Sunday will mark US President Barack Obama's first visit to China. Will he be stricken by Marco Polo-itis? The Great Wall and the Forbidden City can be mesmerising. But so, too, can Obama, especially if allowed to speak freely on Chinese television. Obama will confront some tough choices, not only between meetings and sightseeing but also in choosing among the unprecedented number of difficult issues on his potential agenda. Climate change? World financial crisis? Tariff war and currency revaluation? North Korean nuclear weapons? US arms sales to Taiwan? Sino-US military co-operation? Afghanistan and Iraq pullbacks? Iran and Pakistan dilemmas?
No previous Sino-American summit has confronted so many issues. This testifies to China's increasing prominence.
How much room will the agenda have for 'human rights'? After diplomatic relations were normalised in 1979, and especially after the Tiananmen slaughter of June 4, 1989, human rights became an important issue in Sino-American summits. Yet, until this week's announcement of nine executions in Xinjiang, the Obama administration, contrary to the expectations raised by the president's election campaign rhetoric, demonstrated little interest in stimulating the People's Republic to abide by its international human rights commitments, such as the UN Convention Against Torture.
Nor has it applied public pressure for China to take on new commitments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Beijing signed in 1998 but has not ratified.
To be sure, many agenda items involve human rights of one kind or another. The rights to a habitable environment, a decent job and protection against nuclear extermination are universal. The lives of tens of millions in the Near and Middle East can be affected by other decisions reached next week. And Taiwan's free society has a huge stake in any cross-strait military arrangements. Yet none of those items addresses 'human rights' in the sense of the political and civil rights of 1.3 billion Chinese. During the past three years, the mainland has again tightened restrictions on its own citizens' most basic freedoms of expression - speech, publication, assembly, organisation and religion. Those who challenge these restrictions have been arbitrarily and harshly punished through a comprehensive array of informal, administrative and criminal sanctions.
The cruelty to which many courageous people have been subjected for attempting to experiment with democracy, implement a genuine rule of law or practise their religion is unworthy of a government that has made great social and economic progress in recent years. Despite such progress, the regime is facing a rising tide of popular protests against a broad range of grievances in many areas, not only Tibet and Xinjiang. Instead of establishing democratic institutions to provide satisfactory outlets for processing these grievances, Beijing's response is unremitting repression.
Rights defenders and lawyers who seek to utilise existing weak legal institutions are themselves often harassed, beaten, deprived of their livelihood, detained and prosecuted. Many of them who fall ill in prison are denied the necessary medical care in an apparent effort to permanently incapacitate them and deter others. Probably millions of Chinese hope Obama will condemn such abuses and press their leaders for reforms.