As he takes office, Pompeo faces a key challenge that should not be overlooked: he needs to find a way to reinvigorate the United States’ commitment to human rights diplomacy. President Donald Trump famously disdains US efforts to promote human rights around the world. Instead, he views US foreign policy through a very narrow transactional lens. From the President’s perspective, the issue is quite clear: what’s the point of squandering precious political capital on human rights when the United States has other fish to fry?
It remains to be seen whether Secretary Pompeo will make human rights part of his personal agenda. If he does, perhaps one of the most difficult challenges awaiting him is China. Will the Trump administration find new levers to press China on human rights, at a time when the in-country situation has taken a real turn for the worse?
So far, the Trump administration’s record on human rights in China has been weak. President Trump did not publicly raise human rights concerns in his initial meeting with President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017 and it is unclear whether he raised them privately. Similarly, when Trump travelled to Beijing in November last year, he once again failed to publicly raise human rights concerns after his meetings with Xi Jinping and other top leaders.
Still, over President Trump’s time in office there have been some notable successes. In March 2017, Pompeo’s predecessor Rex Tillerson urged senior Chinese officials to release Sandy Phan-Gillis, a US businesswoman who had been held in China for more than two years. Phan was released soon thereafter and immediately deported back to the United States. That same month, in an unusual and dramatic move, US embassy officials in Thailand helped to spirit Chen Guiqiu — the wife of detained human rights lawyer Xie Yang — out of a Thai detention centre, helping her to avoid certain repatriation back to China. On 17 March, Chen and her two daughters travelled to the United States to begin their life in exile.
Not all US efforts have met with success. In the weeks before his death in July 2017, US officials privately urged Beijing to release Liu Xiaobo, offering to fly him to the United States for emergency medical treatment. Those efforts were rebuffed by Beijing — instead, footage of the US medical delegation sent to consult with Liu was used to suggest, falsely, that the Chinese government was doing all that it could for him.
In a few cases, the Trump administration has called out the Chinese government for serious rights violations. In December 2017, the US embassy released a statement criticising the harsh sentence handed down to Chinese rights activist Wu Gan, who was sentenced to eight years in prison on subversion charges. In that same statement, released jointly with the German embassy, the United States also criticised the conviction handed down to rights lawyer Xie Yang. The United States and Germany teamed up again in April 2018 to release separate but closely timed statements on the ongoing extra-legal detention of Liu Xia, the widow of Liu Xiaobo.
In at least one case, the United States made use of a new diplomatic tool. In December 2017, the US government announced the first-ever sanctions against a Chinese national under the Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that empowers the Treasury Department to sanction individual foreign nationals responsible for human rights abuses. The Chinese official who was sanctioned, Gao Yan, oversaw the Beijing district-level police office where rights activist Cao Shunli was detained in 2014. Cao was initially denied medical care during her time in detention and died soon after being transferred from prison to a military hospital.
The Trump administration also responded to China’s burst of activity inside UN human rights bodies. In March 2018, the United States pushed back, unsuccessfully, against China’s second-ever resolution at the Human Rights Council. That resolution attempts to bolster Chinese Communist Party concepts that privilege the so-called ‘right to development’ over core civil and political rights. In its official Explanation of Vote, the United States stated that ‘it is clear that China is attempting through this resolution to weaken the UN human rights system and the norms underpinning it’.
The downturn in the human rights situation inside China over the past five years has been pronounced. Since taking office in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping has presided over one of the most intensive crackdowns on rights activism in the reform era. Hundreds of dissidents have been detained and several have been sentenced to prison. Many of the top rights advocacy NGOs have had to close their doors and many more have had to scale back their activities. The severity of the situation begs for an international response.
During its first 18 months, the Trump administration has generally fallen short on human rights diplomacy as it relates to China. But the above cases make clear that the Trump administration is willing to take action, at least in certain circumstances. As Pompeo settles into his new job, he should use these cases as building blocks for a new, stronger and more creative China human rights policy.
Thomas E Kellogg is the Executive Director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, Georgetown University.
I really do think Western commentators like Mr Kellog can do more to address human rights abuses among Western nations, including Australia’s treatment of refugees. This is not to neglect human rights in China, but Westerners would speak with more credibility if they deal with their own shortcomings in human rights.
Do the right thing at home so the rest of the world can watch to learn. Why does Australia continue to neglect the human rights of refugees? Why has the US neglected the human rights of black Americans who suffer disproportionate physical violence? There are deep structural barriers in each of these nations that prevent human rights from being addressed.
Addressing human rights require these deep structural issues to be solved. They are not solved by simply criticising other countries’ shortcomings in human rights.
Also, human rights need to be understood comprehensively to include substantive freedoms to live lives and pursue commitments that one has reason to value. Human rights can be advanced when a country’s social infrastructure develops, when we achieve universal education, basic public health and basic social security. These are valuable components of human rights that make a real difference to people’s lives.
It is easy to focus on a narrow range of rights (like freedom of speech) which are well-entrenched among Western nations. But such an unduly narrow focus neglects other rights, such as the right to seek refuge, which many Western nations struggle to meet (understandably). The point is that we need a comprehensive view of human rights, not a narrow view that is easy for us to achieve but difficult for other countries to achieve.
Why should guys like Trump care about human rights in China when they actually profit from it in things like using China’s cheap, non-union labor to manufacturing their products to selling surveillance equipment and computer software to keep track of the population in order to curb political, social, religious, ethnic, racial, and economic unrest?