Hu Jia, his honor
Last week, the European Parliament awarded its human rights prize, aptly named for Andrei Sakharov, to Chinese dissident, Hu Jia. Hu has made something of a career out of making himself unpopular with the CCP, from calling attention to the plight of the endangered Tibetan antelope to demanding greater care for AIDS patients (and thereby exposing the extent the disease has spread in the PRC).
Hu is presently serving a three-and-half-year prison term for the crime of “inciting subversion of state power,” which if nothing else is an admirably straightforward charge — no Orwellian double-speak there! The catalyst for his arrest was the issuing of a manifesto by peasant leaders over land rights for those who property had been confiscated for development (let’s just say the concept of “eminent domain” is rather broadly employed over there).
Needless to say, the Chinese authorities were not pleased with the European Union’s announcement, declaring
If the European parliament should award this prize to Hu Jia, that would inevitably hurt the Chinese people once again and bring serious damage to China-EU relations.
Party officials are prone to these kinds of vague threats when it comes to foreigners noticing China’s treatment of dissidents, and for that matter its rather liberal use of the term “dissident.” Quite often, these threats don’t amount to much. Nonetheless, the EU is to be commended for recognizing Hu’s courage.
Dealing with human rights is always a dicey business for state actors (that the EU is not really a state actor, along with the amorphousness of its decision-making process, makes things a little easier). It seems to me that disentangling the issue of human rights from politics is well-nigh impossible between sovereign states. This of course means that any definition of human rights is essentially tied to who is doing the defining.
In other words, without any supra-political standard to appeal to, yes, you get the U.S. honoring Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but you also get Paris making an honorary citizen of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Part of the problem is that, as we learned during the Cold War, human rights as an issue can be a potent tool in a geostrategic conflict. Perhaps for some, as this shameful Weekly Standard cover would imply, it is merely a tool (how else to explain the cavalier downshifting of context for that otherwise potent image?).
Nor is it as simple as insisting that honoring Hu Jia is an apolitical gesture — for the CCP leaders surely see it as a political one. I spent about a year and a half in China, and it was not uncommon for any discussion of the government’s mistreatment of citizens to be met with charges of real (or perceived) injustices in the American system. Many educated Chinese have been conditioned by the Party line to “nationalize” the subject of human rights.
Nonetheless, I do not believe that we should forswear making such gestures — or even that pursuing a more modest foreign policy requires us to do so. If anything, it is our incorrigible interventionism that constrains our capacity to make statements on human rights, as last year’s furor over the passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution showed.
The same administration that readily wields morality as a club with which to beat geopolitical adversaries (inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House, insisting that it was Russia that initiated the Russo-Georgian dust-up, etc.) found itself unable to back a simple acknowledgment that genocide was perpetrated in Armenia a century ago, due to its being overstretched in the Near East.
My own preference would be for a foreign policy that did not so use human rights in its regular dealings with other nations — but also did not shy away from recognizing the reality of abuses in the world and the courage of those who face them.
In the end, though, these arguments are mostly self-referential. It is Hu Jia who sits alone in a prison cell, facing down one of the world’s strongest state powers.