Do we have to wait 30 years for human rights in China?

[Vattel]

From a Fred Hiatt Washington Post Editorial (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/20/AR2011012003700.html?hpid=opinionsbox1):

When President Obama on Wednesday expressed the hope that "30 years from now, we will have seen further evolution" in China's respect for human rights, I thought about Geng He, who had come to visit me the day before.

Geng He, 43, is a soft-spoken woman who doesn't know whether her husband, Gao Zhisheng, is dead or alive. . . .

Gao is not a dissident. He is something China's government apparently finds even more threatening: a lawyer who has sought, while adhering scrupulously to Chinese law, to represent dissidents, members of religious minorities and other victims of Communist Party repression.

"For him, being a lawyer is more than just a profession," Geng told me. "He's tried to educate the public about justice, about the law, and about what's right or wrong. Now, there seems to be no room for someone like that to survive in China."

Geng had hoped that Obama would speak out about her husband's case, both because such attention might help him and because Obama's words could have a big impact more broadly in China. As she wrote in a Post op-ed last year:

"I worry about the next generation of Chinese lawyers. Will disappearances like my husband's deter them from becoming rights defenders? I imagine so. But if the United States were to speak out on my husband's behalf, perhaps this would change." . . .

Obama said in a prepared statement, leading off a White House news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, that the two leaders had discussed human rights in their private meeting. I hope those discussions will help Gao as well as other individuals Obama chose not to mention publicly, such as imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, who is under de facto house arrest. When I asked whether Obama had raised Gao's case with China's president, a White House spokesman e-mailed me that "the President referred to the list of names he had raised in the past that included Gao."

What may have a bigger impact is Obama's apparent acceptance, in his off-the-cuff answers, of China's own rationalizations for repression: that "China's at a different stage of development than we are"; that "part of human rights is people being able to make a living and having enough to eat"; and, most of all, that "there has been an evolution in China over the last 30 years. . . . And my expectation is that 30 years from now we will have seen further evolution and further change."

What's alarming is not just that 30 years is a long time to ask Gao's two children to wait. It's the assumption that China is moving, perhaps too slowly but inexorably, in the right direction, because that's how nations evolve as they become more prosperous. The statement uncannily echoes Bush administration comments about Russia over the past decade, as President (now Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin chipped away at freedom there.

[elocs]

1. "We" have to wait for as long as it takes them (the Chinese) to attain human rights.

We can encourage and support human rights advances in China but we cannot "make" them do anything.

[Vattel]

5. Who said we can?

[elocs]

7. The "do we have to wait 30 years..." infers that we can. We can't.

We have to wait for as long as it takes the Chinese to do it themselves whether it's 15 years, 30 years, or 100 years.

[Vattel]

10. Whatever.

I posted the headline. The author of an editorial often does not choose the headline. The content of the editorial is more interesting than the headline.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. I'm waiting for human rights in America. nt.

[laylah]

3. +1000! nt

[Vattel]

4. point taken, but I suspect that, you also care about the rights of Gao and others

seized and tortured for defending rights in China. It's not an either-or kind of thing.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. Our President lecturing anyone about human rights is a travesty.

Yes I want human rights for the whole planet. I want universal health care, job security, old age security, environmental security, and a guarantee of a dignified life for everyone on this planet.

What I don't care much for is one torturer and mass murderer lecturing another torturer and mass murderer about their bad practices.

[Vattel]

11. Again, point taken.

[Cali_Democrat]

8. +1000000

[bemildred]

19. Yep, first step is to bring them back here. nt

[styersc]

6. Until Guantanamo is closed, we have a mote in our eye!!!

We used to argue this subject from a position of strength. No more.

[Vattel]

12. more like a log

[Brickbat]

13. I think the idea that "China's at a different stage of development" is a bullshit rationalization.

I feel the same way about the almost total lack of progress on workers rights in other countries. Other parts of the world have figured this shit out! We fought those battles and because we fought those battles, other people shouldn't have to.

[AngryAmish]

18. China will always not care too much about human rights

The cultural framework around human rights that we find so important just does not exist in China. That is to say nobody wants to have gulags but the average person thinks that a strong central government is important and one should not be allowed to say things in public which threaten public order.

Oh, Chinese folks do not care and do not find important the "battles" for human rights we have fought. They think we are scum - if not scum think the attitude of a typical white southerner during Jim Crow about a black person. Americans are kinda gross even if we can do some things well.

[Jeneral2885]

22. excuse me

China is caring about the logn term of its environment--is that not HR--protecting people's health? What has America done for CC?

[Countdown_3_2_1]

14. Rights are never impposed from the outside.

They come to those who demand them.

When Martin Luther King led the struggle, the people rose up and demanded their rights. The oppressors arrested them until there was no room in the jails. And still the people demanded their rights in such numbers it was impossible to ignore.

The job of a tyrant is to either distract the people (bread and circuses), or to cow them with brutal displays of force. But once the people realize they far outnumber their oppressors, the outcome is already won.

[DavidDvorkin]

15. That means it will arrive at about the same time as controlled fusion!

[davidpdx]

16. What is horrible is that people are moaning about what is going on in China

and forget that things are just as bad in North Korea. The human rights violations there are just as bad and not as much is said publicly about the abuses there.

[Vattel]

17. Sadly, we have little leverage with North Korea

[davidpdx]

23. True, but so few people know or care what is going on there

From this side of the ocean, it looks very different.

[quaker bill]

20. We probably have to wait as long as it takes

We have no real leverage.

[Jeneral2885]

21. What gives America the right

to push for Human Rights everywhere in the world (actually not everywhere Saudi Arabia, Kuwait is not criticised, neither is Singapore or friendly nations)?

What is the usae of promoting Human Rights? East Asian nations developed at a much faster rate than any western nation in their devleopment period and did not need to usage the discourse of HR to progress to high standards of living? (H-J Chang, Dani Rodrik)

What has HR achieved? Along with it comes excessive liberalisation (neoliberalism)--unfettered capitalism and fixed western standards that do not match the institutional make up of countries especially in Africa?

And, how about the HR record of America? Supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese government? Coup in Iran to install a corrupt Shah in the 1950s? Paramiltary intervention in Latina America inthe 1970s to install right wing dictatorships? If there were HR is America, there would have been DADT inthe first place, the right of same-sex marriage, no death penalty at all and definitely no such thing as Guantanamo Bay!

China on the other hand has lifted millions of people out of poverty and is investing in green technology whichpanders to the wee-being of its people inthe long term--is that not Human Rights?