"We pretty much know what they're going to say."—Hillary Clinton, on the Chinese reaction to discussions of human rights, religious freedom, and TibetChina seems to believe that they have perfected the smoke-and-mirrors technique of concealing their domestic human rights abuses. The state appears entirely unaware that sheer saturation of the global media, including China's own blogosphere, has made it impossibly difficult to hide anything of the sort.Amnesty International is "extremely disappointed," and rightly so. Human Rights Watch's Asia director fears that America's human rights discussions in China will become "a dead-end 'dialogue of the deaf,' " and she has a point. As for the dissident founders of the new Chinese Charter '08 movement—the biggest political protest group in years—we don't know what they thought, because they were all under house arrest during Hillary Clinton's visit to Beijing. (via slate.com)
Yet the United States has opted out of sharp criticism of China's oppressive regime and chose rather to praise increased US-China economic relations, including China's massive holdings in US treasury notes.
President Obama has hailed himself as a progressive, promising a renewed push to serve as a positive example for democracy in the international arena. Ignoring China's atrocious track record shows that when ideals conflict with interest, we tend to take the more pragmatic approach. The same goes for our recently resurrected interest in Uzbekistan, a state whose history of human rights abuses makes China look like a liberal utopia.
Of course, actions speak louder than words. Time will tell on how this administration will choose to approach the hundreds of human rights "hot-zones" that desperately require attention. If current trends are any indication, progress may be slow to come, if at all.
