Human Rights Becomes a Second-Day Story
Despite the saturation coverage of the China trade deal in today's New
York Times , Washington Post , and Wall Street Journal , not
one sidebar could be found examining its implications for human rights. It
isn't as though the issue of human-rights abuses has gone away; China's
crackdown on the Falun Gong continues (click here to
read a summary of a recent Amnesty International report, and here to read a pretty good Post Op-Ed column by E.J.
Dionne), and several Republican presidential candidates made (admittedly
partisan) noises about human rights when the deal was announced yesterday. The
Times reported that Human Rights Watch endorsed the
China deal, but failed to point out that the organization is conditioning
its support in the following way:
Before giving China permanent NTR (Normal Trade Relations) status, we
hope Congress will insist on limited, meaningful steps to improve human rights.
For example, within one year of getting permanent NTR, China should ratify one
or both of the two key UN human rights treaties it has signed, and take other
steps.
This may or may not be an ineffectual gesture on Human Rights Watch's part;
what's significant is that the news coverage of the China deal presented the
human-rights issue as so negligible that such questions didn't even need to be
answered. (Presumably they will in the coming days, as editors scramble for
fresh angles.) As Human Rights Watch observed in a statement last month to the
Senate Foreign Relations committee, human-rights concerns have loomed smaller
for the United States and China's other major trading partners "even as the
Chinese government's restrictions on freedom of expression and association grew
tighter." (Click here to read the whole thing.) It may be that, contrary to
recent experience, greater trade ties will now foster greater freedom in China.
Or it may be that they won't. There seems a growing consensus that attempting
to withhold admission to the World Trade Organization as a means to advance
freedom is futile and will only hurt U.S. interests. What's striking is the
lack of interest in examining whether this premise is correct.
