A Nuanced Approach to China Needs Human Rights at the Core

Foreign policy pundits have been calling for a rethink to counter Washington’s alleged groupthink. There’s a certain truth in that. But one element has been missing from the mainstream of the new doves on China: human rights. Without this, their words can end up sounding hollow—especially to the victims.

Two recent events prompted new levels of concern. First, on Feb. 4, U.S. President Joe Biden made the decision to shoot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it flew across U.S. territory. Second, a new committee in Congress, the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), held its first public hearing on Feb. 28. It was the assessment by Rep. Mike Gallagher that the CCP posed an “existential” threat, and the seeming bipartisan agreement to the assessment, that set off alarm bells.

Prominent foreign affairs commentators Fareed Zakaria and Edward Luce accused the new bipartisan consensus of groupthink that could lead to war. Max Boot warned of “bipartisan alarmism” and called for a nuanced assessment of the CCP’s threat. On April 5, a group of prominent American former officials and CEOs, including former U.S. ambassadors to China, published an open letter to Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping urging them to “work diligently to repair and stabilize the state of affairs between our two countries.”

The common denominator to these op-eds and open letter seemed to be the perception that U.S.-China relations have gone dangerously off track. And indeed, while the CCP may pose a severe challenge to the United States, Washington needs to have a well thought out strategy, should not blame China for its domestic ills, and should not needlessly forsake opportunities for communication and cooperation with China.

But, for a real check on groupthink and a more nuanced perspective to win the day, policymakers and thinkers must address the role of human rights, which has been largely absent from the critique of the new bipartisan consensus thus far. Addressing human rights strongly is not only the moral thing to do, but it is necessary for a nuanced approach in order to have any hope of having those views adopted as policy. Without this, the advocates of a more calibrated approach to Beijing may end up alienating the significant communities threatened by China’s growing crackdowns—and even implicitly endorsing Beijing’s actions.

Uyghurs and other predominately Muslim groups face crimes against humanity and even the potential for significant loss of life. From 2017 onward, the Chinese government arbitrarily detained an estimated 1 million in so-called reeducation camps in Xinjiang, a northwest region four times the size of California. In the most recent House select committee hearing, a former camp detainee, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, testified to widespread torture and gang-rape within the camps, including with electric batons and tiger chairs: “And the worst thing is they—the guards or police—use electric batons to insert their private parts to rape and torture them.”

This firsthand account of witnessing torture aligns with numerous reports of torture documented by the Xinjiang Victims Database.

Although the massive arbitrary detentions may have ended, hundreds of thousands of these people and others have been subjected to long prison sentences and unfair trials. Since 2017, when many people were rounded up in large numbers, the international community has seen no evidence that the people given long sentences have been released from prison. In 2022, the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate, the regional agency responsible for prosecution, stated that 540,826 people had been prosecuted in the region since 2017. It’s likely that almost all have been convicted , as the Chinese courts have a 99.99 percent conviction rate. My organization, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), is unaware of any Uyghurs being afforded lawyers of their choice.

Uyghur poets, writers, doctors, and other professionals, who are often in middle age, have been subjected to long prison terms, life in prison, or even death. There is every reason to suspect that prison conditions are just as bad as the camps. The Xinjiang Victims Database has recorded 225 deaths in custody, likely the tip of the iceberg.

To see the dangers of prolonged detention, take the case of Ekpar Asat. Ekpar took part in the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leader Program, and upon his return to China in 2016, he was detained and sentenced to 15 years on the charge of “inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination.” There was no evidence that the trial was public or that Ekpar had a lawyer, in violation of international law. His sister, Yale Law School fellow Rayhan Asat, said on Twitter that her parents recently had a brief two-minute video chat with him, and he looked “unrecognizable and lost huge weight” so that he just “looked like a skull.”

Until Ekpar and all those who have been unjustly imprisoned are released and are found to be healthy and alive, the U.S. government and others who are pushing for more sensible U.S.-China ties must act as if it were probable that a significant number of these people may die in prison or may have been otherwise killed.

That moral calculus must underlie attitudes toward Beijing—not least because sustained foreign attention has made a difference before. The Chinese government once denied it was locking people up in reeducation camps at all, but it was after the U.N. review of China’s record of its implementation of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in August 2018 that the government finally admitted that many people were indeed being held in “vocational education and training centers.”

As the controversy over the camps continued, the Xinjiang government unexpectedly announced in July 2019 that “over 90 percent of the students” in the camps had returned to society and the camp system had ended. Since the government has not allowed independent human rights experts into the region, it is impossible to verify those claims, but journalists traveling in the region have observed that some former reeducation camps seem to have been abandoned or converted to other uses.

This shows that international pressure can have some effect—even if only partially and incompletely, as the continued detention of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in the prison system and the targeting of Uyghur religion and culture shows. But even this is meaningful.

The Chinese Han majority also need attention from foreign powers regarding human rights. In a new report, CHRD found that, even under Xi’s dictatorial rule, human rights defenders were finding ways to build support networks. They were continuing their work for a better tomorrow and were simply “persisting in resisting.”

We found that human rights defenders made use of the few legal tools available to them, despite China’s deeply flawed legal system and lack of independence of the judiciary. They were often at the forefront in assisting marginalized populations and helping to build a more inclusive China. And they overwhelmingly expressed that attention to individual cases by foreign governments, the United Nations, and NGOs played a positive role in putting pressure on the government and improving conditions for human rights defenders.

Barring the possibility of war, it may be accurate that the CCP does not pose an “existential threat” to most Americans, and such a misdiagnosis can lead to the wrong “prescriptions.” But it’s important to recognize that for many Uyghurs, Chinese human rights defenders, and their family members, the CCP does indeed pose an “existential threat.”

Underplaying the severity of the human rights crisis in China—or even ignoring it altogether—will only lead to resentment and a feeling of unseriousness for the victims of abuse and people who follow their stories. Even on a practical level, human rights groups, religious leaders, diaspora communities, and concerned allies will consistently put pressure on the government to do more. Beijing’s worrying record on human rights and the constant stream of untruths about how it treats its own people are also bound to raise concerns about whether it can be a good faith actor on the international stage.

Ignoring the gravity of the human rights challenge posed by the CCP, or treating it as an annoying irritant in the way of constructive relations, makes it less likely that a nuanced approach will be listened to. Foreign-policy thinkers should recognize that a forceful strategy on human rights is absolutely necessary—even if matched with actions elsewhere to ease geopolitical tensions.