How China buys the silence of the world's human rights critics
As Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo struggles on his sick bed in a heavily guarded Chinese hospital, leaders of G20 nations gathered in Germany made no official mention of the activist.
It was a telling sign of the waning momentum of
China's human rights movement: the name of China's most famous political prisoner was not even officially brought up as Chinese
President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel instead bonded over pandas and soccer.
Rather than upset the leader of the world's second-largest economy and a major global ally, officials of foreign nations would rather keep their lips buttoned in public and focus on trade and bilateral ties.
This is in stark contrast to the days when international pressure could make a difference in the fate of individuals
fighting for rights in China – when Beijing was still sensitive enough to listen.
Late Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who was among the "black hands" blamed for instigating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, was welcomed into the Beijing embassy on June 5 that year as a guest of former US
president George Bush with the help of veteran sinologist Perry Link.
Fang and his wife hid in the embassy for 13 months before going on to live as exiles in the US. They also could be thankful for the negotiations of diplomat Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, who was then the US national security adviser.
Former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng, who spent about 18 years in jail, was released at the request of former US president Bill Clinton. Wei was deported by Beijing in 1997 after being granted medical parole, and headed to the US.
"The effect of foreign pressure on the [Chinese] government is diminishing," said Link, a comparative literature and foreign languages professor at the University of California at Riverside who co-translated the
Tiananmen Papers, which detailed the Chinese government's response to the 1989 democracy protests. He also translated into English "Charter 08", the document that Liu co-authored calling for political reform in China.
Given the treatment of Liu and the government's massive crackdown on lawyers and activists since July 2015, observers say the disappearing pressure over China's rights record could in turn embolden Beijing to turn the screws further on dissident voices.
Maya Wang, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch's Asia division, warned that the Chinese government would be "rewarded and encouraged [to continue] its impunity in mistreating political activists".
"If G20 nations fail to publicly press the Chinese government to free Liu, they would lose credibility in pressing for human rights everywhere, not just in China," Wang said.
China has gathered economic strength and political influence as its authoritarian regime expanded in the years following the 2007-08 global economic crisis.
Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said: "The size and importance of the Chinese economy, with all that entails, meant others are now much more careful in raising human rights issues with Beijing."
Recent examples of foreign governments putting economic interests ahead of lobbying for rights in China indeed suggest the nation is rich enough to mute critics. Cases in point are the financially embattled Greek government's vetoing of a EU statement condemning China's rights record at a UN meeting last month and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg's refusal last week to comment on calls for Liu's release. Bilateral ties between Norway and China were only normalised in December following a six-year freeze that began when Liu, by then behind bars, was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in absentia.
Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre, said Beijing was aware its authoritarianism prevented it from gaining the international respect it sought; but it needed to weigh global approval against domestic stability, especially when "[global] concerns over human rights" could be bought off.
"For now, China can be confident that the West will not launch an effective challenge to Beijing's crackdown on free expression," Daly said.
He added that Beijing had also grown "more self-certain" by providing "investment, aid and other international public goods which are winning it international influence, if not admiration".
China demonstrated its unwillingness to put up with any more criticism of its rights record in June last year, when Foreign Minister Wang Yi vented his anger at a Canadian journalist who raised the issue at a joint press conference with the Canadian foreign minister in Ottawa.
"Other people don't know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it is the Chinese people who are in the best situation, in the best position, to have a say about China's human rights situation," Wang said, going on to label the journalist's questions "groundless and unwarranted accusations".
Tsang said Beijing "does not feel that foreign powers have any right to put pressure on what it sees as domestic affairs".
"As far as the [Communist Party] is concerned, China's human rights conditions are excellent, and no changes are required, though there would always be scope for the party to take an even stronger leadership role," Tsang said. "If they see no problem, they see no scope for improvement, only scope for the party to tighten control."
Beijing previously appeared less inured to international pressure, which was credited with playing a role in improving the treatment of individual human rights defenders.
In February 2007, Gao Yaojie, a retired gynaecologist best known for her Aids-prevention work during an HIV epidemic in Henan province, was placed under house arrest. However, the local authorities soon bowed to international pressure and allowed her to travel to the US, where she now lives.
In previous decades, Western countries collectively pressured China to improve its rights record, but that was no longer the case, Daly said.
How China buys the silence of the world's human rights critics