The harsh sentence handed down on Friday to Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), one of China’s most prominent campaigners for democracy and human rights, prompted strong rebukes in the US and Europe, but it also raised fresh questions over whether the West has much leverage over a government that is increasingly self-assured on the world stage.
By sentencing Liu to 11 years in prison for subversion, the Chinese government sent a chilling message to advocates of political reform and free speech. Liu, 53, a former literature professor who helped draft a manifesto last December that demanded open elections and the rule of law, was convicted after a closed two-hour trial on Wednesday in which his lawyers were allowed less than 20 minutes to state his case.
But many experts on Chinese politics said that Liu’s conviction on vague charges of “incitement to subvert state power” through his writing was also an unmistakable signal to the West that China would not yield to international pressure when it came to human rights. During his visit to China last month, President Barack Obama raised Liu’s case with President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). Leaders of the EU have been pressing for his release.
But a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry described such pressure on Tuesday as “gross interference in China’s judicial internal affairs.” The next day, more than two dozen US and European diplomats who sought to observe the trial were barred from the courthouse.
“If China’s Communist Party wanted to advertise to the world that they will do anything to protect their power and use the judiciary to accomplish that, then the persecution of Liu Xiaobo was a perfect vehicle,” Jerome Cohen, an expert on China’s legal system and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Friday.
The US State Department issued a statement on Friday calling on China to release Liu, saying that the “persecution of individuals for the peaceful expression of political views is inconsistent with internationally recognized norms of human rights.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “dismayed” by the sentence. The UN said Liu’s conviction had thrown “an ominous shadow” over China’s commitments to human rights.
Such pointed criticisms are unlikely to have much effect, many China analysts said. Hu assumed power in 2004 after a period of modest legal reforms. But under his leadership, the government has presided over a tightening of Internet restrictions, the repression of rights lawyers and the persecution of intellectuals who call for greater transparency and an end to single-party rule. Those who thought that the leadership might loosen its controls for the Beijing Olympics last year were disheartened by the crackdown that took place to prevent people who wanted to stage demonstrations.
Edward Friedman, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said many people in the West had been clinging to the misguided notion that China’s economic development would quickly lead to political liberalization.
“It’s clear that what matters most to the Chinese Communist Party is the survival of the regime and their monopoly on power,” he said.
Many human rights advocates partly blame Western political leaders for putting up with China’s growing intolerance of domestic dissent. They contend that as China’s economic power has expanded, the US and Europe have been softening calls for human rights.
They were especially critical of US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to Beijing last February, arguing that human rights took a back seat to an agenda focused on economic concerns and efforts to gain China’s cooperation in dealing with Iran and North Korea.
Many human rights advocates were also critical of Obama’s decision to put off a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, shortly before the president’s visit to Beijing. The move, they said, was designed to avoid offending China.
The White House insists that it is committed to promoting freedom, but says that it is trying to make its case without the public hectoring favored by the Bush and Clinton administrations. Hillary Clinton has called the approach “principled pragmatism.”
Phelim Kine, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, said quiet diplomacy was valuable at times, but that without real pressure from the US, its largest trading partner, China had no incentive to improve its human rights record.
“In the aftermath of the tragic conviction of Liu Xiaobo, we really need to think about how the US is going to engage China and make sure that there are real benchmarks for progress,” he said.
He and others maintain that the US and its allies must break free from a mentality that fears the economic might of a rising China. The US can no longer prod China on human rights through the annual battle over “most-favored nation” trading status, because China is now a member of the WTO. But human rights advocates say that the White House still has substantial leverage when it comes to trade.
And while China may hold hundreds of billions of dollars of the US government’s debt in the form of Treasury bonds and other Treasury securities, some analysts play down concerns about the possibility of China retaliating against US pressure over human rights by selling off its holdings. Gordon Chang (章家敦), author of The Coming Collapse of China, said that the Chinese government simply had nowhere else to park its swelling foreign reserves.
China’s huge trade imbalance with the US, Chang said, is a potential cudgel that Washington should be prepared to use.
“President Obama can get on the phone with Hu Jintao and say these are the things you need to do,” he said.
“We are extremely indulgent about irresponsible Chinese conduct when it comes to human rights,” Chang added. “We are encouraging the very type of behavior we’re trying to prevent.”
The Chinese leadership is still nervous about the potential for domestic unrest that could threaten its power. Although not timid in its prosecution of Liu, the authorities made sure that coverage of his trial stayed out of the state-run news media.
Even as it questioned hundreds of people who put their signatures on Charter 08, the manifesto that Liu helped to draft, government censors made sure that any mention of the document was quickly scrubbed from the Internet after it became public a year ago.
There was one exception, however. On Friday, the English-language edition of Xinhua, the official news agency, published a brief item about Liu’s sentencing. The article said the court “had strictly followed the legal procedures in this case and fully protected Liu’s litigation rights.”
The Chinese-language version of Xinhua, however, made no mention of the verdict. Instead, it declared 2009 the “year of citizens’ rights.”
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