President Trump, when campaigning last year, said America had not been tough enough on China. His meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday is a great opportunity for such toughness.
United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley spoke aptly this week about pressuring China to pull its weight in controlling North Korea. The nuclear-armed hermit tyranny continues to starve its people and threaten not just its neighbors but also, increasingly, countries farther afield. China is uniquely positioned to push President Kim Jong-un if not toward being reasonable — that would be too much to hope for — at least toward a position of self-preserving acquiescence to international norms.
Trump needs to deliver the tough talk that Haley promised he would.
The president also talks tough on trade. Here, his idea of toughness is probably counter-productive. China subsidizes its businesses. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has expressed envy of China’s industrial policy. Trump has suggested we need to respond to subsidies with protectionism. This would be folly, hurting Americans. There are legitimate concerns, such as Chinese theft of intellectual property, but a trade war wouldn’t Make America Great Again.
There is another crucial area in which Trump needs to talk tough and has signally failed so far to do so. China is one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. In recent years, the government has cracked down on human rights lawyers, increased censorship of the Internet and repression of news media. It detains half a million people without charge or trial, routinely denying them medical treatment, harvesting their organs, and wreaking vengeance on their families as a way both of disciplining alleged offenders and forcefully nurturing political and social conformity. The state seeks to shackle any group it sees as a threat to its authority, whether they be “unregistered” Christians, Tibetan monks or Muslim Uighurs.
President Brack Obama was weak in his dealings with China. He shied from discussing human rights other than with glancing references, and his State Department largely ignored the issue as it sought China’s cooperation in other areas, such as climate change. Obama didn’t threaten sanctions. He didn’t embrace critics of the Communist Party.
There were some high points, such as the harboring of Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese civil rights activist, at the U.S. embassy in 2012. But there were also terribly low points, such as when Joe Biden in 2011 said “I fully understand. I’m not second-guessing” Beijing’s one-child policy. The White House scrambled afterward to call this a misstatement, but the damage was done. The Obama administration had made it plain that it was indifferent to a brutal policy that has involved forcible abortions and the existence of tens of millions of non-persons, unable to get education and jobs because they cannot get ID cards because they are not supposed to exist.
Xi sometimes sounds like a reformer but not on human rights. Human Rights Watch reports that since hi took charge in 2013 human rights in China have “continued in a decidedly negative direction.”
There are rumors that Trump will not raise human rights issues in his meeting with Xi, so as not to break a spirit of goodwill and mutual respect in their initial encounter. This would be a mistake, for a government’s treatment of its citizens is not an ancillary issue but a measure of whether it can be considered a responsible participant in global affairs. If Trump wants to be known for toughness, he should not shy away from this opportunity to deal with a difficult subject.
