But she omitted to mention that Liu Xiao-bo, one of the country’s dissidents is currently being prosecuted, writes Ellen Bork, Director of Democracy and Human Rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative. Liu has been president of the independent Chinese PEN, the freedom of expression advocacy group, which is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Bork criticizes the passivity of the Obama administration’s approach.
“If there is a new direction for the administration’s human rights policy, it needs to respond effectively to the persecution of a Chinese dissident who represents the most significant movement for political reform in a decade,” she writes.
But Harvard’s Joseph Nye defends the administration’s handling of relations with Beijing. “How America responds to the rise of Chinese power is one of the most important foreign-policy challenges of the 21st century,” he argues.
While Obama’s quiet diplomacy made November’s summit meeting with President Hu Jintao a success, the U.S. also appreciates the need for close alliances with Asia’s leading democracies – Japan, Australia and India – “to maintain the hard-power capabilities that shape the environment for a rising China.”
A cautious approach is merited because China and the U.S. need to overcome decades of mistrust, argues Kenneth Lieberthal, formerly a senior director for Asia in the Clinton administration’s National Security Council.
But Liu’s prosecution requires a serious response from the United States, writes Dick Thornburgh, a former attorney general of the United States. Cooperation with an authoritarian China on issues like North Korea “does not mean we must silence ourselves when it comes to the rights and freedoms of China’s citizens,” he contends:
Above all, it is vital that Chinese leaders know that they will lose something in their relations with the U.S. if Liu is imprisoned. There must be consequences for abuses of human rights, in this case, the mere expression of ideas. Chinese authorities seek to make a symbol out of Liu Xiaobo. We must do the same.
Liu’s fate will also send a clear signal about the constraints on China’s public intellectuals who operate in a climate of repressive tolerance, enjoying more freedom than under Mao, but still stifled by party censorship and intolerance of dissent.
“While China’s movement from a totalitarian to an authoritarian polity has not protected public intellectuals from reprisals and detention, it has made it possible for them at times to speak out publicly on political issues and to have an impact beyond their immediate intellectual circles,” writes Merle Goldman of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The ruling Communist Party’s repression of Charter 08 and dissident intellectuals like Liu is partly because it “is acutely conscious of its own frailties,” The Economist suggests.
If “inner-party democracy is the life of the party,” as former president, Jiang Zemin, suggested, the ruling Communist party appears comatose. His successor Hu Jintao’s cautious experiments with reform have prompted “no obvious effort to change the party’s top-down dictatorial style.”
The erstwhile workers’ party has been recruiting and promoting business figures in an attempt to inject some dynamism into its sclerotic ranks. Many have joined, attracted by the advantages of business-friendly connections rather than the seductions of Marxism-Leninism.
But they now face a dilemma, according to Paul Gregory and Kate Zhou, a former Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy:
Will they compete as entrepreneurs in the even playing field of a rule of law, or will they become like party apparatchiks, using their party status to gain “unearned” profits? If they choose the latter, they will kill the competitive goose that lays the golden eggs. The result could be a China that falls into a stagnant oligarchy like that of Russia.
The party’s intellectual lethargy, dubious legitimacy and growing social unrest are often cited to suggest that Communist one-party rule is unsustainable. But such portents of instability are not always what they seem, according to Stanford’s Andrew G. Walder:
They are symptoms of economic conflicts in a vastly transformed society, and in the context of a regime that is more stable and that enjoys greater popular support than was the case during the first decade of economic reforms. Political change in China will remain a protracted affair, driven forward by forces that are fundamentally different from those that toppled so many economically stagnant and illegitimate communist regimes some two decades ago—and that briefly threatened the Chinese regime in 1989.
The East is Red, but the party’s looking grey
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