"China's Olympic Delusion" by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Nation. March 19, 2008.
An Annotation
With the Beijing 2008 Summer Games peeking over the horizon, the People’s Republic of China is at center stage—an unfamiliar place for the long-time isolationist and consistently secretive country. With this new attention, however, comes new responsibility. China postures to be the superpower of the future and a trustworthy business partner, but its continued repression of democratic freedoms and suppression of Tibetan self-determination severely impede China’s ability to legitimize itself and garner the necessary credibility emblematic of a global leader. Wassertrom’s article takes a particular angle on this widespread debate by discussing whether or not China will be able to control its public image under the bright lights of the Olympics, given mass communication as accessible as it is and the critics as vociferous as they are.
“…it remains doubtful that the regime will be able to keep tourists or spectators in Beijing from voicing support for the Dalai Lama or making eye-catching pro-Tibet gestures while the games are actually taking place in August.”
While in the lead up to the Games, China attempts to utilize visual imagery to malign Tibetan protestors as violent, or deploy nationalistic bloggers to tote the Party-line online, when international media descends on Beijing, much will be out of the hands of the central administration. Outraged human rights advocates will seize on this opportunity to leverage China’s exposed vulnerability in the eyes of the world. However, to what lengths is the Chinese government willing to go to protect its public persona in preparation for its “coming-out” party? We have already witnessed crackdowns against pro-democratic activism within China and will likely see more. The short-term costs could well be high for what some see as a long-term project of integration into international society.
“…the tragic and farcical developments in recent weeks underscore the inherent conflict between China’s desire to place itself in the global spotlight and its hope that no one will focus on the nation’s flaws.”
Within human rights circles, there is an ongoing debate surrounding China and nations like it: is steady constructive engagement likely to provoke change within a traditional stalwart or is a tougher, abrasive stance more productive in prompting human rights progress? Providing China with the ultimate stage on which either to shine or embarrass itself in the process may be the perfect control group for this experiment to play out. Or, as critics suggest, has the international community honored and appeased China the abuser by allowing it to host an Olympic games? Looking forward, for China to truly emerge as a global leader it must confront international norms, including universal human rights protection. And this summer we will all be witness to this major face-off.
All this and more in this month’s installment of HRHW’s Roundtable.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Editor's Introduction- May 2008
Seductions of Imperialism: Incapacitating Life, Fetishizing Death and Catastrophizing Ecologies
by Anna M. Agathangelou
"It is also crucial to juxtapose the human rights violations with the demands made for the longest time by U.S.-European-Japanese leaders and managers of capital for China to integrate itself into the capitalist production system.”
“China’s Olympic Delusion” is a great piece which gestures to the ironies and/or contradictions of political systems in bed with imperialist-capitalism as we know it at this time: the tensions between a dominant idea that liberal democracy is the best political system to pay attention to and address human rights, and capitalism with no limits, can go hand-in-hand. This is merely the delusion, and also the fantasy, that keeps “us” (i.e., citizens, intellectuals etc) put, and from thinking critically. This is not merely an irony, but I think this idea and its contingent practices have been for the longest time what has mediated and acted as a major subsidy to imperial-capitalism’s reign. Much of human rights talk now focuses its attention on China with regards to Tibet. This is, I do not doubt, a very important strategy, especially now with the attention (i.e., financial investments, economies of profit) that China is taking with the Olympics. As a strategy, it is useful transnationally as it makes these violations known to many in the world, particularly toward mobilizing resources and voices against the bourgeois regime of China when much is being invested there to allow for the “smooth” performances of the Olympics. Yet, China is not only violating Tibetan rights. Authors like Balbir K. Punj have brought to our attention the fact that China is also meddling in other areas (i.e., the appropriating of a section of Kashmir up to 5,800 square km) “in the Shaksgam valley along the Karakoram range with the connivance of Pakistan.” It is also crucial to juxtapose the human rights violations with the demands made for the longest time by U.S.-European-Japanese leaders and managers of capital for China to integrate itself into the capitalist production system. Indeed, it has done so. Yet, this integration can only be sustained by another major violation: incapacitating and catastrophizing our multiple ecologies, including our own bodies. Indeed, if China moves to capitalist production at the rate done in North America and Europe, we would soon be faced with a global environmental crisis. Yet, these human rights violations are not juxtaposed next to each other and next to this major environmental violation. However, human rights violations, including our move to catastrophizing our multiple ecologies are not merely China’s problem. Human rights violations are the norm and have been so in Somalia, Rwanda, Sierre Leone, East Timor, Aceh, Tibet, Iraq, North Korea. They are the norm regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, Tutsis, and Uygurs. They are the norm when one-quarter of the world's population lives below the international poverty line of $145 per year per capita, one billion lack safe water to drink, 880 million lack access to basic health, and millions of us are engaging daily in the destruction of the environment. These are not merely China’s problems. These are global problems that require innovative strategies against structural/ecological/bodily violations that the erection of imperial-capitalism depends on. The United States, for instance, left many poor, black, and queer bodies in New Orleans who now find themselves in the stream of death. Millions of U.S. children live in poverty, some thirty percent of all Americans have no medical insurance, and five to ten million are homeless. One-quarter of all African American males under the age of twenty-five are in jail, on probation, or on parole. And a U.N. Special Rapporteur describes capital punishment in the United States as arbitrary and racially discriminatory. The highest incarceration rate is found in the most liberal democratic country in the world. This is an irony!
As different states, including China, attempt to muffle the voices and the stench of dead bodies piling up around us, testaments to imperial-capitalist efficacy (See Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 2008), it is crucial for us to re-think strategies and interventions to disrupt these dominant discourses that hide/make invisible, and indeed make possible, human/environmental rights violations in the world. The violated, the dead and the dying, the ecologies speak, perhaps in grammars and methods that those who claim liberal democracy and/or economic viability cannot or do not desire to apprehend. History seems to refuse to rest as it persists to “not let us forget” the daily catastrophes we are faced in the world. And we are left to listen and re-direct our energies to disrupt the many violations, but also to articulate socialist projects beyond unlimited profits and ontological structural adjustments and violences. We are left to become intimate with all the human/ecological rights violations, including those we sanction, so that we might resist the seductive calls to a future unmoored by our history. The many different violations and deaths, including the destruction of our ecologies in our communities cannot any longer be marginalized. We must reckon with them (i.e., the killings of people in Iraq all in the name of freedom; the killings of Rwandans all in the name of ethnicity; the killing of Palestinians all in the name of security, etc.) if we are to wrestle ourselves from the thick fantasies and mystifications of a democracy that collapses violence with liberty, and human/ecological rights with imperial capitalism. Demystifying such moves and problematizing such human/ecological rights violations and their contingent structures is the way to counter the forces of structurally adjusting themselves by drawing “value,” and indeed by attempting to ontologically kill people’s lives, bodies, and ecologies to generate more capital and power. It is only then that the “impossible dreams” of unlimited expansion can be exposed and disrupted.
Anna M. Agathangelou is Associate Professor of political science at York University, Toronto and the director of Global Change Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus. Author of The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave 2004), Agathangelou is currently working on a book-project Terror-Necrotic Ontologies of Capital and Empire: Greek Theory and Possibilities for Substantive Democracy.
Beijing's Olympics: Pride, Appearance and Human Rights
by Thomas Beal
"Some wishful thinkers hold out hope.The more likely scenario is that prideful Chinese leaders will continue to act on their obsession with appearance, despite backlash in the court of public opinion.”
One lazy summer evening in Beijing, about fifteen years ago, my wife and I were strolling down Jianguomenwai, the bustling street adjacent to our flat in the Qijiayuan Diplomatic Compound. The day had been sweltering, and as the sun began to set the sidewalks filled with pedestrians who, like us, had escaped their stuffy apartments to take in a cool, soothing breeze.
Just past the Jianguo Hotel we came upon an odd scene: Several dozen people stood transfixed around two men trying to apprehend a strikingly beautiful young woman. One man held her by her arm in a vice-like grip. The elder of the two, whom I took to be her father, wore a watchful, sorrowing expression as he stroked her shoulders and pleaded, “Return home, return home.” The woman cried and half-struggled to break away.
A few seconds passed before my wife nudged me in the arm. I scanned the street corners for a policeman worrying what exactly I would do if I offered the girl help and she were to answer “yes.” But before I could open my mouth, an old woman clad in blue pajamas emerged from the throng. Wagging a menacing finger at the scufflers, she yelled: “What are you doing? Foreigners are watching!” A few moments of awkwardness ensued before the crowd dispersed and the two men and the young woman walked quickly away together.
I thought this incident was worth remembering as we move into the home stretch of the launch of the 2008 Olympic Games: In a culture obsessed with appearances, China ’s leaders will try to prevent the outside world from seeing anything that reflects badly on either the government or nation. As Jeffrey Wasserstrom suggests, responding with a mailed fist to unrest in places like Tibet and Xinjiang, blocking access to Internet sites, arresting dissidents, and censoring foreign entertainers—all of these and more possibly egregious acts of control to come are necessarily required by Beijing’s Olympic “script.”
China’s leaders view the Olympic Games as a national "coming-out party", an historic opportunity to showcase the country’s economic achievements and offer proof that China is worthy of the world’s respect as a global power. And rightly so. Communist Party policies in place since the early 1980s have helped lift an estimated 400 million people out of poverty. Most of the country’s coastal cities are engines for economic growth and prosperity. In recent years, painfully aware it must narrow the widening income gap between the cities and countryside or reap the whirlwind, China’s government has abolished the age-old agricultural tax, ushered in land-lease reform, and implemented a new national medical insurance scheme intended to make health care more affordable for the rural poor. In 2006, the National People’s Congress made nine-year compulsory education in rural areas free. Such gains—and the political stability they help promote—could be undercut by a global economic slowdown if it dampens China’s economic growth rate below the level needed to create a sufficient number of jobs.
Beijing ’s Olympic script must therefore be followed primarily for the way it bestows symbolic approval of Communist Party rule. Playing the part of Olympic host well bolsters the legitimacy of China’s leaders before their own people. In recent weeks, we have seen what happens when the script is not followed; disruptions such as the one in Tibet are interpreted by many Chinese as an embarrassing sign that their leaders may not be in control. Fierce criticism by the West of Chinese policies and actions add to already high dudgeon. Intense feelings of frustration and injustice— acted out on the streets in front of French-owned supermarkets, for example—make everyone a little nervous, including China’s leadership. Traditionally, the Olympic Games end with a fanfare; the Olympic flame is extinguished, and while the Olympic anthem is played the Olympic flag is lowered, unfurled, and carried out of the arena. But Beijing’s Olympic script ends climactically and symbolically when Party leaders and their families move from Zhongnanhai, the secluded compound sheltering them near the Forbidden City, to a glitzy new complex adjacent to the Olympic Green.
Sticking to the script means China’s crackdown on human rights in the run up to the Olympic Games will likely continue. And during the Games? The script includes building the world’s biggest swimming pool and controlling hundreds of thousands of visitors and thousands of journalists, as well as snaring Falun Gong followers, Tibet independence groups, and other pesky activists. The police state will mobilize several hundred thousand members of the security forces, special SWAT teams, a citizen’s army of more than 600,000 Beijing residents and students (one for every expected foreign visitor and journalist), and a cadre of 100,000 official volunteers, half of whom will also have full-time security duties. Surveillance systems cover phone and Internet and include more than 300,000 cameras on streets, subways, hotels and major venues. Doing whatever it takes requires weathering international outrage, should there be any. In this respect, China also has had plenty of valuable experience. For example, in preparation for their bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games, China’s leaders let nothing stand in their way. Then, as now, they launched a nationwide crackdown on dissidents, accompanied by a systematic “clean up” of Beijing. Hundreds of homeless people, petitioners and migrant workers were forcibly removed from the streets, sentenced to re-education camps and detention centers, and even confined to mental hospitals. Factories were shuttered and electricity cut off to clear the air of smog. The campaign intensified in early 1993 as the International Olympic Committee prepared for an inspection tour of the capital. Preparing for the 2008 Games, Chinese authorities arrested 742 people in 2007 for such offenses as “endangering state security”—twice as many as in 2005 ( The official arrest figures for 2007 were announced by a senior Chinese law enforcement official on March 10, 2008.) .
In recent weeks, China has said it will resume human rights talks with the United States and jumpstart dialogue at higher levels with respresentatives of the Dalai Lama. The Chinese government is also said to be ready to hire an international public relations firm in the wake of the Tibet crisis. Some wishful thinkers hold out hope that these are signs China’s leaders might yet “right the ship in the coming months,” as one wrote, with a startling concession, such as the release of political prisoners, aimed at repairing China’s image before the Beijing Olympics. But this hardly jibes with the conviction and sentencing of civil rights activist Hu Jia in April, and what are likely to be grotesque show trials held throughout May f or the more than 1,200 people arrested in the violence in Lhasa in March.
The more likely scenario is that China’s prideful leaders will continue to act on their obsession with appearance, in mainly harsh but predictable ways, despite backlash in the court of public opinion. They are politicians who must wield unchallenged power or appear weak and incapable. Pride, concern with appearance, fear of the loss of face, and the “delusion” Wasserstrom alludes to—these are also themes central to Lu Xun’s novella “The True Story of Ah Q,” whose main character Ah Q symbolizes flaws of the Chinese national character, such as saving face by finding spurious moral victory in defeat. In one scene, a demoralized Ah Q slaps himself on the face. But because he is the person doing the slapping, he sees himself as the victor:
But presently he changed defeat into victory. Raising his right hand he slapped his own face hard, twice, so that it tingled with pain. After this slapping his heart felt lighter, for it seemed as if the one who had given the slap was himself, the one slapped some other self, and soon it was as if he had beaten someone else—in spite of the fact that his face was still tingling. He lay down satisfied that he had gained the victory.
Soon he was asleep.*
* Lu Xun Selected Works, trans. Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985), pp. 111-112.
Thomas Beal is an adjunct instructor at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He lived in China for more than 12 years, during which time he was deputy editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and foreign correspondent for United Press International in Beijing. He has also worked at Agence France-Presse and as a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Beal was honored by Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Journalists Association in 2001 with a special merit award for outstanding editorial/op-ed articles about human rights in China. He holds a master's degree in international relations from Cambridge University, England.
Sport and Politics
by Christine Bell
"I reject the view that we should enforce a separation between politics and sport that does not exist. Sport, and particularly the Olympics, is intrinsically linked with notions of nationality and belonging, and laced with an ethic of fair play and even justice."
I found the reflection interesting, but unsurprising. Protestors use the Olympic spotlight (or should we say torch?) to shine on China’s flaws, and China tries to re-direct or extinguish its beams.
Was China delusional to think that it could boost its reputation through hosting the Olympics? Or did it make a calculation that what it had to gain from the Olympics was more than it had to lose? Do most states try to place themselves in the global spotlight yet hope that no one will focus on their flaws? Do most states not try to rig the spotlight in some way, so that flaws remain in the shadows?
To me, and to the British public, the more interesting question has been whether and how sports events should be used with relation to political change. The developing “torch saga” which post-dated and played out many of the article’s points, has seen the merits of the South African sports boycott and the Moscow Olympic boycott, all re-hashed. In Britain at least, even protestors have been torn between how far to try to interfere and even damage the running of the Olympics, and how far effective protest requires cherishing the Olympics as bigger than the country that hosts it. The show must go on precisely because it does harness aspirations of peaceful unity through diversity. The paradox of course is that it is precisely this bigger side of the Olympic dream that makes it a vehicle for effective protest.
Typically the debate moves as two ships passing each other by at night. Sports should be kept completely separate from politics, versus sports cannot be separate and sporting bodies must be wise to, and even use, the cachet of large scale sporting events to promote other social ends, such as respect for human rights. Personally, I often find myself somewhat torn. I reject the view that we should enforce a separation between politics and sport that does not exist. Sport, and particularly the Olympics, is intrinsically linked with notions of nationality and belonging, and laced with an ethic of fair play and even justice. A country seeks to host a large scale international sporting event precisely because it can enhance its economic and political standing.
However, the types of protests and the effectiveness of them never occur evenly across all human rights violators. Once we open the door to tying sport to human rights issues, we enable wrapping sporting events up in broader geopolitical wrangles, a là Moscow. Furthermore, is it just to penalize those countries with poor civil and political rights records, while ignoring the global socio-economic rights deficits for which Western liberal democracies also bear responsibility? Can not the revenue and job-creating Olympics go some way towards addressing this deficit? In a world in which widening inequalities are one of the major human rights issues, this would also be a human rights problem.
As the torch wend its troubled journey, I found myself in sympathy with those protestors attempting to link their protests with the Olympic spirit, and to counsel the right to disrupt whole-scale celebration without seeking to derail the entire Olympic event. I do not get too upset about television presenters and celebrity personalities who voluntarily undertook the torch-carrying task under full police protection, having to endure protests and even a few runs at the torch. The torch trail is the market place of free speech, and I welcome conflicted spaces where the torch procession can be simultaneously celebrated and cherished and vilified. This is local and global democracy in action.
Also, although I am relatively uninformed about the work of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), I found myself wishing that it had been clearer about the human rights conditionality attached to hosting the event, with a clearer mechanism for ensuring that this was implemented. Most of the problems that arose could have been easily anticipated and responded to in some way—a mediation role that should have taken place appeared to have been missing. But it also seems clear to me that the Olympics alone could not reform China and should not bear that responsibility. The role of the Chinese people and other world powers is much more crucial and they hold more responsibility.
But the sport and politics debate plays out a larger debate about cause and effect and what are effective forms of human rights advocacy. This is the debate as to whether economic liberalization will naturally herald and “bear forth” political liberalization, or whether pressure for political liberalization must be demanded as a condition of greater economic participation. Does giving China the Olympics bring it into a set of relationships, including with the global media, in which human rights abuses will inevitably become more difficult? Or is it dangerous to assume that a reduction in human rights abuses will just happen because this risks shoring up China’s sense of impunity, if and when it finds out that it can get away with “business as usual”?
In essence, this is an argument also about carrots and sticks, and its implications go well beyond China. Do people comply with human rights standards by being made fully participating members of communities whose other members value norms and where “norm-promotion” happens in diffuse ways through subtle forms of international “peer pressure”? Or do the carrots need to be backed up by sticks, with international economic and political goodies conditioned on compliance with human rights and social justice? In an important and influential book, Buying Social Justice, Oxford University Press 2008, Christopher McCrudden has reframed this debate. In brief, he argues for human rights and social justice conditionality in the public procurement context. He does not put it exactly this way, but in essence he suggests that a space that is created enables a conversation between local and global actors in which the application of human rights values are negotiated. This is human rights, not as an inflexible advocated position, but as a way of talking to each other and a way of doing business. McCrudden does not address this year’s Olympics, but his ideas suggest a way of integrating globalized economic transactions and progress with ensuring the human rights of individuals and communities that we would do well to study more.
But if I had to nominate an Olympic Song for this year’s opening ceremony, I might wonder about Kaiser Chief’s “I Predict a Riot” with world leaders in the background crooning The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Christine Bell was born and brought up in Belfast. She is currently Director of the Transitional Justice Institute, and Professor of Public International Law at University of Ulster (based at Magee Campus). She read law at Selwyn College, Cambridge, (1988) and gained an LL.M in Law from Harvard Law School (1990), supported by a Harkness Fellowship. She has authored the book Peace Agreements and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2000), and a report published by the International Council on Human Rights Policy entitled "Negotiating Justice? Human Rights and Peace Agreements" (2006). She has also taken part in various peace negotiations discussions, giving constitutional law and human rights law advice, and also in training for diplomats, mediators and lawyers.
"Instant Karma": How Globalization Contests China's Abuses
by Alison Brysk
"China's long march to global influence may intensify abuse in the short run-but it has the potential to open new pathways for progress in the long run."
China’s rise from impoverished backwater to prospective superpower has been accompanied by the repression of tens of millions of its own people, at the hands of a nationalist, developmentalist government. Under contemporary conditions of globalization, suppression of civil liberties, domination of ethnic minorities, and unholy alliances with resource-rich dictatorships are no longer plausible requisites of this model—if they ever were. The broadening and deepening of economic globalization towards a more sustainable complex of political influence involves “soft power,” including international reputation and norms. Thus, China’s Olympian reach for true hegemony provides the best chance for human rights advocates to weave a transnational “invisible handcuff” that will restrain the worst excesses of China’s rulers, and build a base for the long-term empowerment of China's civil society.
One marker of China’s shifting political environment is the difference between the response to the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the current unrest in Tibet. In 1989, China turned tanks on thousands of peaceful protestors in the heart of its capital city in full view of the world, cut communication links, and followed with a massive manhunt, detentions, and executions. Twenty years ago, China easily defied brief and tepid international sanctions. Today, China has exercised Chiapas-style preemptive caution in responding to less visible and more violent threats—but one reflecting widespread international support. All the major world leaders debate boycotts of the Olympic opening ceremonies, and ongoing consumer-based economic sanctions are a real possibility. Despite some nationalist backlash, world-wide pressures over Darfur boomerang back to inspire Chinese intellectuals to petition for peace in Tibet. China’s leaders carefully defend their response as necessary for sovereignty, “not a question of human rights.” China has clearly moved from the denial to bargaining stages of Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink’s “spiral model” of human rights reform.
International cultural and diplomatic ties are often seen as marginal to the pursuit of national interest and world power. But because sustainable power depends on recognition and reciprocity, nations seek legitimacy, membership, and influence—just as interest-driven firms seek good public relations, consumer confidence, and branding. From the Nazis’ reach for recognition at the Munich 1936 Olympics to Japan's increase in foreign aid as it sought U.N. Security Council membership, states value international prestige as a long-term investment. But that logic opens them to new forms of leverage, as Argentina discovered when hosting the 1978 World Cup which shined a spotlight on its disappearance of political opponents, bringing increased media coverage, transnational contact with activists, and eventually increased international pressure by the U.S. and OAS human rights machinery. Raising the reputational cost of quashing protesters in Lhasa or selling weapons to Khartoum forces China’s political elite to shift their calculus of political dominance, even before it wins hearts and minds.
China ’s long march to global influence may intensify abuse in the short run—but it has the potential to open new pathways for progress in the long run. Economic globalization creates new incentives for prison labor, sweatshop exploitation, trafficking in persons, and even organs, and pillage of resources from unsavory regimes. But meanwhile, informational and cultural exchange, along with increasing involvement in international institutions, may pull China ineluctably towards greater conformity with global norms of civil liberties and religious freedom. With continued pressure over time, illiberal global powers will be hobbled—if not halted—by their own contradictions. What defenders of human rights can learn from the Dalai Lama is how to speed up the karma a little, by turning around the soft power of globalization—while the whole world is watching.
Alison Brysk is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Winner of the 2007-2008 Distinguished Mid-Career Research Award, she has authored or edited six books on international human rights. Professor Brysk has researched and lectured in a dozen countries, and in 2007 held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair in Global Governance at Canada's University of Waterloo/Centre for International Governance Innovation. Brysk is active in promoting human rights through campus, professional, international, and advocacy organizations and networks. Please visit her website: http://www.alisonbrysk.org.
The Olympic Spotlight: The Beijing Games and China as a Future World Leader
by Eric A. Heinze
"By shining the Olympic spotlight on this year's hosts, the world community will be able to judge for itself whether China, as a potential world leader, is going to be worth following."
According to Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s article, if the Chinese think they can censor the Olympics, and the political showcasing that will almost certainly accompany them, they are sorely mistaken. I am persuaded by the thrust of this argument. I just hope that as China vies for global leadership and influence, whatever truths the Olympic spotlight reveals about its potential in this regard are more farcical than tragic.
The Olympics have frequently been accompanied by dramatic events that are indicative of the state of world affairs. Witness Berlin in 1936, Mexico City in 1968, Munich in 1972, and Moscow in 1980. This summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing may likewise reveal some sobering political realities about the world. Namely, is China ready to be a world leader? China’s Olympic theme song, “We Are Ready,” clearly indicates the political message the Chinese want to send. Yet it remains to be seen whether the Beijing Olympics will portray China as the emerging responsible global power that it aspires to be, or reinforce the caricatures of a repressive and undemocratic state that is intolerant of political dissent.
Recent events are indicative of China’s broader political message that it is capable of becoming a responsible world-power. The Chinese government’s “less harsh” response to the recent crisis in Tibet is an obvious one. Likewise, its criticism of Sudan’s policies in Darfur suggest that the Chinese government no longer wants to be known as the country that enabled a genocidal regime because it filled its coffers with money from buying its oil. Such moves are not surprising given what is at stake, even if the stakes are purely symbolic.
But this desire to avoid bad publicity has led Chinese authorities to pursue policies that may have the exact opposite effect. It seems logical that avoiding bad publicity would entail exercising as much control over the flow of information surrounding Olympic coverage as possible. One might therefore expect efforts to prevent reporters from showing China’s pollution problems, human rights abuses, or other problematic social issues. Yet even if China succeeds at controlling media coverage to a certain degree, thus saving face in front of its own people, complete control is impossible. The more China’s authorities try to have complete control over media coverage surrounding the Games and the inevitable demonstrations that will accompany it, the less they will convince the rest of the world that China is “ready.” Such efforts are already having counter-productive outcomes as stories like that of Chinese human rights advocate Hu Jia, who was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power,” begin to make headlines the world over.
In this sense, Wasserstrom is correct that the Chinese are delusional if they think they can fool anyone about their preparedness for global leadership. If the crackdowns on human rights advocates, reporters, and pro-Tibet partisans continue in the run-up to the 2008 Games, then the recent turmoil that accompanied the Olympic torch’s trip through London and Paris will be but a dress rehearsal for the international outrage that could ensue. The news story will then no longer be the Olympic events, but rather the accompanying political showcase—in this case, the censorship of the Olympics and the attempt to hide the uglier side of the communist regime. In this sense, the recent jailing Hu Jia undoubtedly does more harm than good to China’s international standing by distracting international audiences from how we are supposed to be seeing China.
Thus, if world leadership and international respect and attention are what China wants from the Beijing Olympics, then it cannot avoid subjecting itself to international scrutiny. The 2008 Olympic Games are therefore potentially more consequential than any in history. By shining the Olympic spotlight on this year’s hosts, the world community will be able to judge for itself whether China, as a potential world leader, is going to be worth following. In short, if China is not “ready,” then the Beijing Olympics will tell us this…again, hopefully as farce and not as tragedy.
Eric A. Heinze is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Waging Humanitarian War: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (forthcoming, SUNY Press) and numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of international human rights and the ethics and law of armed conflict. Dr. Heinze teaches courses on international law and organization, international human rights, and international relations theory.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Editor's Introduction - August 2007
“How China's Support of Sudan Shields a Regime Called 'Genocidal'" by Danna Harman. Christian Science Monitor. June 26, 2006.
An Annotation:
Once the term “genocide” has been used to identify a conflict, responding in defense of civilians and working towards peaceful resolution requires identifying those obstacles to stability and respect for human rights. In the case of Darfur, there is no shortage of obstacles: the self-deluding administration in Khartoum; the complicit United States that depends on the Sudanese government for intelligence in combating the “war on terror;” the ineffective African Union; and the bureaucratically intractable United Nations—to name just a few of the most prominent players. Increasingly, activists are raising the issue of China’s role in supporting the genocide, as the rising superpower has crept-in under the radar as a business partner, political defender and weapons dealer for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir regime.
“…[I]n its role as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China has continuously blocked effective action against Sudan by arguing for the respect of Sudan’s sovereignty.”
The self-serving consequences of this diplomatic approach are clear: If sufficient precedent is set that domestic human rights violations are not the concern of the international community, then China has less to fear, in terms of future repercussions, for its own notorious domestic disregard for the human rights. In an attempt to defend human rights abuses, many nations appeal to sovereignty and self-determination. However, this is largely a smokescreen aimed at shifting focus away from human rights practices toward debates about the relevance of international norms and the relative nature of human rights. The longer these excuses are accepted as justification for human rights violations, the more difficult it will be for advocates to champion ideas about universal application of human rights standards.
“…China does not tie its aid or investment to conditions such as good governance, fighting corruption, or adopting reforms—the sort of conditions that have long been mainstays for the West and international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”
The ability of China to outbid and under-restrict Western institutions for aid projects in the developing world threatens development and compromises attempts at democratization and advancing human rights. Despite the array of well-deserved criticism aimed at international financial organizations, at least moderate provisions for accountability and transparency, on the part of the recipient, accompany these investments. Termed by one commentator as “rogue aid,” this phenomenon skews the balance of power dramatically away from the West in favor of China, as well as any other nation that can afford to participate in this “auction” in which influence over the politics of developing countries can be bought and sold at the most competitive price.
“…[M]any critics say that China’s willingness to befriend, do business with, and diplomatically protect questionable regimes does not end with Sudan.”
The Cold War was replete with examples of superpowers propping up tyrannical regimes in the name of (questionable) security interests, as well as for ideological purposes (i.e., to prevent the spread of communism/liberal democracy). What we are witnessing with respect to the Chinese support of the genocidal regime in Sudan, as well as others in the region, is a strategy justified not even in the name of security or ideology, but merely by economics. At stake here is the future of the developing world, whose people are not well-served by the perpetuation of corrupt governance, political instability and dictatorial rule. Defenders of human rights must meet this challenge because failure to do so has dire consequences for the people of Africa, as well as those within China, who will only be further disenfranchised as its government increasingly operates outside of international normative frameworks.
These issues and many more are addressed in this month’s installment of Human Rights & Human Welfare’s Roundtable.
~ The Editors
Ending the Cold War is a Good Place to Start
by Judith Blau
“The reason I...discount many accounts in the U.S. media about China is that I feel that many American commentators and journalists [are] unaware of how complicit the U.S. is in the darkest and most grievous affairs around the world."
Recently, I told my daughter that the U.S. media had hyped the Chinese toy recall. “Just more rehashing of Cold War rhetoric,” I said. My two-year old daughter rebuked me: “Come on, Mom! You read politics into everything!” Then, after a moment or two of silence, she said, “Oh yes, I see what you mean. The Chinese toys with toxic paints could have been made in sweatshops owned by U.S. multinationals” (proud mom—politically aware daughter).
The reason I am so quick to discount many accounts in the U.S. media about China (and Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, “Old Europe,” Iran, etc.) is that I feel that many American commentators and journalists too easily fall for the official U.S. party line, unaware of how complicit the U.S. is in the darkest and most grievous affairs around the world. The easy path is to blame other countries, as Danna Harman blames China for inaction on behalf of Darfuri civilians in her Christian Science Monitor article—the focus of this month’s Roundtable.
The U.S. is up to no good. The evidence is overwhelming that U.S. officials drastically exaggerate the obstructionist role that China is playing in the Sudanese genocide to divert attention from the obstructionist role that the U.S. is playing. Independent media outlets document why it is not in the interests of the U.S. to get tough with Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan. All Africa News Service, Africa Action, Africa Resource Center, Sudan Net and Africa Speaks all provide comprehensive coverage of the Sudanese barbarism and the complicities of foreign governments in Sudanese affairs—including China and the United States. Although the U.S. has gone through some motions in the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution that would deploy a large peacekeeping force in Sudan, inside observers say that the U.S.’s commercial and military interests are dominant and the U.S. is just dragging its feet, while attempting to maintain public appearances.
From the mid-1980s until September 11, 2001, the CIA relied on the Sudanese, chiefly Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, for intelligence about Osama bin Laden. Gosh supplied the CIA office in Khartoum with information, and occasionally was flown to Washington D.C. to report on bin Laden’s activities before bin Laden left for Afghanistan in 1996. After that, Gosh and others in the Sudanese government continued to supply the CIA with information on Arab Islamists traveling through African countries to the Middle East. In June 2003, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the Bush Administration was still maintaining an intelligence-sharing partnership with the government of Sudan. What Zoellick did not disclose, but what African news sources report (also in The Los Angeles Times), is that the Sudanese government recruits and trains U.S. spies for deployment in both Iraq and Somalia. In a 2007 interview with an LA Times reporter, Sudan’s ambassador to the U.S., John Ukec Lueth Ukec, said that tougher sanctions would affect his country’s willingness to cooperate with the U.S. on matters of intelligence. Nat Hentoff published an article in Truth Out with the title, “CIA’s Close Relationship with Sudan’s Government Enables Genocide there to Continue,” referring to the U.S.-Sudan partnership on espionage and intelligence.
However, intelligence is not the only thing that the U.S. puts ahead of the lives of Darfuri civilians. Rich oil deposits and abundant water resources are something that the U.S. dearly covets—Chevron discovered major oil deposits in southern Sudan in 1979-80, estimating that Sudan had more oil than Iran and Saudi Arabia put together. Water is now viewed as a valuable commodity and the blue Nile and the White Nile meet in Sudan. America’s rival, China, now controls 40 percent of the Sudanese oil sector, with Pakistan, Malaysia, Russia and France controlling the rest. Although Fidelity recently divested from Sudan, other American investors remain, and Sudan continues to court more American and other foreign investors, still perfectly legal and actively encouraged by the World Bank. New laws also make it easier for companies to invest indirectly in Sudan through second and third parties, which Chevron now appears to be doing through Indonesia.
Toward a Better World?
Those of us who have attended any of the World Social Forums (WSF) know that the current geopolitical system that makes the Sudanese genocide possible cannot last. The people of the world will not put up with it, and the planet cannot sustain it. This seems like a remarkably naïve statement, except for the fact that the WSF is so incredibly multi-stranded, and is as much a part of local communities as it is embedded in interconnected, international networks. The brilliance of the Forum is that other than human rights and a commitment to deep forms of democracy, there is no substantive agenda except to make a “possible better world, an alternative world, a world for the people.”
WSF participants include international NGOs such as Via Campesina, Food First, ATTAC, ActionAid, Social Watch, Focus on the Global South, Africa Forum on Small Arms, and many, many others. They increase exponentially because of local-national-regional-global networks facilitated by the Internet.
But how can a peoples’ movement possibly deal with the immense power of the United States and China to dismantle dictatorial power in Sudan? Can it shatter the hold of economic elites of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO? Can it bring down the brutal, military dictatorship in Myanmar? Can it eradicate hunger and suffering in Haiti, Zambia, North Korea and everywhere else? I do not believe for a second that it is impossible. By emphasizing human rights principles of equality and self-determination, people’s movements can influence the type of change global superpowers fear.
Judith Blau has published three books on human rights with Alberto Moncada: Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Vision (2005); Justice in the United States: Human Rights & the US Constitution (2006); and, Freedoms and Solidarities: In Pursuit of Human Rights (2007). She is Director of the Social and Economic Justice (interdisciplinary) Undergraduate Minor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Blau and Moncada are now working on a volume on human rights that will be published by Paradigm. Outside of her academic work, Blau also serves as President of Sociologists without Borders.
Integrating China into an International Human Rights Regime: The Case of Darfur
by Harry Kreisler
“Without the U.S...Chinese policy will drift...humanitarian intervention often involves strong words by the international community followed up with little action.”
Chinese leaders find themselves in unknown territory as they guide the Chinese state. Their unusual experiment combines Communist party rule with unbridled capitalism. Under these unique circumstances, a major challenge they face is to define their country’s global role as an emerging power. From what compass will they navigate their direction? If their guidance system is built for a world of international anarchy, national interest and power politics, then the direction of their course is clear. Because of U.S. neglect and indifference, Africa, rich in natural resources, is up for grabs. Flexing its muscles on the world stage with its “soft power,” China has the economic power to buy friends and win influence in Africa and withstand international pressure.
In their foreign policy, Chinese leaders are heavily influenced by domestic politics, the need for economic prosperity, and a desire for international prestige. They are not unmindful of the nationalist aspirations of the people of China. In Susan Shirk’s analysis, China is a “fragile superpower.” Having access to oil is a sine qua non of maintaining prosperity at home—a prosperity that keeps the party in power. By these metrics, Sudan is important and China’s relationship with the Sudanese regime must be protected; respecting Sudan’s sovereignty makes sense and concerns about human rights violations are secondary.
But there is another side to China’s dilemma. Chinese decision makers confront an interdependent world and the acceptance of the rule of international law cannot be rejected out of hand. In an era of globalization, China’s power is insured by its economic success. It holds reserves of a trillion dollars—three quarters of which is in U.S. bonds. But this strength is a double-edged sword. The world’s dependence on China goes with China’s dependence on the world as a market for its products. This relationship produces jobs guaranteeing a phenomenal growth rates averaging seven percent per year. Moreover, The intelligent use of its soft power creates the opportunity to convert its economic power into influence and ultimately consolidate its position through matching military capability.
In the meantime, China has to care about what the world thinks of its behavior. Therefore, for internal and external reasons, China needs recognition through events such as the 2008 Olympics.
A key variable in shaping Chinese behavior is the influence, prestige and goals of the world’s only superpower—the United States. In debating its Sudan policy, what should Chinese leaders learn from American action in Iraq? If the Iraq intervention had been successful, the spigot to control that oil would be in the hands of future American Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds.
China sees itself as respecting the sovereignty of Sudan and avoiding interference in Sudan’s internal affairs. It refuses to embrace openly international pronouncements concerning human rights violations. Chinese policy makers might ask themselves: How does this compare to what the U.S. is doing in Iraq? In Iraq, which international norms are the United States committed to enforcing?
So, in Sudan, as China attempts to navigate among national security concerns and the norms of international human rights law, the international community confronts its own dilemma. A rising power is learning how to assume its international responsibilities while protecting its national interest for oil resources. The dominant world power, the United States, addresses the crisis in Sudan with its role as moral leader compromised because of its irresponsible adventures in Iraq. Having sacrificed its moral authority and military power in the Iraq catastrophe, the U.S.’s pivotal role as moral leader is diminished. Without the U.S. in a position to move the emerging power toward concerns for humanitarian law, Chinese policy will drift, showing flexibility behind the scenes but refusing to endanger its strategic position. After all, humanitarian intervention often involves strong words by the international community followed up with little action. In this context, Chinese behavior will be contradictory—at times, China will use its influence to moderate Sudan’s policies and other times it will use its influence to stabilize the flow of oil to its booming economy.
In today’s nightmarish world, the people of Darfur are not the only victims. Sudan is emblematic of how much has been lost in the wake of the debacle in Iraq—greatly diminished is humanity’s hope for an international order that transcends power politics and embraces an international regime where crimes against humanity are prevented.
Harry Kreisler is Executive Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. In that role, he shapes, administers, and implements interdisciplinary academic and public affairs programs that analyze global issues. He is also creator, executive producer and host of Conversations with History, an interview program, broadcast nationally every Thursday evening on sattelite television, and on cable throughout California. Conversations with History is also a critically acclaimed online archive containing more than 360 one-hour interviews with distinguished men and women from all over the world who talk about their lives and their work. Harry Kreisler is also Executive Producer of Connecting Students to the World, a World Wide Web -based program that introduces students and retirees to leading figures in international affairs through online curricula, preparatory workshops, and Internet conversations.
China's Africa Strategy: The Puzzle of Trade and Reform
by Mahmood Monshipouri
“This policy undermines the Western policy of demanding transparency, accountability, and respect for human rights.... China’s strategy clearly puts economic interests and civic work above concerns for basic freedoms.”
China’s growing presence is certainly one of the most important developments in Africa since the end of the Cold War. The strategy of “trade and non-interference” is how the Chinese government describes its relations with Africa. Oil and metals, such as cobalt, iron ore, and manganese are what China’s manufacturing industry needs; while foreign direct investment and an increase in oil production are what some African governments—especially those in Angola, Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—seek.
Danna Harman’s article sets out to explain the sharp rise in Chinese interest in Africa. Trade between China and the African continent has reached a record volume of $55 billion. Chinese foreign direct investment exceeded $1.25 billion in 2006, with Sudan being its top recipient. Sudanese production of oil has risen from about 60,000 barrels per day in 1999 to more than 500,000 in 2006, largely due to Chinese investment. This policy undermines the Western policy of demanding transparency, accountability, and respect for human rights in return for access to trade and investment. China’s strategy clearly puts economic interests and civic work above concerns for basic freedoms.
Chinese leaders insist that they will not “interfere” in other countries’ domestic affairs. China’s aid, development programs, and debt relief have overtaken that of the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). China will also build 30 hospitals and 30 clinics as part of its $37.5 million package to assist African countries to fight malaria. China has canceled more than $10 billion in debt for 31 African countries and has given $5.5 billion in development aid, with a pledge of a further $2.6 billion in 2007-2008.
China-Sudan relations, however, have been overshadowed by a seemingly intractable and annoying problem: Darfur’s four-year-long conflict. The Sudanese government continues to intensify this conflict by giving money and arms to various groups, but keeping those weapons under government control has become increasingly difficult. Khartoum’s involvement is more about politics than ethnic cleansing. The Sudanese government has in the past armed janjaweed militias to suppress a rebellion in South Sudan. But its failure to compensate tribes who lost fighters, along with the realization that they had been used, caused the militias to switch sides. The militia eventually joined the rebels, forcing the government to sign a peace agreement in November 2006, which calls for the deployment of international peacekeeping forces. Meanwhile, pressure is ratcheting up for U.N. sanctions, asset freezes, and criminal indictments. Some Sudanese officials and militia leaders have been charged by the International Criminal Court with numerous counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Given this genocidal state conduct, the neutral position adopted by the Chinese government is problematic at best. The real question is: Should China share responsibility for the genocidal killings of non-Arab Sudanese in Darfur? China has frequently opposed economic sanctions on Sudan. The Darfur crisis has killed more than 200,000 and displaced more than 2.5 million in Western Sudan.
Chinese investors in Sudan have found a secure place for their business opportunities. The amount of money transferred to the semiautonomous government of South Sudan, Harman writes, is left to the discretion of Khartoum. The production and sales figures all go directly to the Ministry of Mining and Energy from the Chinese-run Greater Nile Production Company, with little or no oversight regarding whether the estimates are accurate. In recent months, as Danna Harman points out, South Sudan’s share in oil revenues has sharply dropped from nearly $80 million in January to below $40 million in March. China buys 64 percent of the country’s oil and is a key partner in the consortiums extracting the oil. China’s National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) controls between 60 to 70 percent of Sudan’s total oil production. Additionally, it owns the largest single share (40 percent) of Sudan’s national oil company, Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company.
China’s preference for quiet diplomacy appeared to have paid off when President Omar al-Bashir conceded to a deployment of 3,500 U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur. Yet China’s willingness to do business and maintain normal diplomatic relations with repressive regimes, such as Zimbabwe, is troubling. To condone human rights violations in Zimbabwe and other African countries is certain to undermine China’s international image as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics.
The deleterious effects of China’s policy on Africans’ human rights and governance need to be balanced against the economic gains stemming from trade. Improving governance and tackling corruption are as crucial for creating an effective business environment, as are loans and investments. Disregarding this reality is much too risky for those Chinese companies, which are keen on using wise tactics to promote their brand, products, and images. Ultimately, the Chinese will find it contrary to their national interests to continue doing business as usual with repressive regimes. China’s reaction to such criticisms has been slow in coming, as it has appointed a Chinese special representative for Darfur and has vowed to enhance its humanitarian aid to Sudan, while sending in about 300 Chinese military engineers to help relieve an excessive burden placed on the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Dr. Monshipouri is a Professor in the Department of International Relations at San Francisco State University and currently a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Dr. Monshipouri's publications include Islamism, Secularism, and Human Rights in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), and, more recently, the volume Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (eds. Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, Andrew J. Nathan, and Kavita Philip, Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2003).
Countering Chinese Influence in Sudan
by Ali Wyne
“While I would hardly be so naïve as to suggest that a resolution to the ongoing crisis [in Darfur] can readily be achieved, it seems, once again, that the central impediment to one is political will.”
It is difficult to imagine a more poisonous symbiosis than that between China and Sudan. The former requires a continuous flow of low-cost oil imports to satisfy its soaring oil demand, and the latter requires sufficient economic support to immunize itself against international interventions and preempt potential internal uprisings. Sudan supplies 64 percent of its oil to China (meeting seven percent of the economic power’s demand in 2006), and China, for its part, has invested heavily in Paloich, one of the country’s central oil-producing areas.
China’s appeal to Sudan, a fellow authoritarian country, is manifest. Unfortunately, however, no democracies have challenged its influence in the country, a fact that becomes further disheartening when one recognizes that liberal states can actually offer the embattled state a far more appealing investment program. The absence of human rights conditionality, one of the prominent characteristics of China’s offer, is admittedly difficult to counter. However, China has invested almost exclusively in oil-related infrastructure. In order to compete, the West could propose a far more diversified package—to include investment in Sudan’s oil regions, to be sure, but also to include investment in irrigation technologies and high-yield crops (the country’s economy is largely agrarian)—conditioned on the regime’s making good-faith efforts to halt hostilities in the country. Short-term instability may prove advantageous to the Sudanese government insofar as it affords it a vacuum in which to consolidate its power, but as armed conflict envelops the countries that border Sudan, instability becomes increasingly costly.
Encouragingly, a “hybrid” force of the United Nations and African Union (A.U.) is primed to supplant the A.U. Mission in the Sudan. That unit, however, will likely meet the fate of its predecessor—which proved unable to establish a durable peace—unless it receives robust financial support. The imperative of provisioning such support takes on added urgency when one notes that the conflict in Sudan increasingly threatens Chad and the Central African Republic.
This new force, however, is not the only entity that requires attention. Humanitarian organizations must receive better protection; they have been the object of growing levels of violence and, not surprisingly, have begun to leave en masse. How can a civil society be expected to challenge the government if it is subject to daily terror and, more importantly, if it is unable to procure the basic necessities for survival: water; food; and shelter?
Although this war is, in part, racially motivated, it is also, perhaps more importantly, a resource war. Indeed, resource scarcity has been a root cause and sustainer of much of the violence that has plagued Sudan since it achieved independence in 1956. Britain’s Department for International Development offered the following assessment of the conflict: “It is largely a battle for resources, land, water and grazing rights together with a related struggle for power within the indigenous tribal administration structure.” In consideration of this fact, the discovery by Boston University researchers of “a huge underground lake in Sudan’s Darfur region” is especially encouraging. At a minimum, it introduces a new, and potentially powerful, element into the Darfur calculus. A comprehensive deal, the bare outline of which I proved earlier, should use this potentially important new resource as a point of departure.
There is a certain perversity to framing such unspeakable, unfolding horrors in practical terms. Unfortunately, however, as Samantha Power documented in her masterful account, A Problem from Hell, even the awareness that genocide is occurring rarely compels the necessary interventions on the part of those who can do the most to stop it. In Sudan, the world confronts yet another ghastly specter and yet another test of its will to preserve human dignity. While I would hardly be so naïve as to suggest that a resolution to the ongoing crisis therein can readily be achieved, it seems, once again, that the central impediment to one is political will. Chinese influence is formidable, but it can be challenged. What will the world do this time?
Ali Wyne is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is pursuing dual degrees in Management and Political Science, as well as a minor in Economics. He serves as Vice-President of the Undergraduate Association, and as Editor-in-Chief of the MIT International Review, MIT’s first journal of international affairs. He will be contributing a chapter, “How World Opinion Challenges American Foreign Policy,” to a forthcoming volume, The Public Diplomacy Handbook (Routledge 2008). He maintains a blog on global problems and solutions, “The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting.”
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