The American Pot and the Chinese Kettle: Joining Forces for Human Rights

I The Search for the High Ground The U.S. is confident that it is occupying the high ground when it threatens to apply economic and diplomatic sanctions against China until it mends its ways. China defines its high ground by citing statistical profiles of its economic and social progress. American leaders justify their stand by presenting annual lists of conspicuous abuses that are reported by independent human rights groups. Chinese leaders complain that those reports specialize in condemning offenders who have western credentials but don't give credit for success in improving the living conditions of the poorest. The tone of this discourse is monotonously negative: no group admits to being much impressed by progress made by the other. If the annual parade of horrors permits no display of offsetting achievements in the Chinese national landscape, it also overlooks lesser offenses in countries that have passed a minimal threshold in the observance of human rights. The result is that no country escapes reproach or collects kudos. There are grounds for concern, but not for mutual understanding. There is an emergent international consensus on human rights, but it is not immune from geopolitical considerations. Western catalogs of human rights horrors tend to go easier on favorites (Israelis) than on pariahs (PLO). And what critics regard as violations in "bad" countries are taken as harmless cultural manifestations in "good" ones. Defensive responses to complaints on both sides usually take the form of political statements. It is no surprise that here, as elsewhere, politics conceal more than it enlightens. Stalin used to pride himself in that his Soviet Constitution had created the world's most democratic instrument because its list of human rights was so comprehensive, while ignoring the truism that "there are no rights without remedies." With slightly more justification, China ranks its human rights status high because it has achieved so much economic and social progress in spite of conditions of great austerity. The standards used in passing these celebrated judgments are more congenial to American than to Chinese or Arab traditions. Our domestic politics offers very circuitous instructions to national leaders. The U.S. Congress felt no awkwardness in requiring the Secretary of State to transmit to it "a full and complete report . . . with respect to practices regarding the observance of and respect for internationally recognized human rights in each country proposed as a recipient of security assistance" and to list". . . the steps the United States has taken to . . . promote respect for and observance of human rights in that country."(1) Nor was the President too shy to assert the national virtue by requiring the Secretary of State to determine whether China "has made overall, significant progress with respect to . . . taking steps to begin adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"(2) before renewing its Most-Favored-Nation status. The American contribution to the international dialog was to propose six times (unsuccessfully) that the UN impose economic and diplomatic sanctions upon China. In the Western tradition, human rights are centuries old. At first they concentrated on protection of property, moving rather gradually to assert the priority of free speech. Only in the 1960s, after the McCarthy era, did John Stuart Mill's justification for free expression assume its present role as the ultimate safeguard of responsible government. The progression to individual privacy as the protector of human dignity is of even more recent vintage.(3) The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, after a millennium of searching for social harmony, is only now moving by tiny steps to recognize individual rights against the collective and the state. Free speech and privacy lie somewhere in its future.(4) History tells us that these differences transcend current political jockeying, and that there are profound reasons for the different priorities assigned to human rights by the two countries. …