China’s Search for Security

China’s growing economic and military clout and its skillful rollout of a reassurance strategy in the surrounding regions brought Beijing a surge of “soft power”—that is, the ability to exert influence beyond what a country wields through the use of force and money because of the appeal of its cultural values, its ideas, and the perceived success of its way of doing things.¹ Soft power is a valuable resource in foreign policy because it helps a country gain cooperation from other actors in the international system at low cost. Others may even follow its lead without being asked.

In the first years after the end of the Cold War, the advantages of soft power accrued exclusively to the democratic West, especially to the U.S. with its triumphant model of liberal capitalism. But in the early 2000s, the U.S. seemed to falter, facing trouble in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere and suffering a financial crisis that seemed to reflect the failings of its individualistic culture. China was less affected by the global economic downturn. Its economy continued to grow, and a robust, cosmopolitan consumer society that had emerged in the 1990s continued to expand. There was some social disorder, but the political system appeared stable. China’s way of doing things began to look good to citizens of other countries. China stood for what some called “Asian values,” meaning solidarity and cooperation among citizens at home and egalitarian respect among countries in the international system regardless of size and wealth. Commentators labeled the Chinese model the “Beijing consensus,” referring to a supposedly more dynamic, more efficient, and fairer version of capitalism than the formerly dominant “Washington consensus,” which now seemed to have gotten the West and its partners into trouble.

But China has not yet surmounted one long-standing vulnerability in the battle of values and ideas: the self-inflicted wound of its pervasive violation of internationally recognized human rights. Although reform and opening brought widening personal freedoms and rising individual wealth, the government acted as if any questioning of its legitimacy might get out of hand and cause a national collapse. It met any perceived challenge to its authority with harassment, threats, beatings, and arrests. Such violations were the ugly twin of China’s successful development model, described in chapter 10, for both had their roots in authoritarian one-party rule.

Mao’s regime had violated human rights far more extensively than the post-Mao government did, but China in those days was too isolated for the outside world to know or do much about these violations. Once Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, the country’s domestic problems were put on global display. Unfortunately for Beijing’s diplomats, this opening coincided with an expansion in the scope and activism of the international human rights system. During the late–and post–Cold War periods, new rights norms were promulgated, UN human rights institutions proliferated, and Western-based NGOs grew more active. The more China’s hard power grew, the more its claims to soft power were scrutinized as these outside institutions paid greater attention to its human rights problems, generating a constant challenge to its international prestige, which Chinese diplomats scrambled to counter.

Chinese diplomacy has always used soft power.² Beijing’s authority was at first extended into what are today the Tibet, Xinjiang Uyghur, and Inner Mongolian autonomous regions by conferring upon local rulers the status of vassals of the Chinese emperor. Imperial China gained special influence in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan because these societies emulated its writing system, Confucian classics, poetry, music, clothing styles, metal-working techniques, and agricultural practices. Foreign envoys were impressed with China’s greatness when they were treated with elaborate ceremony and showered with precious gifts.

Even in the 1960s, when China was most isolated, Mao Zedong insisted, “We have friends all over the world” and welcomed a stream of pro-China Communist and leftist party leaders from other countries to visit the fountainhead in Beijing. China used cultural treasures such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty to impress foreign visitors. Cultural artifacts such as ceramics, calligraphy, and martial arts have always enjoyed worldwide respect, and China’s varied and often exotic cuisine is a widely appreciated attraction.

Foreign dignitaries invited to the Middle Kingdom were given royal treatment regardless of the size or significance of the country from which they hailed. One of the first senior American diplomats stationed in the PRC, George H. W. Bush, noted in his diary on June 29, 1975: “China’s attention to … Third World countries is amazing. In how many big countries do they give such a great stylish welcome to chiefs of state from tiny African countries, for example. The airport is bedecked, downtown is colored [with] banners all over and big signs of welcome in French or English or whatever the language might be. Children, soldiers marching around, dancing enthusiastically, welcoming; all make an impression on the visitor.”³

Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 triggered a China vogue in the West, with prominent journalists and celebrities writing books after two-week tours to reveal the miracles of pollution-free agriculture, incentive-free industrialization, and acupuncture anesthesia. During the period of the strategic triangle, even veteran practitioners of hard power such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski were reduced to giddiness on occasion by the wonders of China. Both confessed in their memoirs to feelings of exhilaration upon arriving there.⁴

China suffered a soft-power deficit for two decades or so after Mao’s death. The tragedies of the Mao years were revealed in a genre of novels, poems, and plays called “scar literature.” One of the post-Mao leaders, Hu Yaobang, said that 100 million Chinese had had their lives ruined by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 1981, the Central Committee adopted a resolution summing up the official view that most of what Mao had done in the last ten years of his life was wrong. Pro-democracy and pro-Western ideas gained currency among liberal theorists within the CCP and were discussed by ordinary people in wall posters hung on “Democracy Wall” in late 1978 and early 1979. The mood of liberalization gave rise in 1989 to the nationwide pro-democracy movement and student hunger strike known as the “Tiananmen movement.” The regime’s violent crackdown on the movement left hundreds of students and workers dead. China’s international prestige was at a low point.

Beijing’s huge investment in the Olympics—larger than that of any previous host city—was part of a well-considered strategy. Chinese foreign relations experts in the early 2000s had formed the consensus that soft power was a necessary part of comprehensive national power. It would reduce the fear of China’s rise and create a more welcoming environment for other forms of Chinese influence. They believed the core of China’s soft power should be its culture—including traditional art, literature, philosophy, and the Chinese language—together with its contemporary image as a peace-loving nation standing for harmony at home and abroad.⁵ Hu Jintao made this policy official in his report to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007: “In the present era, culture has become a … factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength…. We must … enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country.”⁶ The Central Committee reinforced the point in 2011 with a lengthy, formal decision on “deepening reform of the cultural system.”⁷

The Chinese foreign ministry funded “China Year” exhibitions and activities in various countries. China sent cultural artifacts on loan to museums around the world. In 2005, Beijing permitted select treasures from the Forbidden City to be displayed in London. The opening of the exhibition was timed to coincide with a state visit by President Hu Jintao. Some of the famous terra cotta warriors normally displayed near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang visited the British Museum and other locales in 2007–2010. Starting in 2004, the Ministry of Education began establishing Confucius Institutes in collaboration with foreign universities and other institutions to teach Chinese language and culture, partly with the help of teachers sent from China on temporary assignment. Reviled in Mao’s China as backward and feudal, Confucius was now seen to personify Chinese values of harmony, community, and deference. Within a few years, there were some three hundred such institutes in sixty countries on five continents, including more than two dozen in the U.S., mostly at universities.

Chinese media moved into foreign markets under the combined leadership of the State Council Information Office and the Foreign Ministry’s new Office of Public Diplomacy. Long-established publications such as China Daily, Beijing Review, and China Pictorial as well as similar publications in other foreign languages became glossy and professional. China Central Television, Xinhua TV, and China Radio International broadcast to the world in many languages. The official Xinhua News Agency established an office in New York City’s Times Square to compete with the traditional wire services to supply news to global media. The quality of Chinese journalism was upgraded as media workers were increasingly trained at professional journalism programs in Chinese universities. Under the rubric of e-government, many agencies at the central and provincial levels and even some at lower levels established English-language Web sites alongside their Chinese-language sites. All Chinese media were still government or party owned and had to follow directives from the CCP’s Propaganda Department, but their look and content were modernized and they were increasingly accepted worldwide as reliable sources of information.⁸

China’s universities sought international standing and connections. In 2003, Shanghai Jiaotong University began ranking twelve hundred universities worldwide on an annual basis. The rankings gained widespread attention and spotlighted China’s massive investment in its top schools. In the first year of rankings, the best Chinese universities (Peking and Tsinghua) stood tied with four dozen others around the world in ranks 201–250. By the time the 2010 rankings were announced, these two schools had risen to the 151–200 level, and five other Chinese institutions had joined the (expanded) tier of 201–300. As conditions in academia improved, foreign-trained Chinese Ph.D.s returned in large numbers to teach. Chinese institutions welcomed more than a hundred thousand foreign students a year to study the Chinese language or to take academic degrees, the majority from Asia and Africa. Foreign schools set up joint programs on Chinese campuses. The China Scholarship Council, under the Ministry of Education, began to send a couple of thousand Ph.D. students abroad each year to study for one or two semesters before returning home to teach, thus increasing the cosmopolitan character of Chinese academia.

Beijing made skillful use of sports diplomacy. South Korea had pioneered the use of sports for diplomatic purposes in Asia when it used the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics to sprint ahead of North Korea in the rivalry for diplomatic recognition.⁹ Taiwan, too, had worked hard to counter its post-1979 diplomatic isolation by participating in the Olympics starting in 1984 under the name “Chinese Taipei” (chapter 9). In 1993, Beijing applied to host the 2000 Summer Olympic Games as part of its attempt to reverse post-Tiananmen Western sanctions, but the bid was rejected at least in part because of NGO pressure over China’s human rights record. In 2001, however, Beijing’s second bid was successful. The unprecedentedly elaborate hosting of the 2008 Olympics sent the message around the world that China had arrived. The city leveled old neighborhoods, built five-star hotels, malls, new subway lines, and theme restaurants; trained fifteen hundred “civilized bus-riding supervisors”; appointed five thousand antijaywalking monitors; held “queuing awareness days”; and mounted campaigns against spitting and slurping. Factories were closed and traffic restricted to improve the air quality in one of the world’s most polluted cities. More than one hundred heads of state and heads of government attended. The lavish opening ceremony bruited the theme of China’s national unity and love of peace over its five thousand years of history, while—many observers felt—also signaling this rising power’s vigor, pride, ambition, mass power, and group discipline.

Under Mao, talented athletes had gone to special schools run by the military.¹⁰ That system was restored after the Cultural Revolution but was tarnished by a series of doping scandals in international competitions in the 1990s. By 2008, the system had been transferred to civilian authorities. But recruitment and training for international competitions remained major priorities under central-state planning. In 2008, Chinese athletes won one hundred medals, second only to the U.S., and more golds than any other country.

China was even able to export some world-class athletes, albeit with strings attached. National Basketball Association sensation Yao Ming was a product of China’s state sports-development system, the country’s best basketball player, and the key to China’s hopes for basketball glory at the Beijing Olympics. As such, he was beholden to his club, the Shanghai Sharks, and the Chinese Basketball Association, and the decision to allow him to play in the U.S. was carefully weighed. He generated incalculable value as a goodwill ambassador for his native country. So did others, including soccer star Sun Jihai, who in the 2000s played for England’s Manchester City club in the Premier League, widely regarded as the world’s top soccer league.

Even the traditionally reticent PLA tapped into soft power. Breaking with a tradition of extreme secrecy, China’s soldiers increased the volume of exchanges and expanded the number of bilateral and multilateral exercises in which they participated. Besides attending international conferences and symposia, the PLA began to host its own gatherings, among them a series of international conferences on Sun Zi’s Art of War and a biannual international forum on global security issues. Another innovation was the introduction of an annual course for foreign officers and defense officials at China’s National Defense University.

Additional elements of soft power came into being without the government’s involvement and sometimes even against its will as indirect products of the cultural vitality that accompanied growing wealth and freedom. Chinese artists’ paintings, sculpture, films, novels, and poetry drew growing audiences. The world seldom knew which artist had honored the Propaganda Department’s red lines and which was a dissident: indeed, the roles changed over time. For example, the artist Ai Weiwei was engaged to help design the main Olympic stadium (the “bird’s nest”) for the 2008 games but in 2011 was detained for several months, ostensibly for tax evasion but actually because the government considered his artistic and political statements too challenging. Even when the message was not what the government wanted, the rising prices and growing audiences for Chinese works advanced the respectability of China as a cosmopolitan society and culture.

So, too, with the growing power of the Chinese market.¹¹ China’s large new middle class was at first keen to wear Western clothes, drive Western cars, and eat Western fast food. But the Chinese market grew so large that Western brands began to adapt to Chinese tastes. MacDonald’s added taro pie to its menu in Beijing. Kentucky Fried Chicken sold “Old Peking Style chicken rolls.” Luxury car designers increased backseat legroom for owners who used drivers and incorporated jade into auto interiors. China became the world’s largest market for upscale cars, platinum wedding rings, and high-end cognac. As Chinese tourists appeared in growing numbers in major cities around the world, the hospitality industry accommodated to their needs with Chinese-speaking front desk staff and some Chinese dishes in the coffee shops. Prominent architects produced cutting-edge designs for museums, airports, and other buildings in China that took advantage of low construction costs and met the local taste for a high-modern aesthetic. As China becomes the world’s largest market, we can expect advertising, packaging, and design around the world increasingly to reflect the influence of Chinese consumers’ taste.

Some commentators believe that the same may be true for social and political values.¹² So far, however, values remain the weak point of Chinese soft power. Unlike the U.S., China has not aspired to convince other countries to emulate its political system. Few other authoritarian countries would be able to do so in any case—they lack the key elements of a robust ruling party, a complex technocracy, and a cadre of ambitious local leaders striving to show both initiative and loyalty to the center. China’s foreign relations, even with other authoritarian regimes, depend on mutual interest, not ideological affinity (chapter 7).¹³ Even so, other authoritarian regimes have learned some lessons from China, such as methods of Internet control, the use of closed-circuit surveillance cameras, electronic face recognition, and the use of the legal system to limit political challenges. China’s successes have undercut the once-flourishing “end of history” belief that democracy is the wave of the future and that all authoritarian systems are doomed to fail.

Despite these soft-power successes, however, China continues to find itself on the wrong side of an important set of international values and institutions—the international human rights regime—that gained growing influence during the years when China was cut off from most of the world under Mao. It was just as this cluster of international norms, institutions, and NGOs entered a phase of more assertive activity that China began its reform era under Deng Xiaoping. Even as human rights conditions in China improved, so did the flow of information to the outside world about abuses. As a result of this confluence of events, Chinese diplomats were drawn into a long battle first to confront and deflect international pressure on human rights issues and then to try to shape the international human rights regime in ways more conducive to the Chinese government’s interests.

The idea of human rights has a long history but emerged in its full modern form only with the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.¹⁴ The UDHR defined human rights as an inclusive set of norms, embodied in international law, consisting of the legitimate claims of every individual upon states and “other organs of society.” Because of the Cold War, the international human rights regime at first developed slowly. Over the course of nearly three decades, the only new step the international community agreed to was the restatement in 1966 of the principles of the UDHR in the form of two international covenants. These two covenants were enacted separately, one on civil and political rights to satisfy the West and one on economic, social, and cultural rights to satisfy the socialist camp.¹⁵

In the mid-1970s, coinciding with the end of the Mao era in China, the international human rights regime entered a period of normative, institutional, and political expansion. The main impetus for these developments was changing state interests—especially Western states’ interest to use human rights norms, first, to challenge the Soviet Union at a time when its power seemed to be increasing under Leonid Brezhnev and then, after the Cold War, to create new global institutions to help stabilize a fluid, uncertain international system of power. In addition, the rise of international human rights was stimulated by the growth of international civil society (“transnational activist networks”) under conditions of globalization and by the UN’s institutional interests in seeking new missions.

This renewed trajectory of growth started in 1975 with the adoption of the Helsinki Final Act, a treaty signed by a group of Western and socialist states. The treaty met the Soviet demand for recognition of the existing borders in Europe; in return, in Basket III of the agreement, the West extracted Moscow’s acknowledgment of its obligation to honor human rights. The accords unexpectedly became a focus of organizing for political freedom in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Russia and in that way contributed to the fall of communism in Europe.¹⁶ In 1977, Jimmy Carter took office as U.S. president and put forward the promotion of international human rights as a theme that could help restore a national sense of mission after the loss of the war in Vietnam. Each subsequent American president for his own reasons continued the crusade for human rights and democracy. Ronald Reagan used the language of rights to support his push to redress the U.S.–Soviet power balance, calling for “a global campaign for freedom … [that would] leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”¹⁷ George H. W. Bush presided over humanitarian interventions in response to crises in northern Iraq and Somalia. Bill Clinton built human rights into his foreign policy and called for “democratic enlargement.” George W. Bush used the name “Freedom Agenda” to describe a package of policies to promote human rights and democracy worldwide. Barack Obama declared human rights a key goal of his foreign policy.¹⁸

In Europe, policymakers likewise promoted human rights as part of a broader security policy. Especially in the post–Cold War period, Europe saw itself as surrounded by zones of instability in South and Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa that it could not pacify by military means. The EU developed a values-driven security policy that tried to leverage its economic and cultural—rather than military—strengths to create regional stability by enticing neighboring countries to conform to European values and helping them achieve economic growth and democratic political stability. Its 1992 Common Foreign and Security Policy identified the promotion of democracy and human rights as a pillar of its security strategy toward neighboring regions.

The EU applied the strategy to China in its 1995 Long Term Policy for China–Europe Relations, which proposed to support human rights in China through project assistance and government-to-government dialogue. The European Commission’s 2006 document EU–China: Closer Partners, Growing Responsibilities raised a range of issues relating to human rights, religious freedom, and relations with ethnic minorities.¹⁹ These issues were also subjects in long-running negotiations between China and the EU in the 2000s to frame a new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement.

Also starting in the mid-1970s, the U.S. and Western Europe supported the “third wave” of democratization that started in Portugal in 1974 and spread through southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. This process increased the number of democracies in the world from 39 in 1974 to 76 in 1990. Regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1990–1991 extended the democratization wave, which continued further with still more transitions in Africa. The peak was reached in 2006 with 121 democracies among the world’s 194 states.²⁰

Another development of the late–and post–Cold War periods was the expansion of the international human rights NGO movement, which began to pay attention to China just as China opened up under Deng Xiaoping. Amnesty International was founded in 1961 but issued its first report on China in 1978, criticizing the government for putting people in prison for political reasons.²¹ The Helsinki Accords inspired the formation in 1975 of a New York–based group that later came to be known as Human Rights Watch, which established an Asia division in 1985. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (later renamed Human Rights First) was founded in 1978, and the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1981. The first overseas advocacy organization devoted exclusively to Chinese human rights problems, Human Rights in China, was founded in New York in 1989 by a group of Chinese students and scholars. Both the Tibet Information Network in the United Kingdom and the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, D.C., were established in the late 1980s. Numerous other NGOs concerned in whole or in part with human rights issues in China continued to emerge in the following decades. They were among an estimated eleven thousand human rights organizations all over the world that had emerged by the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade.²² This growth in activism was probably attributable to the increased flow of information and the heightened sense of interdependence produced by economic globalization, which had been accelerating since in the 1970s, and by the willingness of foundations, governments, and individuals to provide financial support for groups that promoted human rights.

NGO activists pushed states to expand the international treaty system covering human rights. Until the early 1980s, the major human rights treaties besides the two covenants (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights)²³ were those concerning genocide (1951), the status of refugees (1954), and racial discrimination (1969). But in the late–and post–Cold War periods, the roster was expanded with treaties that opened up new subject areas and posed unprecedented expectations for the behavior of states. Among the new treaties were those that dealt with the elimination of discrimination against women (1981), the elimination of religious intolerance (1981), the banning of torture (1987), the rights of children (1990), and the rights of persons with disabilities (2006). In addition, the UN adopted declarations on a range of subjects, including the right to development (1986) and the rights of indigenous peoples (2007). Each of these enactments was promoted by an international network of advocates who used various forms of reason and pressure (and made various compromises) to gain governments’ sometimes grudging cooperation.

Yet another cause of the growth of the human rights regime was the increasing activism of the UN bureaucracy. The end of the Cold War stalemate liberated the UN to expand its work in the field of human rights as in other areas. In 1993, the UN created the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, an office that several of the incumbents used to bring high-profile pressure to bear on various countries, including China. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (served 1997–2006) promoted the expanded use of UN peacekeeping operations in part to stop human rights abuses. The Security Council in the 1990s authorized a series of humanitarian interventions in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and East Timor.²⁴ The UN created the beginnings of a system of international justice, establishing the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1991 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994 and hosting negotiations that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. The UN treaty bodies—committees of experts that are charged with supervising the implementation of core human rights treaties—started for the first time in the 1990s to issue numerous “general comments” or “general recommendations,” which often interpreted the provisions of international human rights law more broadly than before. Likewise, the UN “special procedures” (independent experts or working groups appointed to monitor human rights issues in certain countries or issue areas) became more active, and several of them visited or negotiated to visit China for investigations.

Concerns with China were not a primary cause of the growth of the human rights regime, but as China opened up, it attracted the attention of human rights activists and institutions.

It was ironic from Beijing’s point of view that China became a target of international human rights advocacy just when it had begun to rectify the worst abuses of the Maoist system. In the Mao years, Beijing had occasionally targeted other countries with human rights criticisms—South Africa, Israel, the Soviet Union—without having the spear turned against itself. Now, however, with Deng’s opening, information about abuses in China—both past and present—began to flow. Western reporters were admitted to the country; Cultural Revolution victims were rehabilitated; “scar literature” and “reportage literature” revealed stories of past victims; the regime intermittently tolerated public expressions of dissent such as Democracy Wall, and it set up a system of laws and courts whose proceedings were more public than the kangaroo courts of the Mao years. China soon had its own “Sakharov,” Wei Jingsheng, who along with other Chinese dissidents was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. International activists applied to China their then-novel technique of “name and shame.” Critical reports flowed from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Western journalists, and the U.S. State Department.

As in so many other areas of international politics at the time, China responded to these pressures with a strategy of engagement—joining the human rights regime, learning its rules, complying when useful, and seeking ways to influence the regime in its own interests. Chinese diplomats took part in the UN Human Rights Commission, the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and working groups concerned with the rights of indigenous populations, human rights aspects of communications, the rights of children, the rights of migrant workers, and the issue of torture. They promoted the idea of a right to development and attended meetings to draft the international convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. The PRC signed and ratified the international conventions against genocide, mistreatment of refugees, racial discrimination, apartheid, discrimination against women, and torture. In the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, China agreed to allow the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to continue in force in Hong Kong for fifty years after 1997, although China itself (like the U.S.) had not at that point acceded to the covenants. By 1991, when the PRC issued its first white paper on human rights, it had acceded to a total of seven of the twenty-five major international human rights conventions in force at that time, one more than the U.S.

At the same time, China articulated a number of theoretical positions designed to push back against what it viewed as Western use of international human rights norms to exert undue influence on its domestic affairs. Chinese strategists found that posing a contrast between Western and Chinese (or Asian) culture or values could be a conversation changer. As a symposium at the Central Party School put it, “The theory that there is one set of universal values serves the idea of the centrality of the West. Therefore, we must emphasize and strengthen the study of the differences between Eastern and Western culture.”²⁵ In the 1980s, Beijing supported the idea of Asian values promoted by authoritarian and semiauthoritarian governments in the region, such as Singapore and Malaysia.

The thrust of the Asian-values argument is that, first, Asia can provide an alternative to the American way of life, which has been overrun by excessive individualism, creating a wave of violent crime, drugs, guns, vagrancy, and immoral behavior. The countermodel relies on the strong hand of a wise and benevolent leadership that promulgates traditional values of obedience, thrift, industriousness, respect for elders, and authority. Promoters of Asian values claim that Asians prioritize economic and social rights over civil and political rights, the community over the individual, and social order and stability over democracy and individual freedom. This argument sometimes provided a rationale for China–ASEAN cooperation against U.S. policies perceived as too assertive in the region, such as the U.S. push to sanction the military regime in Burma.

The Tiananmen crisis occurred at a time when economic and political sanctions were becoming more common as a tool of human rights policy. In the 1970s, the U.S. under Carter had cut military and economic aid to Pinochet’s Chile; in 1981, the U.S. sanctioned Poland after the declaration of martial law; many governments imposed sanctions on the South African apartheid regime in the 1980s; and the U.S. imposed a series of sanctions on the Burmese military regime starting in 1988.²⁶ International human rights NGOs had added political lobbying to their previous major technique of information exposure and moral pressure. Now with respect to China they pressed for concrete actions by governments and international agencies to punish the Chinese regime. In response, the governments of the leading industrial countries (the G7) imposed sanctions. These sanctions included suspension of high-level diplomatic contacts, restriction of exports of military equipment and military-related technologies, and suspension of cultural exchanges, bilateral aid, and loans. Under U.S. leadership, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank temporarily suspended loans. Negotiations on China’s accession to the WTO came to a halt that lasted three years.

The renewal of normal trading rights (most-favored-nation privileges) with the U.S. was threatened annually from 1989 through 1994 by public and congressional desire to push China toward human rights improvements. Armed with information from NGOs, a procession of senior statesmen from the industrial countries made public representations on human rights when visiting China. Beijing’s 1993 bid to host the 2000 Olympics encountered international opposition on human rights grounds and was defeated. The world press took the 1995 women’s conference in Beijing as an occasion not to celebrate improvements in the status of women in China, but to attack the government for heavy-handed security measures. The fact that China was on the defensive on human rights weakened its ability to block American and French arms transfers to Taiwan and helped motivate Britain to replace a conciliatory Hong Kong governor with one who confronted Beijing on the issue of Hong Kong democratization (chapter 8).

Even though it was a permanent member of the Security Council, China suffered a series of humiliations in UN bodies. In August 1989, the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities adopted by secret ballot a resolution critical of China. In 1991, Beijing came under fire again when the subcommission voted by secret ballot to request China to respect the human rights of the Tibetan people and asked the secretary-general to prepare a report on the situation in Tibet. In the 1990 session of the Human Rights Commission, Chinese representatives had to sit through the presentation of a secretary-general’s report on violations in China based on material compiled by Amnesty International and other groups. The commission debated a resolution to condemn China, although the resolution was ultimately not put to a vote. From that year through 1997, in every year but one, Chinese diplomats had to expend diplomatic resources to defeat unwelcome resolutions presented by the U.S., Japan, and other countries. China’s lobbying included state visits and aid projects for countries holding rotating seats on the commission²⁷ as well as the argument that “what is happening to China today will happen to any other developing country tomorrow.”²⁸

Thanks especially to the work of international NGOs in presenting relevant information, Chinese human rights problems were repeatedly criticized by UN treaty bodies and special procedures. In 1994, the special rapporteur on religious intolerance recommended that China reduce its numerous restrictions on freedom of religion. In 1997, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention advised China to incorporate the presumption of innocence into its criminal procedure law, to provide a precise definition of the crime of “endangering national security,” to assure that the criminal code would not outlaw any peaceful exercise of fundamental UDHR rights, and to stop sentencing people to labor reeducation without trial. In 1999, when Hong Kong filed its regularly scheduled report with the treaty body supervising fulfillment of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, it criticized the Hong Kong administration for allowing Beijing to interfere with the Special Administrative Region’s judicial independence. In 2000, the Committee Against Torture expressed concern about mistreatment of Tibetans and other national minorities and recommended abolition in China of a form of jailing without trial known as “administrative detention.” Chinese problems were discussed at one time or another in reports or meetings of the UN’s special rapporteur on summary and arbitrary executions, the special rapporteur on torture, and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

As part of its return to a global role, China intensified its involvement with the international human rights regime. In 1998, it entered into a dialogue with the newly established Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and in 2000 it signed a memorandum of understanding for a long-term program of technical cooperation on issues such as human rights education, which served government purposes and helped shelter it from public challenges to its human rights performance. Also in 1998, it signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (although it did not ratify it), and in 2004 it acceded to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In 2004 as well, the NPC amended Article 33 of the Chinese Constitution to state, “The State respects and preserves human rights.”

In the fifty-three-member UN Human Rights Commission, China helped create a caucus of non-Western states that made sure that resolutions against China and other rights-abusing states never came to a vote. The commission even went so far as to elect Libya—one of the more flagrant violators of human rights—as its chair in 2003. In response to such actions, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan reorganized the commission in 2006 into a forty-seven-seat Human Rights Council, which he hoped would be more effective. But this body continued to be dominated by a majority of repressive regimes. These states, including China, shaped the ground rules for the new council around a system of “universal periodic review,” which treated all countries equally and hence did not target the worst abusers. Each state defined its own human rights aspirations, received recommendations from the council based on the report it submitted, and was free to adopt or reject all recommendations. As one of the first countries reviewed, China submitted a Human Rights Action Plan in 2009, emphasizing its achievements to date and aspirations consistent with its existing political system, and it rejected all the concrete recommendations made by other states at the end of the review.³⁰

In its relations with the UN special procedures, China accepted only four visits (two by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and one each by the special rapporteur on the right to education and the special rapporteur on torture), set limits on the activities of each visit, and dragged out negotiations or left requests pending from nine other such bodies.³¹ It worked with other members of the “like-minded group” of countries in the Human Rights Council to end, shorten, or restrict the mandates of various special procedures.³²

In relations with Western countries, China diverted the human rights issue into a channel referred to as “quiet diplomacy.” Instead of accepting prisoner lists from high-level foreign visitors and accepting public démarches on issues such as censorship, Tibet, and religious freedom, China began to treat such representations as affronts, as when the meeting of a U.S. State Department official, John Shattuck, with Wei Jingsheng in Beijing led to Wei’s rearrest in 1993. Businesspeople and scholars in the West increasingly emphasized the importance of maintaining smooth ties with China.³³ As business ties burgeoned, groups such as the U.S.–China Business Council, consulting firms such as Kissinger Associates and Stone-bridge International, and think tanks such as the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States articulated the importance of not letting human rights issues get in the way of business and strategic interests. The threat of American trade sanctions for human rights violations disappeared in 1994, when Bill Clinton asked Congress to approve the extension of China’s most-favored-nation tariff status even though Beijing had not complied with any of the human rights–related conditions that he had put forward a year earlier. This “delinkage” of trade and human rights was made irreversible when Congress approved “permanent normal trading relations” with China in 2001 as part of the agreement for China to enter the WTO. To take the place of the annual trade privileges debate as a venue for airing worries about China, Congress set up two specialized commissions, the China Economic and Security Review Commission and the Congressional–Executive Commission on China, but these bodies only issued reports and policy recommendations and had no serious potential to threaten Chinese interests.

Beijing rewarded quiet diplomacy with selective prisoner releases, which had the added benefit of weakening the democracy movement by sending its leaders into exile. In 1998, as a price for restoring summit-level meetings with China, Bill Clinton won the right to give an uncensored lecture at Peking University that was broadcast on Chinese TV, using it to say that China was swimming against “the tide of history.” By contrast, Clinton’s successor George W. Bush said it was best to speak in private with Chinese leaders about human rights issues. For China, the diplomatic cost of hearing such interventions in private was far less than that of hearing them in public. European leaders followed suit. Nevertheless, U.S. presidents continued to find ways to express their commitment to human rights in China. Every president since Clinton has met with the Dalai Lama informally, although George W. Bush went beyond this by publicly presenting the Tibetan spiritual leader with the Congressional Gold Medal—the highest award the legislature can bestow on a civilian—in the U.S. Capitol building in 2007.

One of the West’s demands in the 1990s had been that China enter into official dialogues about human rights. China yielded to this demand in the mid-1990s, establishing dialogues with the U.S., Canada, the EU, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia. But it shaped the ground rules to its advantage, insisting that the agendas be negotiated in advance, that they concern technical issues rather than current violations, and that the proceedings be confidential. Keeping the dialogues bilateral and separating them in time prevented foreign powers from coordinating. China characterized as unfriendly the occasional attempts to convene meetings of relevant officials from Western governments to exchange ideas about their dialogue experiences (the so-called Berne Process).³⁴ NGOs could not participate in Western delegations but were shunted off to occasional forums with Chinese academics that occurred prior to the government dialogues. China vetoed the participation of certain Western NGOs even in these forums by walking out or threatening to cancel if they were invited. From time to time, it cancelled dialogues to express protest over other issues, then framed the resumption of the dialogues as a concession made in exchange for an advance in some area unrelated to human rights. By the turn of the century, China had blunted the human rights critics’ traditional strategies of name and shame and diplomatic pressure.

In this changing landscape, human rights advocates searched for new ways to influence China. First, some groups made increasingly sophisticated use of international human rights mechanisms. Human Rights Watch opened offices in Brussels, London, and Paris that, among other functions, assisted the EU and European governments to prepare for their dialogues with China. Its UN specialist provided information and ideas to UN human rights bodies that worked with China. Human Rights in China increased its lobbying and informational services for European foreign ministries as well as the UN treaty bodies and special mechanisms to enable them to more effectively challenge official Chinese claims about China’s compliance with international human rights law.³⁵

Second, knowing that human rights improvements would be driven chiefly from within China, human rights groups began to use the Internet to communicate directly to the Chinese public. Human Rights in China promoted Internet-based advocacy directed at readers inside China with a Chinese-language biweekly newsletter of banned news and opinion (Zhongguo renquan shuangzhoukan), which was disseminated by email and made available online as well as through its Web site. China Human Rights Defenders circulated news of human rights abuses not only overseas in English, but inside China through email news releases and a Web site. Chinese human rights advocates in exile broadcast their views to Chinese audiences over the U.S. government–supported Radio Free Asia. Most dissident organizations in exile set up Web sites, which the Chinese government tried to block with the Great Firewall.

A third advocacy innovation involved working Chinese civil society—an increasingly active and diverse collection of bloggers, lawyers, petitioners, advocates, and demonstrators. China Labour Bulletin experimented with labor rights litigation, finding lawyers and providing support for workers who sued under Chinese law in Chinese courts against employment discrimination, for severance and pension benefits, or for compensation for injuries.³⁶ Such cases sometimes produced favorable judgments or settlements that might have an impact on other cases through publicity and force of example, even though local CCP authorities control the Chinese courts, and the courts have little power to enforce their judgments—and although in civil law systems such as China’s the judgments rendered by one court do not bind other courts. The Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers provided help for lawyers specializing in rights protection (weiquan) who were willing to take the cases of victims of discrimination, land seizure, and other abuses even at great risk to their careers and personal safety. The committee publicized abuse of lawyers’ rights, helped with the defense of those rights, and supported capacity building and exchange between Chinese lawyers and lawyers outside China.³⁷

Fourth, human rights groups responded to China’s increasing importance in the world economy by interacting directly with businesses. In this approach, they were part of a rising trend to connect business and human rights.³⁸ The National Labor Committee, China Labor Watch, and others issued reports highlighting abuses of labor rights in factories in China that produced for Western markets, trying to use consumer pressure to force firms such as Wal-Mart, MacDonald’s, and Disney to get their China-based suppliers to improve labor conditions. Several of the leading human rights groups concerned with China engaged in a series of meetings with Internet firms working in China and other stakeholders to produce a code of conduct to protect user privacy. In October 2008, the organizations jointly launched the Global Network Initiative as a voluntary compact to promote the implementation of international human rights standards, including freedom of speech, in the governance of the Internet.³⁹

The Chinese government responded to each kind of advocacy innovation. It exerted far-reaching control of the Internet and other new information technology in China, blocking most citizens’ access to information about human rights. It outlawed and repressed independent civil society organizations that challenged the system too directly and in some cases treated their contact with outside supporters as a violation of criminal law. It threatened foreign Internet companies with loss of business if they did not cooperate with Chinese regulations, even though those regulations themselves violated users’ rights under international law. In the UN system, in international diplomacy, and in its dealing with international and domestic NGOs, China’s goal appeared not to be to get rid of the international human rights regime (which would be difficult and unnecessary), but to cap its growth and expansion, freeze its effectiveness, shade the norms to fit long-articulated Chinese priorities, and shape the institutions so that they would be deferential to China and like-minded states.

China’s response to the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to a prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was another illustration of its vulnerability in the realm of soft power. Having sentenced Liu to eleven years in prison for advocating peaceful change, Beijing could not deter the Norway-based Peace Prize committee from awarding the prize and then endured weeks of ridicule for preventing Liu or his wife from attending the ceremony, for denouncing the prize committee as “clowns,” and for openly pressuring other governments not to send their ambassadors to the ceremony.

Human rights violations also remain an ongoing source of insecurity within China’s borders. The regime’s current level of acceptance among the people depends on performance-based legitimacy, grounded in economic growth, foreign policy successes, and control of the propaganda message. But the system remains permanently vulnerable to citizen rejection in a way that consolidated democratic regimes are not—even those that are far less popular on policy grounds—because citizens are constantly aware that there is an alternative type of regime that is widely considered to be more legitimate. As the Asian Barometer Surveys have shown, when citizens in democratic systems are asked whether they would be interested in changing the current regime—even one that is viewed as performing poorly—for one that is authoritarian, most of them say no. But citizens in China and other authoritarian regimes mostly agree that “democracy is the best form of government.” In this sense, authoritarian systems live on sufferance, accepted only so long as they perform.⁴⁰ This vulnerability is the core reason why the Chinese regime continues to see human rights promotion as a form of political subversion. The enduring appeal of democratic ideals suggests the limits to China’s prospects of enhancing its soft-power standing.

As China rises—and thanks to the skill of Chinese diplomacy and the cooperation of like-minded governments—its efforts to weaken the effectiveness of the international human rights regime have enjoyed some success. As a result, what at one time seemed to be an inevitable progress toward the universalization of human rights values now appears as a more contingent historical struggle with an uncertain outcome. China will have a large role in shaping the future trajectory of human rights both as an idea and as a system of international laws and institutions.