U.S.: Talks with China hampered by Beijing's rights abuses
BEIJING — The leader of a U.S. delegation on human rights in China said Friday that the repression of basic freedoms has grown worse here and that U.S. efforts to learn more about several jailed Chinese dissidents has gone nowhere.
"We've continued to see a deterioration of the overall human rights situation in China," said Uzra Zeya, acting assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Zeya's assessment appeared unchanged from that which her predecessor reached in the annual talks held last year in Washington.
The two countries have held regular human rights conferences, known as the U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, since 1990. China suspended the talks during the administration of George W. Bush over its criticism of China at the United Nations for the repression of citizens.
Tied by trade and multiple other links, the world's top two economies hold regular talks on a range of regional and global issues. But talking about human rights is one of the oldest and thorniest topics on the agenda between the two nations.
This year's dialogue is the 18th and it opened Tuesday in Kunming, the capital of southwest China's Yunnan province. During the conference, Zeya highlighted the way Chinese authorities have in recent months targeted the family members of human rights activists, such as jailed Nobel Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo, and blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and the increased controls on Tibetans and Uighurs in western China.
On Friday, at a news conference in Beijing, Zeya said the U.S. side, which included national security staff and representatives from the White House, State Department, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency, raised more than eight specific human rights cases with their Chinese counterparts, including the recently detained legal activist Xu Zhiyong and the long disappeared lawyer Gao Zhisheng, in the hope of hearing about their health and whereabouts.
Those cases were selected as being "illustrative of the wider systemic human rights problems that exist in China," including abuse of the freedoms of association and expression, and the right to peaceful dissent, Zeya said. "In some cases, we were able to receive some information," she said, but "overall, it fell short of expectations."
Some human rights say the "dialogue" fails to do much about repression. Ahead of this week's talks, the New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Washington to insist on the setting of benchmarks to demonstrate whether Beijing meets the commitments it has sometimes made to protect human rights.
Zeya said the Obama administration is "trying to achieve a more results-oriented approach. But I wouldn't frame that in terms of benchmarks."
Talking with the Chinese government is often difficult, said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.
"The two sides do talk but have little to show for it," she said. "The human rights dialogue risks producing very little unless there's a stronger push towards measurables at the end instead of just talking."
China appears less interested in placating Western complaints about Chinese repression.
In recent years, China has reduced the number and length of such discussions it holds with Western countries, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S. non-profit that lobbies for better rights through dialogue.
"Chinese representatives are also increasingly vocal in blasting the human rights records of their Western counterparts," said a Dui Hua report last year.
Li Fangping, one of a group of human rights lawyers who is often harassed and occasionally "detained" by authorities, says the talks are still meaningful despite China's posture.
"It achieves little in the short term, but from a macro and long-term perspective, there are great benefits," he said. "It helps make human rights public and mainstream, and more people can be aware of the issues through digital media."
The talks receive little attention in China media, where the state closely monitors both traditional and new media. But besides some commentaries that were critical of United States, some micro-blog users grabbed the chance to critique their own system.
China should send some of its infamous city management teams, or chengguan, to the USA, joked Beijing lawyer Xu Xin on Weibo, a Twitter-like service that has boomed as Twitter is banned here.
They could help Americans "face the terrible human rights situation, and learn advanced experience from China," he wrote.
The chengguan have committed multiple abuses across China, including a case in July where a farmer was beaten to death for selling watermelons in an unauthorized location.
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