US President Barack Obama's meeting scheduled for tomorrow with the Dalai Lama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent speech condemning China's internet censorship have added to the complications plaguing Sino-American relations, rekindling debate over the role of human rights in US policy towards China.
Last week's commentary in The Wall Street Journal by the distinguished American expert on Chinese law, Stanley Lubman, helps crystallise the arguments. Lubman criticises Clinton's attack on internet censorship as unnecessarily damaging because such foreign rebukes are unlikely to modify China's policies. 'Sino-American relations', he writes, 'would be less roiled if the Obama administration muted its disapproval of conduct within China that foreigners cannot change.'
Lubman acknowledges that 'some Chinese clearly desire the strengthening of democratic values' and notes 'the chaos of competing values that currently marks Chinese society'. Yet, since the communist leaders vigorously oppose political democracy and 'any tendencies toward pluralism', he suggests that 'the Obama administration should avoid criticism that Beijing characterises as 'ideological war'.'
Instead, he urges, it should focus 'on practices that can be more realistically affected by foreign pressures and influences'. He favours supporting 'reforms that quietly work to strengthen the rule of law in China', such as improvements in government transparency, rights consciousness and legal aid. He also endorses renewal of the oft-interrupted US-China official dialogues concerning human rights and law.
Of course, such activities are desirable. Many foreign governments, non-governmental organisations and universities have been involved in law reform co-operation with China for decades. As experience in Taiwan and South Korea demonstrated, such programmes lay the groundwork for significant long-run progress and, in the interim, encourage rule of law aspirations and incremental improvements.
Lubman concedes these are 'modest examples'. Yet, he writes, 'nothing bolder appears likely to have even mild and long-term impact' on Communist Party attitudes towards reform.
This takes too narrow a view of the benefits of foreign protests, and it fails to address the challenges that China presents daily to foreign governments and human rights advocates. Although China's entry into the World Trade Organisation deprived the US of the leverage previously used to extract from Chinese prison political dissidents and other unfairly convicted people, it is still important for foreign governments and others to protest, in public as well as private, against cases of injustice in China.