China - Report on U.S. Human Rights Record

The Bureau of  Democracy, Human Rights & Labor of the U.S. Department of State issues annual country reports on human rights, taking as its touchstone the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The Bureaus's objective are to:

• Hold governments accountable to their obligations under universal human rights norms and international human rights instruments

 The U.S. 2009 country report on China is typically blunt:

As in previous years, citizens did not have the right to change their government.  The People's Republic of China (PRC), with a population of approximately 1.3 billion, is an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutionally is the paramount source of power.

The government's human rights record remained poor and worsened in some areas. During the year the government increased the severe cultural and religious repression of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR).Tibetan areas remained under tight government controls. The detention and harassment of human rights activists increased, and public interest lawyers and law firms that took on cases deemed sensitive by the government faced harassment, disbarment and closure. The government limited freedom of speech and controlled the Internet and Internet access. Abuses peaked around high-profile events, such as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

The Information Office of the State Council of China, not to be outdone, has issued its own report  "U.S. Human Rights Record 2009".  It is a long list of laments gathered from conventional sources: our high crime rate and lack of personal security, racial disparities, high rates of incarceration, unemployment, poverty, health care deficiencies and the like.  All true and all largely irrelevant to the American view of what is wrong with China.


The era of Sino-American good feeling that we hoped for with Obama's election is not off to a particularly good start, as the Dui Hua Foundation has recently reported.  It is not just that Chinese, like Americans are thin-skinned and united in the view that each (not the other) is the greatest country on earth.


What strikes me is that the Chinese complaints are irrelevant to our basic critique, which is that China is not a liberal democracy.  Recitation of a social-democrat's list of American shortcomings is non-responsive to the American critique - which is essentially the same as that of the social democracies of northern Europe - though the Scandinavians are characteristically less "in your face" about it.


The left critique of the U.S. in the Cold War was that we would forgive almost any monarch or dictator for life so long as he hated the Communists.  Liberals never wavered in holding up liberal democracy as the ideal for the entire world.  


So what can we say to Chinese that may have an impact?  As a government, I don't know, but for myself, it is this:  for a party that proclaims Marxism as a guide, the Communist Party's self-conception is decidedly ahistorical.  The most powerful message of Marxism is the inevitability of change, that materialism which expresses itself in the maxim of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.  
The fact that the Chinese Communist Party governs now - and generally successfully - does not mean that it must be the party permanently in power, that there can be no other, that any alternative is subversive.  The fundamental critique therefore is that multi-party democracy and the freedom to form peaceful and independent organizations is a historical necessity.