President Trump must use ongoing U.S. trade fights with China to move the communist country toward honoring human rights at home, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday.
On the 30th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square, the California Democrat and longtime critic of the Chinese regime, said back-and-forth tariffs on an array of goods provide an opportunity to school the nation’s leaders on the importance of human rights.
“If we do not speak out for human rights in China because of economic concerns, we lose all moral authority to talk about human rights in any other place in the world,” Pelosi told the Congressional Executive Commission on China. “Human rights and trade are inextricably linked.”
Pelosi has long sought to pressure Chinese leaders over human rights, going back to her early days in the House in 1989. As a backbencher she led criticism of the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissidents in Tiananmen Square, from which estimates of the death toll vary from several hundreds up to 2,600, with additional thousands wounded.
“America and the world cannot afford to promote a morally bankrupt policy toward China,” Pelosi said Tuesday. “America must demonstrate the moral courage to use our leverage to not only guarantee fair trade for our products in Chinese markets, but also to advance human rights in China.”
A top Chinese official defended the massacre on Sunday, though Beijing censors most discussion of the incident. “The central government’s measures to stop that turbulence was correct,” Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said in Singapore. “China has enjoyed stable development.”
Pelosi cited China’s mass repression of Uighur Muslims and pressure on Hong Kong as evidence that U.S. analysts were wrong to expect China’s government to reform itself due to economic engagement with the West.
“America and the world cannot afford to promote a morally bankrupt policy toward China,” she said. “Sadly, 30 years after Tiananmen, we see that China has changed but its record of repression has not.”
[Opinion: Never forget Tiananmen Square]
