Human Rights in China: The Great Political Divide between Regional and International Regimes - Essay Example

Human Rights in China: The Great Political Divide between Regional and International Regimes Introduction For several years a perplexing and multifaceted debate regarding human rights and Asian values has been intense, not only in Asia but across the globe. Deng Xiaoping, as early as the 1980s, began to claim that China, with its distinct political and cultural context, had a different point of view and worldview from that of the West (Foot 2000). This argument was explained in a White Paper on Human Rights released in 1991 by the State Council. In it the regime did its best to argue accurately and appropriately about human rights condition, claiming that citizens of China had enjoyed not just the privilege to live and political privileges, but also social and economic privileges, involving the right to development (Foot 2000). Any remarks and disapprovals from other governments and non-government organizations were to be criticized as meddling in China’s internal affairs (Van Ness 1999). Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was clear in his statement about ‘Asian values’ and his criticisms of the United States. He was angered by what he witnessed taking place in the West: ‘guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public—in sum, the breakdown of civil society’ (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000, 182). Persuaded that political and civil rights hamper economic progress, he was geared up to lead a new direction for Asia (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). Certainly this conflict climaxed in the World Conference on Human Rights organized by the United Nations in the summer of 1993 in Vienna, where political representatives from China and several other nations got into a heated debate with their counterparts from the West concerning the interdependence, adherence, and universality of political and civil rights on the one hand, and cultural, social, and economic privileges on the other (Svensson 2002). Even though the standpoint of the Western countries dominated at the convention, the debate has not subsided. Evidently, the perspectives adopted by government authorities from China, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries not in favor of the international human rights standards, or as they perceive it, of the Western nations, may be clarified, partly, as a justification for their poor records in human rights protection, particularly that of political and civil rights (Hashimoto 2004). However, the outcome of this disagreement on both academic circles and governments in the West could not be taken too lightly. Indeed it has contributed to a feeling of exigency in the academic society to tackle head on what is called a discourse between Asian values and human rights (Hashimoto 2004). Numerous international conventions have been organized and numerous scholarly articles have been published. Many sympathetic individuals, both advocates and scholars, have committed themselves to the pursuit for consensus (Forsythe 2000). In this attempt to think critically about universal human rights and Asian values, a trend is simply determined: Asian values have a tendency only to mention long-established values. In China’s case, two kinds of treatises have been leading in international conventions, specifically papers discussing customary values, particularly Confucian thoughts and principles, and papers on theory and practice of human rights under Communist regime (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). There is certainly a valid justification to this preference. It may be argued that to oppose Confucian principles with the notion of human rights emphasizes the dispute between the East and the West, while to talk about communist theory and practice of human rights plays as a discourse between the past and present (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). Convincing as it seems to be, this argument is exposed to countervailing thoughts. Initially, this perspective seems to be confined: papers on Communist policy and ideology and Confucian ethics could not adequately tackle the opportunity of a discourse between East and West (Bell 2000). Several papers on Confucian ethics, in more sensible terms, are inclined to be nostalgic. They have a tendency to give in to the possibility that the principled traditions could in some way be adapted to the needs of the contemporary period. In the hands of several thinkers, Confucian principles would not merely fulfill a purpose in the life of present-day China but would also rescue the entire world from the verge of calamity (Bell 2000). As for papers on theory and practice of Communism, it is smart on the part of several academics to support the current government, either owing to compassion with the Communist Party, or sense of national pride (Weatherley 1999). A few of them only replicate the opinion of the government on the issue, applying several academic terminologies to mask their abandonment of professional dedication (Weatherley 1999). The lines of reasoning introduced above, though, are simply negative. From an optimistic point of view, it could be illustrated that a successful discourse between universal human rights and Chinese liberalism has been taking place for a short time (Svensson 2002). And it is still taking place. It is a courageous attempt that may perhaps transform reality. Two arguments are made. First, in principle, Chinese liberalism should be farsighted. It should aim for a better future without giving in to flight of the imagination (Mendes & Lalonde-Roussy 2004). It should be fully conscious about the hindrances displayed by long-established culture and dominant political organization without surrendering hope. Likewise, the notion of universal human rights is a futuristic and liberal force (Mendes & Lalonde-Roussy 2004). No matter what triumphs it can declare had been attained through an extensive and long dispute against the states, global businesses as well as established cultures in several parts of the globe. The finale remains distant (Neack 2008). Second, throughout several decades, Chinese liberalism has consistently called upon the human rights movement in other countries for advocacy and support (Svensson 2002). International associations, including the United Nations and the League of Nations, have assisted in providing universal human rights norms to which advocates of Chinese liberalism sought, whereas Western countries’ governments and non-governmental organizations provided material and moral support when the liberals were dealt with maltreatment and repression by the government (Svensson 2002). The contribution of international NGOs merits emphasis. Similar to Western regimes, they were and remain, more objective and sincere in their dedication to the aspiration of human rights in China (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). Major Political Issues regarding Human Rights in China Throughout the 1970s, the period when the government of Beijing was becoming more vigorous globally, the human rights system reached a very important crisis. The two international treaties of human rights, first made known in 1966, were implemented in 1976 (Foot 2000). A Human Rights Committee, founded under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and with the dispatch to take account of reports from nations that were parts of the treaty, placed a major fragment of fortification in the great wall of execution that still looks forward to accomplishment (Foot 2000). Several democratic nations, most particularly the United States, but also several Scandinavian and West European countries, openly integrated into their foreign policies issues of human rights, occurrences that in the latter instances also influenced European Community’s external relations (Pollis & Schwab 2000). Capacities of NGOs in this concern are also enlarged quickly along with these better prospects for lobbying governments recently dedicated to safeguarding human rights. UN organizations likewise formulated new mechanisms and practices for monitoring violations, hence indicating an enthusiasm to take more sincerely their obligations for preventing abuses wherever they may take place (Pollis & Schwab 2000). Issues were not to fade away after these developments. A further expansion and intensifying of human rights initiatives took place in the post-cold-war period with such pronouncements as the assignment of a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, additional expansion growth in the number of nations asserting democratic position, and the clearer binding of democratic governance and human rights standards in the distribution of economic aid (Hashimoto 2004). When the government of China started its last deliberation on whether to sign the main international treaties, it must have been affected by the idea that it was becoming a member of a group that, since June 1997, consisted of 138 state members to the ICCPR and 136 to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (Hashimoto 2004). Neither treaty has any efficient forceful way of ascertaining execution of its articles, which moderately elaborates the discrepancy between dedication and practice (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). Nevertheless, those states that endorse what are, in fact, covenants have given announcement of being bound by their provisions, and have approved of the responsibility to make intervallic reports UN organizations implemented to give effect to the privileges and rights enclosed within the treaties, a remarkable demonstration of the collapse of the division between the international and domestic areas in this issue domain (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). The expansion and intensifying of the human rights system has relied both on political forces prominent in the international relations research and on those that are less usually the core of emphasis (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). State welfare, the claims of the dominant on the less dominant, and the conflict between North and South and East and West have fulfilled their tasks (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001); but thus also have the mechanisms linked with institutional formation and expansion, which have encouraged the development in this issue domain, and led to historically and politically dependent social norms becoming more profoundly entrenched and independent of their beginnings (Van Ness 1999). Even though there are several critical weaknesses related with the expansion of the protection of human rights, the greater international involvement of China arrived at a phase when almost all states were visibly acknowledging that human rights were a topic of valid international issue (Foot 2000). Significant normative union had took place, hence, if we put emphasis on symbolic and participatory behavior in this issue domain, even as we consider the reality that concrete degrees of protection have usually failed the mandated criteria (Forsythe 2000). Concern for identity and reputation influenced political factors of the debate and behavior of several states implicated in the struggle over China’s human rights, and markedly so in the concluding years of the 1990s (Horowitz & Schnabel 2004). The decision of Western and Japanese governments, in 1997 and 1998, to avoid the UN path was made in the insight that they had to possess something to substitute the yearly critical decrees, or risk being faced by accusations of insincerity and a dispute to their democratic identities (Weatherley 1999). Nations such as Brazil, newly dedicated to the expansion of human rights in its own state, and aware of the aspiration globally to provide credibility to this new position, also set off a bilateral discussion on human rights with China, in trade for a relapse to nonparticipation on the vote at the yearly convention in Geneva (Bell 2000). Beijing allocated extensive diplomatic resources with the intention of assembling allies at the UN, but that approach also involved efforts to present itself as a nation that regard the international human rights system sincerely (Bell 2000). The aspiration of the Chinese leadership to pursue the successful 1997 summit in Washington with an equal accomplishment in Beijing in 1998 also triggered extra domestic political slackening and some polishing of its reputation, granting favorable political room for Chinese from different levels to examine the limits of what came to be understood as a new phase of political liberalization (Hashimoto 2004). The outside features of the human rights concern hence functioned to empower regional human rights advocates, and to reinforce their connections with the international human rights society (Forsythe 1993). Every government implicated in this struggle over human rights may assert particular policy achievements by 1998 (Foot 2000, 225): … for the democracies, there was the ‘release of a few Chinese dissidents, a visit to China by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, some reinforcement of the language of universality of rights and—most gratifying of all—China’s signature of the ICCPR. In addition, they could also point to the starting or restarting of dialogues, and their associated training and cooperation activities which showed something tangible was happening—of some value as a shield when NGOs, the media, legislatures and others demanded to know what efforts were being made to improve the Chinese record. On the part of Beijing, its attempts to make public the new legal policies and penalize those who violated the legal reforms showed an enthusiasm to deal with the massive setbacks related with execution (Foot 2000). In addition, it could restore confidence of the more nationalist components among its local public that denunciation of the UN would now stop, and that it would be involved in joint, more courteous, discussions on human rights with its intercontinental equivalents (Horowitz & Schnabel 2004). Also, the Chinese leadership seemed to have had some achievements in persuading several international players of the requirement to remedy the alleged disparity in consideration to political and civil rights, to one that concentrated more on the development rights and cultural, social and economic rights (Mendes & Lalonde-Roussy 2004). The weakness of this mechanism was expressed far sooner than any had expected, though, with a noticeable frigidity in the political climate of China surfacing by the closing of 1998. Numerous Chinese, largely scholars, did carry on in debating and publishing different features of the human rights and law and apply international norms as a support for their arguments (Mendes & Lalonde-Roussy 2004). However better thought-out disputes, containing appeals for multiparty democracy, or acknowledgement for particular religious and social organizations were promptly closed down upon, particularly in a period of anniversaries that promoted expression on the record of the Party (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). These oppressive acts depicted the triviality of the origins of the new legal policies, the restricted boundaries of political acceptance, and the relative insignificant that the state connects to protection of human rights when Party control was threatened (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). They also exposed the limitations in the ‘bilateral dialogue route’ (Foot 2000, 225), and their associated actions, due to the fact that these were adapted to the notion of encouraging major transformation in China, and did not grant a great deal of prospect to register condemnation of abrupt cases of intensified political domination (Foot 2000). Furthermore, NGO and other assessments of those discourses and of the latest Chinese regulation in domains that influenced protections of human rights become more broadly distributed, and perhaps were taken more interest of at a period of weakening confidence about the opportunities for political reform in China (Gillies 1996). Hence, demands for concrete outcomes from the dialogues unavoidably intensified at the period of China’s onslaught, resulting in consultations to the necessity for benchmarks to identify improvement and to the potential negative implications from the frustrated hopes of public opinion in the West (Brown 2002). Still any actual decisions to respond strongly to the political repression by means of a condemnatory decree at the UN Commission, the clear spot on the human rights agenda at which to accomplish this, and one that may reveal a relationship between Chinese movements and international condemnation of those movements, encouraged a Chinese warning to terminate the bilateral dialogues (Neack 2008). And definitely China did terminate its discussion with the US, in part as an outcome of the decision of Washington to cosponsor a decree at the conference of the UN Commission in 1999 and more obviously as an outcome of the unplanned NATO bombing of Belgrade’s Chinese embassy (Bell 2000). The cooling in associations with the US for a great portion of 1999 took place as an outcome of the UN decision, the unsuccessful resolution of the entry issue of WTO throughout the visit of Premier Zhu Rongji to Washington, and the sidestepping of the UN Security Council as an outcome of the identified condemnation of China of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo (Foot 2000). The terror campaign of the NATO in the region at the stage of President Jiang Zemin’s trip to Europe, alongside the Belgrade embassy episode, resulted in a revival of Chinese argument against the domination of the US, meddling in the internal issues of autonomous states on the unfounded justifications of a standard of humanitarian intervention (Foot 2000). The threats of destabilized norms of territorial honor and state autonomy in support of advocating international human rights appeared all very apparent to Beijing, and those threats, alongside the nationalist sentiments that the terror campaign of NATO encouraged among numerous Chinese, created new hindrances in the course of those trying to publicize human rights principles in China (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). Regional Political Interest on Human Rights Issue in 21st Century China Regional inter-governmental institutions of human rights have been in effect for a short time in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. These regional systems of human rights are founded on regional human rights conventions such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). They are put into effect by such political bodies as the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Council of Europe (Hashimoto 2004). In China, regional political interests on human rights outweigh those of international political interests because regional human rights processes have discovered to be more efficient and valuable in endorsing and safeguarding human rights than the international human rights processes obtainable at the UN (Hashimoto 2004), such as the Committee against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, etc. due to the fact that they cannot merely be opposite to the UN regime but can also express regional identities, such the conditions, priorities, and requirements of the regions (Hashimoto 2004). Regional systems of human rights are normally explained as fundamental components in any successful international regimes of human rights in a conflicted, varied world (Pollis & Schwab 2000). In the domain of human rights, execution of human rights processes has been less effective at the international level than at the regional level. Human rights conventions have made it possible not merely to identify and summarize what rights are but as well as to discover means of implementing them (Pollis & Schwab 2000). This is not to claim that every human rights regional body has been triumphant. For instance, the 1975 Helsinki Accords did not meet the pledge they initially embraced for endorsing human rights in the former Soviet Bloc. Another example is the Arab Commission on Human Rights which has also resulted in negligible progress (Bruun & Jacobsen 2000). What is remarkable about China, obviously, is that no regional human rights body, treaty or agreement has yet been established. Founded on regional integration theories, one might have predicted that Chinese leadership would have strengthened (Svensson 2002), either to build a common approach for endorsing human rights or, in the lack of agreement about such approach, would have shape a treaty or agreement providing negligible direction on the issue (Svensson 2002). One of the objectives of the current paper is to attempt and interpret, within the framework of the theory of regional integration, why regional political interests outweigh international political interests in human rights in present-day China. Another explanation of the strong regional political interests in China with regard to human rights is interdependence. The notion of interdependence provides the foundations of globalization theory due to the fact the political economy of the world have encouraged the world political economy to be more inter-reliant than in the past (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). A heightened level of interdependence leads to countries being more susceptible than in the past in considerable extents to developments occurring outside their boundaries. At present, no nation-state can protect itself from international inter-reliance. In this setting, the secluded state is not satisfactory for solving numerous problems due to the inter-reliant character of modern-day China (Forsythe & McMahon 2003). If secluded states, such as China, cannot independently solve complicated and major problems, then it is understandable that regional regimes become more and more essential. For instance, Ohmae claims that nation-states were built to fulfill the requirements of a much earlier historical era (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). He emphasizes that states are dysfunctional as players in an international borderless political economy. Ohmae refers to the divisions that seem sensible for critical objectives ‘region-states’. Region-states are normal political economic regions created by the invisible hand of the international market (Bell, Nathan & Peleg 2001). Due to highly advanced communication and transportation technologies, defensive borders are no longer invulnerable to the flow of information and its ability to control public opinion and politics. In this setting, the notion of interdependence provides sufficient clarification why China has been ever more cooperating politically in a regional context. It is hence important to determine the level to which there has been a comparable development in the human rights domain at the regional level in China. Conclusions There are not numerous mentions of Asian political values in the Chinese human rights discourse, and neither there are great deals of really expressed mentions to particular Confucian, or Chinese, values. China supports its assertions to uniqueness more on political and economic aspects than on cultural forces. Its relativist stance on human rights is weakened by its own eagerness to condemn other nations, specifically the US, for neither meeting its own political values or to Chinese political values. The Chinese discourse of human rights is monopolized and governed by the system, which creates the issue of ‘representativity’. It is important that the government of China is supporting a government-to-government discussion, while it does not appear concerned in entering into a discussion with its own citizens. The reality that condemnation of the Chinese human rights record is shown as opposed to Chinese is profoundly alarming since nationalism is emerging, which yet again emphasizes the requirement for a sincerely pluralistic discussion and debate on human rights. However, some deliberation on the part of Western countries is also required to make its work on human rights more realistic. For instance, to this objective it is crucial that the US also concentrate on social and economic rights and not merely political and civil rights. It is also important that problems of human rights are viewed in an objective, unbiased, and consistent way irrespective of where they take place. To use various criteria to various countries function to weaken the core notion of the universality of human rights, of which Western nations have always delighted themselves to be such a forceful champion. References An-Na'Im, Abdullahi Ahmed, ed. Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Bell, Daniel A. East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Bell, L.S., A. Nathan & I. Peleg. Negotiating Culture and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Brown, M. Anne. Human Rights and the Borders of Suffering. 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