Will Obama Get Tough on China's Rights Record?
When Hu Jintao arrives in Washington this week, Obama has a remarkable opportunity to return attention to China's human rights record.
As Chinese president Hu Jintao descends on Washington next week for a full state visit, with all of the trappings that entails, let us think for a moment of a man named Li Yujun. Li is a peasant from Lioaning Province in China’s Northeast – although he hasn’t been home in a long time. He was arrested on June 5th, 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, on charges of vandalizing government vehicles. He’s been languishing as a political prisoner in Beijing Number Two Prison ever since.
Or recall a sixteen year old ethnic Tibetan named Tenzin Gyatso. Tenzin is a young Buddhist monk who participated in a peaceful protest early last year, calling for Tibetan independence and the safe return of the Dalai Lama. He was subsequently arrested, and his whereabouts and legal status are unknown.
Liang Huantian, meanwhile, is a 28-year old female farmer from Guandong Province in China’s verdant south. She protested alongside her neighbors when the local government seized land in her rural village in early 2007. Over two thousand members of the People’s Armed Police swarmed on the small protest, and Liang, like thousands more of her countrymen, has been a captive of the state ever since.
President Obama commands a great deal of moral authority throughout the world; the (preposterous) Nobel sitting on his mantle attests to that. When he talks, much of the planet listens. Thus, the President has been handed a remarkable opportunity next week. He has a chance to make the world aware of the plight of China’s dissidents, liberals, and ordinary citizens.
To be sure, there will be plenty of business for Obama and Hu to hammer out next week. Important discussions over China’s currency, defense build up, and relationship with North Korea are sure to be on the docket. Yet that must not be all. Hu’s in charge here? Not so, when it comes to the issue of Chinese human rights.
The work of arousing the world’s conscience on matters of Chinese liberties made significant headway last year with Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize. Now President Obama has the opportunity to continue to press that case with a loud and forceful denunciation of Hu ‘s government’s appalling human rights abuses. The Chinese government, loath to be “humiliated” in public, may be chastened. Global opinion, key to forcing change on repressive societies, is sure to be shifted.
Shining a spotlight on China’s human rights abuses is a moral imperative. Given that so much of the world is focused on what the Chinese government is doing right, Obama has a unique opportunity to point out what Beijing is doing wrong.
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