Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

A particular focus of foreign concern over Tibet as well as other areas of Communist Party rule is China’s record on human rights. This is a subtle and complex issue. As the prominent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote at the height of the Cold War,

Politics is a game of vulnerabilities, and the human rights issue is clearly where the “socialist” world has proven most vulnerable, just as the economic rights issue is where the “capitalist” world is most open to criticism. . . . The debate on human rights can be conceptualized in part as a struggle between eighteenth century libertarian persuasions [the West] and nineteenth century egalitarian beliefs [China]—that is, from a vision of human rights having to do with the right of individual justice before the law to a recognition of the rights of individuals to social security and equitable conditions of work and standards of living.¹⁰

During the Cold War, the West consistently used the issue of human rights as a weapon against the Communists—but always only in its first, eighteenth-century sense. The Communists consistently returned the favor, using the issue of human rights—but always in the second, nineteenth-century sense—as a weapon against the West. We in the United States may sometimes abuse our citizens’ political rights through police wiretaps or sting operations, but we are much more sensitive to these abuses than to economic abuses. The Chinese have generally taken an opposite stance.

Americans hold that human rights are a universal matter, and in a philosophical sense of course they are, but we ignore how that universalism can sometimes disguise very specific agendas and the ways in which it can be wielded as a political weapon to advance our own interests. We conveniently fail to classify civilian safety from land mines, for example, among human rights; and we are regularly indifferent to or conveniently look the other way when human rights as we define them are suppressed by regimes like those in Turkey, Chile, or Guatemala that are important to us for political, strategic, or economic reasons. The selective linking of Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status (that is, giving or withholding access to our market on the most preferential terms) to a regime’s human rights record is a prime example of this process. In December 1974, Congress first attached the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Nixon’s 1972 trade agreement with the USSR (which granted the Soviet Union MFN status, as well as access to U.S. Export-Import Bank financing) in order to help Jews emigrate from Russia. The amendment specified that the president had to certify annually that trade with Communist countries was consistent with freedom of emigration. In 1979, China was also granted MFN status, and Jackson-Vanik automatically applied because China is a Communist country. When Deng Xiaoping, on his first visit to the United States after we recognized the Beijing government, was asked about the freedom of Chinese to emigrate, he smiled broadly and replied, “How many do you want?”

In the autumn of 1989, however, following China’s use of army troops to disperse demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and kill workers and students in the surrounding streets, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California sponsored legislation giving thousands of Chinese students in the United States permission to extend their stays. Congress later amended these provisions to require annual presidential certification that China was making “overall significant progress” in its human rights policies, in trade practices, and in weapons nonproliferation, backing all this with the threat of MFN withdrawal. But that threat was never credible, since its implementation would have meant putting at risk extensive American investments in China. Thus the withdrawal of MFN remains primarily a rhetorical device used by members of Congress for partisan political advantage at home without the serious intent of altering policy at all.¹¹

The selective way the U.S. government has wielded the human rights issue has had an unintended consequence. It has stimulated Asians of many different persuasions to develop an “Asian concept of human rights” and to attack the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as not “universal” at all but only another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism. As so often is true whenever invidious comparisons between Asia and the West are involved, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore gained a certain prominence as a spokesman for the Asian point of view. “Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were . . . ,” he insisted. “The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.”¹²