Chinese officials are trying to embed the communist regime’s understanding of human rights at the United Nations and in diplomatic relations, dissidents warn, at the expense of U.S. influence and the widely accepted view of human rights espoused by American thinkers.
“The Chinese government is trying to undermine the very idea of universal human rights by claiming to have its own, culturally specific model,” the International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, told the Washington Examiner. “On top of that, China is spreading its subversion of human rights around the globe, both by hacking and harassing Tibetan activists abroad and by trying to push its human rights vision on other countries.”
That warning, echoed by the leader of an international Uyghur Muslim organization, throws the ideological stakes of the U.S.-China competition into relief. Chinese officials have attempted to defang Western condemnation of the atrocities underway in Xinjiang by arguing that American views of human rights are not normative at the U.N. and in governments around the world. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team rejected that argument at the unveiling of the annual U.S. report on human rights.
“Our approach on human rights and our approach to the Human Rights Reports is grounded in the United Nations documents,” acting Assistant Secretary Lisa Peterson, the State Department’s lead official in the democracy and human rights bureau, told reporters Tuesday. “That has been our guiding set of documents from the inception of the reports. So, whatever China may say about our approach, it is based in those founding U.N. principles and guiding U.N. documents.”
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The 2020 State Department report on human rights was unsparing in its observations about the “authoritarian state” commanded by the Chinese Communist Party. “Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” the report said. “Government officials and the security services often committed human rights abuses with impunity.”
Chinese officials have complained that such criticisms amount to an improper intervention into China’s domestic politics. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi carried that argument to several Gulf Arab states in recent days, where he proposed that governments averse to U.S. human rights rhetoric could organize to resist such rebukes.
“China and the six nations will continue giving mutual support to each other regarding their core interests. This is the most important outcome of the trip,” the foreign minister said Wednesday, per the South China Morning Post. “We oppose imposing ideology on others, and using human rights to interfere in other nations’ affairs and smear them.”
Chinese Communist officials have a track record of providing authoritarian regimes with high-tech surveillance technology and methods of maintaining political control. The international debate over human rights points to the philosophical differences likely to govern such technology.
“In China, it’s a big difference: There is no law to protect your rights. China’s constitution … just protect[s] the Chinese Communist Party,” World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa, who is based in Munich, told the Washington Examiner. “Law in the Western countries protect[s] the citizens — everybody is equal in front of the law.”
Isa argued that Chinese officials define human rights in terms of physical security and material prosperity, without respect to individual liberties. “Freedom of speech and assembly, right [of] the minority, rule of law — this is not the concept of Chinese human rights” promoted by the regime, he said.
Chinese officials won a recent vote at the United Nations Human Rights Council, which passed a Beijing-drafted resolution that “promote[d] an approach to human rights whereby states cooperate to advance the interests of governments over promoting and respecting the human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals,” according to the State Department.
Chinese officials, for their part, are trying to teach ethnic and religious minorities to value those material benefits over their conscience rights. This position recently has been stated by authorities in Tibet, the predominately Buddhist region where Chinese Communist regional chief Chen Quanguo worked before taking over in Xinjiang.
“Tibet has some bad old habits, mainly due to the negative influence of religion that emphasizes the afterlife and weakens the urge to pursue happiness in the current life,” Che Dhala, the Chinese Communist chairman of Tibet, said in October.
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That idea figures into Beijing’s repressive policies and understanding of human rights. “From torturing and beating Tibetan political prisoners to death after sham trials, to detaining Tibetans for speaking out about COVID-19, to blocking foreign journalists’ access to Tibet and treating support for the Dalai Lama as an organized crime, it’s obvious that China’s model of human rights is no human rights at all,” the International Campaign for Tibet said.
