by Joshua Kurlantzick
The damage has been done. Beijing has learned that if it tries to bully the U.S., Washington is likely to give in.
But strategic reassurance hasn't work out as planned. Backing off on human rights has only emboldened China. Chinese officials have privately lobbied their American counterparts not to criticize Beijing on abuses toward Tibetans and Uighurs, a Turkic-Muslim minority living primarily in western China. Beijing has likewise ignored American requests to intervene more decisively on the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and act in ways that seems calculated to provoke war with its southern neighbor. Neither has China suddenly allied itself with the U.S. on climate change; at the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, Beijing held a secret, back-room meeting with other developing nations that ultimately helped scuttle any compromise.
Worst of all, China has stepped up its attacks on human-rights defenders. Over the past five months, Beijing has grown increasingly wary of dissent, as unrest has swept through the Arab world and other closed societies. In fact, most longtime China observers say this is the most sustained climate of repression since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. After an online call, in late winter, for a "jasmine revolution" in China, Chinese security forces rounded up some of the most prominent human-rights advocates in Beijing and beat and arrested foreign journalists working in the capital. The Chinese government has also unleashed a brutal crackdown on Tibetan activists, even arresting Ai Weiwei, the country's best-known modern artist, on questionable charges of "economic crimes."
To its credit, the Obama administration now seems, at long last, to have recognized its errors and shifted course, realizing that the U.S. can criticize Chinese abuses while still working with Beijing on regional security, trade, and other challenges. Besides noting China's abuses before this week's dialogue, President Obama used a meeting with President Hu in January to publicly call on Beijing to improve its rights record: "History shows that societies are more harmonious… and the world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all people are upheld."