Apparently, there won’t be any change we can believe in when it comes to America’s China policy:
BEIJING, Feb. 20–Human rights violations by China cannot block the possibility of significant cooperation between Washington and Beijing on the global economic crisis, climate change and security threats like North Korea’s nuclear program, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday.
“We pretty much know what they are going to say” on human rights issues such as greater freedoms for Tibet, Clinton told reporters traveling with her on a tour of Asia. “We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere” with dialogue on other crucial topics.
Clinton’s remarks are likely to dismay human rights organizations who have pressed her to move human rights near the top of the U.S.-China agenda. Last week, seven prominent groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, wrote Clinton a joint letter urging her to tell Chinese officials that China’s relationship with the United States “will depend in part on whether it lives by universally accepted human rights norms.”
The letter noted that in recent years “human rights concerns have been pushed progressively further to the margins of the US-China relationship” as Beijing has gained economic, military and diplomatic power.
Clinton suggested she was simply being realistic about China’s stance on human rights, noting that the Chinese halted the broadcast of a tough speech she gave on women’s rights in Beijing 13 years ago, when she was first lady.
“Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these issues . . . I have had those conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders,” Clinton said. She said she did not mean to imply “a lesser concern” for human rights but will spend more time talking about areas where she senses a breakthrough, possibly including “the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis. We have to have a dialogue that leads to an understanding and cooperation on those” issues.”
On some level, of course, Clinton is right. Bashing the Chines over their human rights violations isn’t likely to accomplish much of anything, but neither is ignoring those violations completely, which is the policy that that previous Administration and, apparently, this one, chose to follow.
