Addressing a CNN town hall event on Tuesday, President Biden said he would stand up for human rights in China. But, he immediately added, Americans should recognize that “culturally, there are different norms that each country, and their leaders, are expected to follow.”
These were ill-chosen words. Especially since Biden had just identified the top three human rights abuses that define Communist China as its repression of Hong Kong, its threat to use force to subjugate Taiwan, and its genocidal campaign against the Uighur people.
There is no cultural norm that can excuse or justify these grotesque abuses. By suggesting otherwise, Biden is sacrificing America’s moral leadership at the altar of Chinese Communist Party arrogance.
Beijing will welcome Biden’s statement. Xi Jinping is responding to rising international concern over these human rights abuses by suggesting they are purely domestic Chinese matters. Any external criticism of China, Xi and his minions argue, constitutes the crossing of a red line.
Biden should not play along with Xi’s deception. China crossed a moral line drenched in blood, a red line marked by the persecution of thousands of Hong Kongers who have protested for rights Beijing owes them under treaty law. The Sino-British declaration, bearing Beijing’s signature, guarantees Hong Kong’s democratic rule of law until 2047. And China threatens to obliterate the democratic island nation of Taiwan and is inflicting misery on more than 2 million Uighurs in Xinjiang province.
Xi’s policy toward the Uighur Muslim people is particularly evil. It’s not just that these innocent Chinese citizens have been thrown into reeducation camps as punishment for their cultural identity. Nor is it just that the Uighurs have then been forced to abandon their sacred values. It is also the fact that the Uighurs have been forcibly sterilized, prostituted as sex slaves, and used as slave labor. This stuff is evil in any culture and certainly not a cultural norm in a society and under a government that tries to conceal and deny it.
Former President Donald Trump should have condemned these human rights atrocities more loudly, but his actions against Xi’s abuses were nevertheless significant. Led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the United States recognized the treatment of the Uighurs as a genocide. The Trump administration also imposed sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong. These actions forced Xi to address rising international criticism. Biden should be building on that legacy of moral action, not dancing around it.
There’s a broader point; by hinting that Xi’s human rights record is, at least in part, a matter of Chinese cultural norms, Biden excuses other governments that wish to give Xi a pass. Germany, which is desperate for more investment from Beijing, is an example. The European Parliament will decide this year whether to ratify a trade deal with China. Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing hard for it, but a number of parliamentarians demand that China enforce basic protections against forced labor in return. Biden undermines those efforts if he suggests that there is some moral nuance that extenuates what China is doing to its people.
China isn’t just America’s foremost geopolitical adversary. It’s also our foremost ideological competitor. Where America offers a global future centered on democracy and the rule of law, China offers a global future structured around feudal mercantilism, an order in which China offers investments in return for fealty to the Communist Party.
The American president shouldn’t hint or, by his actions, suggest that there is any moral equivalence between these two modi operandi. He should take the next chance he has to “clarify” his position, which is to say reverse the impression he has created. And he should choose his words better next time.
