The administration of US President Barack Obama faces a delicate balancing act in human rights talks with China that began yesterday: It looks to pressure China to improve its treatment of its citizens while not angering a country that is crucial to US international interests.
The meeting also gives the administration a chance to answer criticism that it ignores rights abuses while pushing for Chinese support on Iranian and North Korean nuclear standoffs, climate change and other difficult issues.
This may be a difficult time, however, for the US to take a tough position in the private talks that end today.
The meeting, which is resuming after two years, comes ahead of a major gathering of top-level US and Chinese officials this month in Beijing that will focus on the countries’ intertwined economic and security interests.
“We hope they do more than talk,” Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, said about this week’s meeting. “The US side must send a credible, serious human rights message.”
Disagreements over human rights have been for years irritants in US-China relations. This week’s talks are particularly sensitive. They come as the countries try to repair ties after a rough period.
Obama infuriated China by recently announcing a US$6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan and by meeting with the Dalai Lama.
The head of the US delegation, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner, said in an interview that the US would not shy away from raising difficult issues.
“The challenge is to find a way to communicate those differences respectfully but directly,” he said.
Posner said human rights could not “just be isolated to a few days of discussion every other year, every year; it’s part of the broader relationship.”
The US regularly criticizes China for abusing its dissidents, the lawyers who try to defend them and average citizens looking for free access to information. In response, China says the US is rife with crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.
Activists have been unhappy with the Obama administration’s approach to China’s rights record since US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a trip to China early last year, said human rights should not interfere with improving US-China ties.
Hom said the US should use the rights dialogue to raise the cases of imprisoned dissidents, and when the talks are finished, both sides should lay out what was discussed and set up benchmarks for ways to get results.
US officials have said they expect to talk about religious freedom, attacks on the legal profession, China’s strict Internet controls and individual cases such as Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), an author an dissident serving an 11-year prison sentence on subversion charges.
Wang Baodong (王寶東), spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China considers the dialogue a useful way to “increase mutual understanding in this important area.”
However, Wang said that while the cases of Liu and other dissidents the US has worries about might be raised at the meeting, they are “matters of judicial sovereignty, and we believe that any country should handle such cases in accordance with domestic laws.”
“No one has been punished just because of his expressions of mind,” Wang said.
Posner said officials were determined to get results from the meeting,
“Not just how do we have a couple days of talks ... We’re very much focused on the next steps coming out of it,” he said.
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