The Right Way to Pressure Beijing

By:  William F. Schulz

The full version of this article was originally published by Foreign Policy and is available on their website.  This abstract is published with the permission of its author and Foreign Policy.

When the U.S. Congress recently passed a resolution calling on Beijing to end its repression of dissent in Tibet and open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, a Chinese spokesperson declared that the resolution had “seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” Nor was this the first time the Chinese had expressed emotional distress at some political gesture. Everyone from the Icelandic singer Björk, who shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” at the end of a concert in Shanghai, to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who met with the Dalai Lama in Ottawa, has been accused of hurting the feelings of the Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese might be the only people who regard the rantings of CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who referred to the Chinese government as “goons and thugs,” as worth taking seriously. Nerves this sensitive bespeak either a severe case of adolescent angst or a revealing insight into national character, or both. It is hard to imagine Vladimir Putin or Robert Mugabe, or George W. Bush for that matter, confessing to having hurt feelings about anything, much less the kind of symbolic ephemera that seem to regularly rile the Chinese.

That the Chinese take symbolism so seriously, however, provides a rare opening for those who care about human rights. There are, after all, only a limited number of ways in which human rights groups or Western governments can influence China on civil and political rights. Formal diplomatic entreaties usually yield shallow results. Trying to isolate the world’s most populous country is not an option. Economic sanctions that worked against apartheid South Africa and maintain at least nominal pressure on countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe would be fruitless against the world’s second-largest economy. Military intervention to stop human rights violations is unthinkable.

William F. Schulz, a senior fellow in human rights policy at the Center for American Progress, was executive director of Amnesty International USA from 1994 to 2006. He is the editor of The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).