Many human rights lawyers, activists and lawmakers in the United States have called upon President Obama to place human rights issues at the top of the agenda in his meetings with President Xi Jinping of China today in Sunnylands, Calif. In particular, he has been called upon to press for the release of dissidents, such as Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, to demand that China end religious and ethnic persecution, etc., and in general to liberalize Chinese politics.
On its face, these efforts are noble and well-intentioned. The Chinese government is indeed imprisoning a literature scholar whose only offense is to call for the peaceful transition to democracy, and it is persecuting many more intellectuals, lawyers and activists attempting to do the same. The lives of Chinese who press for more political freedom — including freedom of religion and freedom of expression and freedom of assembly — are frequently imperiled by both the central and local Chinese governments.
And President Obama may seem to be the most effective presidential messenger for such messages of freedom. As a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he is no doubt well-versed in the philosophical and political arguments for the value of a society with limited government and strong civil society, including individual freedom. He is a charismatic, charming and persuasive debater. And as America’s first African-American president, he knows very well the difficulties in discussing political affairs that are emotional, passionate and deeply embedded in a society’s history.
And yet there are several reasons for why this is the wrong time for such a lecture, especially of the public sort, as in past high-level dialogues, when American presidents felt compelled to criticize Chinese leaders on human rights issues even as they stood side by side at matching podiums.
The most obvious reason, unfortunately, is that President Obama, unlike many of his predecessors, has much less moral high ground to stand on and look down upon the Chinese leader. Scores of men have sat in Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade, not knowing whether or not they will even be given the most basic human right of a public trial. In recent weeks it has been revealed that the FBI has secretly accessed the phone records of Associated Press journalists. The IRS has targeted conservative organizations for extra investigations. And finally, just before the summit, The Guardian has shown the National Security Agency’s PRISM program has secretly collected the email and Internet communications of millions of innocent Americans. If President Obama criticizes China on human rights issues at the final press conference for the summit, who will smile and laugh first: Xi Jinping or the Americans in the audience?
I believe Xi Jinping would not laugh in President Obama’s face in such a situation. No smiles. Nor a wink and a nod. Chinese leaders know the Chinese people will watch such a high-level meeting with great anticipation and interest, and that is why they will behave very seriously. And that is why we should not publicly lecture the Chinese on human rights these days.
Xi is the newly chosen leader of China’s Communist Party, an organization of some 80 million educated, ambitious and politically savvy individuals, many of whom have very different ideas on how to proceed in developing China. In recent months some local Chinese leaders have responded to popular protests with an iron fist, and some have reacted with open negotiations and compromise. The Chinese state media still cranks out endless diatribes against America and the dangers of “bourgeois liberalism,” and yet reporters in some places have gone on strike to protest editorial censorship. Many young Chinese are vying to become Party members, and yet many more are now only interested in private enterprise or public NGOs. Chinese scholars attack the West for trying to “encircle” and “contain” China, and yet many of the same intellectuals are aggressively pushing for new public discussions about civil society and constitutionalism. Or in other words, Xi Jinping is not the president of a monolithic, homogenous, Maoist China.
Smart diplomats in the United States — and thus far President Obama and his director of strategic communications with China, Ben Rhodes, have been very savvy in their public relations with the Chinese people — know that this is a good time to learn more about Xi and his leadership team, to find out whether or not he will indeed push forward with political and economic reforms, including liberalization of political rights. An attempt to publicly “shame” the Chinese president on human rights in California might please many Americans, but this would surely fall flat in China, angering many Chinese who themselves press for reform at home. At this point in China’s history, no Chinese wish to be lectured on civil rights by Americans who themselves are so obviously still struggling to find the right way to balance civil liberties against national security goals.
Steven W. Lewis is the Baker Institute’s C.V. Starr Transnational China Fellow and faculty adviser for the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program. He is also a professor in the practice and an associate director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Sociology at Rice University.