Dr. Rana Siu Inboden says the United States and other Western nations must stand up for international human rights, even at the price of offending China and other nations who oppress their citizens and other people.
She discussed her views in this during an interview for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which posted an episode of its China Power podcast March 2 titled “China and the International Human Rights Regime: A Conversation with Dr. Rana Siu Inboden.”
Dr. Rana Siu Inboden
| Texas LBJ School of Government
Bonnie Lin, director of the China Power Project and senior fellow for Asian Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, served as moderator.
Lin said China began participating in the international human rights format in 1982 and became a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2006. Despite memberships in these organizations dedicated to protecting human rights, China has been under international scrutiny for human rights abuse, she said.
Inboden said China is trying to use its growing economic power to force other countries to ignore its human rights record. The sad reality is, she added, it’s working.
“I don’t think the U.S. and other countries are doing enough," she said. "This goes back all the way to the 1990s, where even as China was still sort of trying to dig itself out of the Tiananmen Square consequences of its repression of those protesters, other countries were already sort of trying to make sure that they didn't anger China too much, especially with regard to losing out on economic opportunities in China.”
Many companies and countries wanted to be able to participate and benefit from the Chinese market, Inboden said.
“I think that China has all along been able to use the size of its country and economic potential to offer very robust human rights scrutiny,” she said. “It’s actually around 1997 that China sort of gains its first win in this area when the EU said that it would no longer sponsor country-specific resolution on China in the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
"One thing that I think countries have historically failed to do is be consistent," she added. "And this taught China very early on that they could use their political and economic heft to thwart human rights scrutiny. Now that China is so much more powerful, I think that the challenge is much more difficult. But we see that the consequences are enormous.”
The United States has re-engaged with the Human Rights Council, Inboden said, but it “faces a huge credibility loss” if it does not work with other nations on human rights and make it a priority.
“And then, domestically, I think that we really need to see the U.S. and other countries that are concerned about the repression in China to work collaboratively together to either deliver joint statements in the U.N.,” she said. “I don’t know that any of the countries are ready to do this, to put forward resolutions or even call for a special session of the Human Rights Council for China’s record to be considered. The introduction of sanctions in response to the repression of workers is a good start but it's not yet enough to really show the Chinese state that the world is watching, that there will be consistent pressure and that countries can work collaboratively to try to ease human rights repression in China.”
Inboden is a senior fellow with the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin. She serves as a consultant on human rights, democracy and rule of law projects in Asia for a number of non-governmental organizations and conducts research related to international human rights, Chinese foreign policy, the effectiveness of international human rights and democracy projects and authoritarian collaboration in the United Nations.
Inboden holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. She obtained a master's degree at Stanford University in East Asian studies and a bachelor's degree at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
She was awarded a U.S. State Department Superior Honor Award for her work in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Her first book, “China and the International Human Rights Regime,” (Cambridge, 2021) examines China’s role in the international human rights regime between 1982 and 2017.
Inboden said it’s important to understand both the Chinese perspective, and the nation’s long history.
“China does view human rights somewhat differently," she said. "The West tends to emphasize civil and political rights, the right for us to participate in elections, the right to be safe from encroachments of the state with regard to police questioning or arrest,” Inboden said. “But China tends to focus on and favor economic rights and especially the right to development, and there’s lots of language that China uses talking about the importance of alleviating poverty or bringing people to a stable level of livelihood in terms of life expectancy and the like. China also tends to take on even as it mild support for the universality of the human rights regime."
Inboden said China became more interested in international human rights in the early 1980s.
“First, I would note that during the Mao era, China was both unfamiliar and suspicious of human rights, and Chinese leaders were very dismissive of these concepts, even labeling it bourgeois,” she said. “In the early 1980s that gradually began to shift. China entered into the human rights regime, participated in the UN Commission on Human Rights. This, of course, though, was interrupted by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which fundamentally changed China’s relationship with and view of the international human rights regime.
“We have to remember that Tiananmen did not only lead toward condemning the use of violence, but it also led to actions that impacted China's material interests," she added. "The U.S., the EU and a range of other countries also imposed sanctions and suspended diplomatic ties that were instituted in the wake of Tiananmen. These hurt China’s economic and security interests, so China lost access to international lending worth about $2.3 billion, faced EU and U.S. sanctions that restricted weapon sales, and it lost bilateral aid worth about $11 billion. And because of this experience, China really sees the international human rights scrutiny as potentially threatening its interests.”
She said with President Xi Jinping’s ascent to power, China has become much more assertive in pushing back against human rights scrutiny and advancing its own views on the subject.
Chinese leaders want to gain political and economic strength to shape the regime, allowing them to lobby and recruit enough support from other countries for its positions, Inboden said. This allows China to push back much more forcefully against human rights scrutiny.
She said China seeks to weaken the human rights effort to ensure it does not pose a threat as China seeks to expand its influence.
“For example, many recent Chinese resolutions include a number of schisms and some of the resolutions. Phrases like win-win, mutually beneficial cooperation are prevalent in China,” Inboden said. “They also do contain some damaging ideas in terms of favoring cooperation and dialog over meaningful, robust monitoring of countries and their records.”
Lin said Inboden wrote in her new book that China views the state as responsible for the well-being and protection of its citizens. Most Western governments view governments as the perpetrators of human rights abuses.
It’s a stark difference in worldviews, and they are difficult to reconcile.
“This is where context and history really shape ideas,” Inboden said. “China’s historical experiences prior to the founding of the PRC, when the Chinese state often lacked the capacity to govern, such as providing services, providing public security or ensuring stability, these have all shaped the Chinese view."
However, she said, it might not be the most significant difference between the West and China.
“Other significant areas of tension also relate to differences over a right to development and the extent to which the international human rights regime should be empowered to monitor and scrutinize the records of states,” Inboden said.
She said it’s important to note that although China views the state as responsible for the well-being and protection of its citizens, in terms of human rights, it does not see itself as a servant of the people.
Inboden: China must comply
The analyst said China should be encouraged to participate in a robust and active way with human rights.
“China tends to participate in a very superficial way," she said. "Although it is procedurally compliant, such as submitting written reports, it is not substantively compliant, such as bringing legislation and domestic practices into conformity with international human rights standards."
China tends to attack foes and defend allies, she said. At the International Labor Conference in the mid- to early 1980s, PRC officials were seen laughing during the Soviet Union’s review.
It has consistently shown support for other like-minded countries.
“This is a group that is made primarily of authoritarian countries or at least countries with marred human rights records, and they engage in a number of kind of mutually beneficial protective actions, so they'll speak up during each other's universal periodic review sessions to defend each other,” Inboden said. “And they, in general, certainly hold views that are contrary to what most Western nations would consider. China has not had to lobby many of these countries to take on these views."
These nations — led by Russia and China — are more focused on economic rights or a right to development, saying that must come first in order to provide people with human rights, she said. The informal group formed in the early 1990s, with Cuba, Pakistan and Egypt among its members and it is gaining nations who are largely unconcerned with human rights as a major issue.
Inboden and Lin then turned to discussing the U.N. Human Rights Council. Inboden said her chapter on its creation “was one of the more colorful chapters to research because there were so many rich interviews and documentation” to study.
“And in this chapter there was also a very vivid episode in Geneva [Switzerland] when the PRC was holding up agreement on the institution-building package, which was the final step in creating the Human Rights Council,” she said. “And because PRC diplomats wouldn’t agree to this package and held up agreement past midnight, it threatened to unravel the entire package. The hold-up related to China’s desire to include language that required any country-specific resolution needed to enjoy the sponsorship of one-third of the countries in the Human Rights Council and then two-thirds of the countries to pass. This would have paralyzed the Human Rights Council’s ability to use country-specific resolutions.”
Inboden said Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, who was serving as Human Rights Council president, negotiated with the PRC diplomats, who were getting instructions from Beijing as to whether they should they were allowed to concede.
“And this was such a vivid example with the whole proceedings of the Human Rights Council being held up, and even to the point that the mariachi band that the Mexican mission had hired even had to be put on hold from playing during what was hoped to be a celebratory reception because diplomats were having to wait on the outcome of de Alba’s negotiations with the PRC,” she said. "This goes back to how much the PRC detests human rights resolutions, any attention on its record specifically or being singled out. And this is, as I mentioned, traced back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown."
China was working with other nations to block effective monitoring of human rights violations, Inboden said.
She said as China’s economic and political power grows, it will feel free to be “much more bold in abusing human rights,” with more than a million workers placed in detention in facilities that resemble concentration camps. Others face severe repression as their movements are monitored and restricted.
Chinese agencies are using a combination of police checkpoints, facial recognition technology, security-enabled cameras and other techniques to control and oppress people.
“And then also we see visible Chinese domestic behavior in terms of Hong Kong and the repression of protesters, even to the point that China has hunted some of them down as they've tried to flee overseas,” Inboden said. “And I think this is largely because the PRC leadership thinks that they have sufficient global weight, that they can engage in this kind of repression without suffering consequences."
These trends should create considerable concern globally, in her view.
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