.
Note 3: On forced exile, see Human Rights Watch/Asia (HRW/A) and Human Rights in China, "China: Enforced Exile of Dissidents" (New York: HRW/A, January 1995). Back.
Note 4: For recent information on rights abuses of Tibetans, see Tibet Information Network and HRW/A, Cutting Off the Serpent's Head: Tightening Control in Tibet, 1994-1995 (New York: HRW/A, 1996). Back.
Note 5: HRW/A, "China: Religious Persecution Persists" (New York: HRW/A, December 1995). Back.
Note 6: HRW/A, "The Three Gorges Dam in China: Forced Resettlement, Suppression of Dissent, and Labor Rights Concerns" (New York: HRW/A, February 1995). Back.
Note 7: HRW/A, "China: Organ Procurement and Judicial Execution in China" (New York: HRW/A, August 1994). Back.
Note 8: Amartya Sen has written extensively on these themes; for a synopsis of many of them see his "Human Rights and Economic Achievements" (paper presented at a conference on "The Growth of East Asia and Its Impact on Human Rights," Tokyo, June 23-25, 1995). Back.
Note 9: For a good description of communications pathologies generated by Chinese authoritarianism, see Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 174-179; for an example of the policy results see HRW/A, "The Three Gorges Dam in China," pp. 37-44; the story is also summarized in Audrey R. Topping, "Ecological Roulette: Damming the Yangtze," Foreign Affairs 74, no. 5 (September/October 1995), pp. 132-147. Back.
Note 10: HRW/A, "China: The Cost of Putting Business First" (New York: HRW/A, July 1996). Back.
Note 11: See, for example, Commission of the European Communities, "A Long Term Policy for China-Europe Relations" (1995), Part B.2, reprinted in David Shambaugh, China and Europe: 1949-1995 , Research Notes and Studies no. 11 (London: Contemporary China Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996). Back.
Note 12: Andrew J. Nathan, "China's Constitutionalist Option," Journal of Democracy (October 1996), pp. 43-57 (chapter 15 of this volume). Back.
Note 13: Sidney Jones, "The Impact of Asian Economic Growth on Human Rights," Council on Foreign Relations Asia Project Working Paper (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, January 1995). Back.
Note 14: HRW/A, Death By Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages (New York: HRW/A, January 7, 1996). Back.
Note 15: Jianwei Wang, "Coping with China as a Rising Power," in James Shinn, ed., Weaving the Net: Conditional Engagement with China (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), pp. 133-174. Back.
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