The US and China reported no major breakthroughs on Friday after only their second round of talks about human rights since 2002. A senior US official said, however, that the two-day meeting lays groundwork for more regular talks to soothe an irritant in relations between the two world powers.
Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, who led the US side, told reporters that another round will happen sometime next year in Beijing. The countries also plan to hold legal talks soon, and he said he would participate in a high-profile economic and security summit in Beijing this month.
“In two days we’re not going to change major policies or major points of view, but we laid a foundation to continue,” Posner said. “The tone of the discussions was very much, ‘We’re two powerful, great countries. We have a range of issues that we are engaged on. Human rights is part of that discussion, and it will remain so.’”
US President Barack Obama’s administration wants to push Beijing to treat its citizens better, but it also needs Chinese support on Iranian and North Korean nuclear standoffs, climate change and other difficult issues.
This week’s talks came 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, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing as its own, and by meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader China calls a separatist.
Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about US rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination. He said the US side did not whitewash the US record and in fact raised on its own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.
Wang Baodong (王寶東), spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the talks were “constructive and very candid.”
“We believe that such dialogues can contribute to the growth of the bilateral relations,” Wang said.
The US was represented by officials from the State Department, White House, the departments of Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, the trade representative’s office and the Internal Revenue Service. The Chinese side was led by Director General for International Organizations Chen Xu (陳旭) and included officials from nine agencies.
The officials discussed Tibet, the Uighur ethnic group in the Chinese province of Xinjiang and specific dissidents the US has worries about. Posner would not provide details, except to say the US raised the cases of Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), an author-dissident serving an 11-year prison sentence on subversion charges, and Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), a crusading Chinese rights lawyer.
Todd Stein, with the International Campaign for Tibet, said political repression in China is growing. If officials want improvement in China’s human rights record, he said, the issue should be a focus of this month’s high-profile Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing.
“It would be a mistake if this dialogue resulted in a ‘check the box’ exercise that sidelined substantive engagement on human rights in any other arena,” Stein said.
The officials spent part of Friday traveling around Washington for meetings, including, Posner said, a visit to the US Supreme Court, where they were briefed by retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on rule of law.
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