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China vs US contest: Who is the bigger human rights violator?

Washington Written By: Bernd DebusmannUpdated: Apr 17, 2023, 09:09 AM IST
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Given the effort that goes into the reports, one might assume that its findings play a major role in shaping US foreign policy. But that is not the case. Where US national interests are at stake, human rights violations are not necessarily obstacles to normal relations. Photograph:(Reuters)

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Neither the US report, the only global assessment of human rights by a government (as opposed to private advocacy groups), nor the Chinese counter-report broke new ground and instead re-emphasised mutual recriminations.

For the past quarter century, every spring the United States and China have accused each other of pervasive human rights violations in a tit-for-tat routine that brings in sharp focus an ideological rift so vast it is difficult to see that it can ever bridged.

The clash routinely begins with the publication of an extraordinarily detailed report on the state of human rights in the world compiled by the U.S. State Department. The report runs to more than two million words. It covers 198 countries and territories.

That’s every country in the world, except one – the United States. Without fail, extensive parts of the reports have been sharply critical of China and the Communist Party’s failure to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in running the world’s most populous country.

The persistent criticism so infuriated Beijing that China began issuing a counter-report, in 1998, on Human Rights violations in the United States.

The latest US report came out on March 20, more than 28,000 words of it about China, complete with charges about genocide and crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur community and other ethnic and religious groups in the north-western Xinjiang province.

A week later, China responded with 11,130 words of condemnation which described the year 2022 as a landmark setback for U.S. human rights and portrayed the country as plagued by “chronic diseases” including racial discrimination, police brutality, politics controlled by money, extreme wealth disparity, rampant drug abuse, declining average life expectancy and relentless gun violence.

The day the Russian report was published, America’s Gun Violence Archive, a widely respected research database, recorded the 146th mass shooting since the beginning of the year. Since then, there have been mass shootings at a bank, a school, and the 16th birthday party of a girl in Alabama.

Details of the Chinese critique of America were drawn from U.S. think tanks, media, academic research institutes, and government statistics.

Reading the reports side by side, it is obvious that the Chinese leadership views America’s (and the West’s) definition of human rights as unsuitable for their country and a threat to the rule of the Communist Party.

Shortly after Xi Jinping assumed his first term as president in 2013, the rejection of the idea that all people around the world are entitled to certain rights – universal values — became official policy in a Communist Party “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.”

Dubbed Document 9 by Sinologists, it said there were “essential differences between the West’s value system and the value system we advocate.” That system, according to Document 9, is based on obedience to the party and requires opposition to “false ideological trends” such as constitutional government with the separation of powers and an independent judiciary.

For Chinese officials, the most important human right is economic well-being. In pursuit of that goal, the leadership has excelled. Over the past three decades, the system has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, according to World Bank figures.

The Chinese report on the U.S. notes, in contrast, high national poverty rates and “disproportionally high” child poverty rates. Quoting statistics from Columbia University, the report says child poverty had risen from 12.1 per cent in December 2021 to 16.6 per cent in May 2022, which translates to an additional 3.3 million children in poverty.

Coinciding with the American report on brutal repression, genocide and a long list of trampling individual freedoms, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua accused the West of ignoring that “one of the greatest human rights successes a country could hope for is the elimination of poverty.”

That message is falling on receptive ears in large parts of the world where China has steadily expanded its influence through credits and infrastructure projects. One of the most memorable remarks from last month’s U.S.-sponsored Summit of Democracy came from an African leader, Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia..

“You can’t eat democracy. Human rights may sustain the spirit but not the body,” he said in a speech to the participants of the mostly virtual event.

Neither the US report, the only global assessment of human rights by a government (as opposed to private advocacy groups), nor the Chinese counter-report broke new ground and instead re-emphasised mutual recriminations.

But the American report added to a very long list of activities that could land a Chinese citizen in jail an unfamiliar offence: “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” One offender, named Xu Guang, was arrested for holding up a sign in front of a police station demanding the return of his confiscated smartphone.

A Beijing-based lawyer, Li Yuhan, has been held in a detention centre since 2017 also for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, according to the report.

Its preface noted that State Department officials and diplomats around the world spent “thousands of hours” compiling accurate accounts of the state of human rights.

Given the effort that goes into the reports, one might assume that its findings play a major role in shaping US foreign policy. But that is not the case. Where US national interests are at stake, human rights violations are not necessarily obstacles to normal relations.

US President Joe Biden provided a memorable demonstration that national interests trump human rights last summer when he visited Saudi Arabia, a country he had described as a “pariah” when he was running for president because of Saudi abuses including the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi.

Candidate Biden pledged that Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, would “pay the price” for the Kashoggi murder, U.S. intelligence says he ordered. But President Biden, concerned about sky-high gasoline prices in the U.S., visited Saudi Arabia in hopes that the Saudis would increase oil production and thus help lower gasoline prices.

Biden’s about-face provided yet more evidence that the universal values Washington officially espouses are not universally applied. Cozying up to dictators when that is in the American interest has a long history and predates the first U.S. global human rights report which was published in 1976.

In 1938, when aides complained to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the repressive and corrupt rule of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, a close US ally, history books give his response as “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s OUR son of a bitch.”

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.) 

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