As the U.S.-China Human Rights Dialog resumed today, democracy and human rights advocates urged the Obama administration to press Beijuing on media and Internet freedom, Uyghur and Tibetan minority rights, and attacks on human rights defenders.
The dialogue was frozen between 2002 and 2008 but the administration suggested that there would be a full agenda.
“Rule of law, religious freedom, freedom of expression, labor rights and other human rights issues of concern will be raised over a two-day period,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.
China is expect to object to the recent State Department decision to fund the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, an Internet censorship circumvention software developed by associates of the Falungong spiritual movement.
“We firmly oppose any government or organization providing support to anti-China forces in their anti-China activities,” said foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu
Some activists suggest that the dialog can be less productive in generating real gains than other sources of leverage, as this report notes:
“If some positive change comes as a result of this discussion, great,” says Sophie Richardson, a China expert with Human Rights Watch in Washington. “But we’ve seen that not only is this one of the vehicles that is least likely to produce the kind of change we want to see, but it can also in fact be damaging because it steals a sense of obligation from those vehicles that tend to be much more productive.”
An example? Other US government agencies whose pronouncements China cares about, she says. Last summer the Chinese government withdrew plans for a personal computer filtering system after the US Department of Commerce and the US Trade Representative suggested the system could constitute a violation of World Trade Organization rules and said it would be a threat to freedom of expression.
“That was heartening,” Ms. Richardson says, “and it also got the Chinese government to back down pretty quickly.”
The shortcomings and frustrations of bilateral dialogs has led others to stress the value of building issue-based coalitions through what analyst Kelley Currie calls “vigorous outreach to groups outside the traditional human rights community who are increasingly attuned to the downside of Chinese autarky: the business community, security analysts, internet freedom advocates, faith communities, environmental activists, and especially local and regional activists in Asia.”
Such coalitions must be strategic and targeted, she writes, “developing strategies that play to the strengths of a loose-knit, diverse group working across open societies, and similarly exploits the weaknesses of China’s brittle, top-down authoritarian structure and political culture.”
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