responded that the Dalai Lama was interfering in China’s domestic affairs and in elaborately staged ceremonies in Beijing and Lhasa anointed a different six-year-old (evidently placing the Dalai Lama’s choice and his family under house arrest). They formally installed him on December 9, 1995, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; he was quoted in the newspapers as having said, “Thank you, Jiang Zemin. Thank you, government of China. I will study hard and love the motherland.”9
It is possible that, as they regain their national self-confidence, the Chinese will invite the Dalai Lama to return and allow him to re-create something like the relationship that existed in the past between Lhasa and Beijing. This would be clever of them. As matters stand now, people in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea (or in Hollywood) could well become as emotionally involved with the fate of Tibet as others have been with the pandas, whose fate seems destined to be similar. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Tibet will become Sinified and its lamaseries will be left as nothing more than crumbling museums, as most already are.
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
Lee’s emphasis on American society’s internal cohesion was telling in an Asian context. China’s leaders remain preoccupied by the disintegration of societies pressured to adopt Western-style economic and political practices like the former Soviet Union and Suharto’s Indonesia. In their eyes a decision to permit free association when there are so many inequalities of many different kinds left over from the old order or created by the new one is more likely to lead to a political revolution than to produce political harmony. On March 15, 1999, in a news conference that included foreign reporters, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji said, “Don’t support these so-called pro-democracy activists. They will bring neither democracy nor the rule of law to China.”13
Chinese leaders—and foreign investors—also ignore human rights in their mutual exploitation of a cheap labor market. One prime way of doing so and of justifying what they are doing is to spread the idea that human rights (as conceived by Westerners) have no basis within Chinese culture. This kind of rhetoric is very common throughout Asian ruling circles today. The Burmese military (and their Japanese financiers) use it to keep Nobel Prize winner and National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest even though her party won 82 percent of the seats in the 1990 Burmese election; the Singaporean government and courts used it in 1995 to execute a Filipina housemaid, Flor Contemplacion, for murders probably committed by her Chinese employer;14 and the Chinese government used it in sentencing Democracy-wall activist Wei Jingsheng to prison for a second fifteen-year term merely for suggesting that there might be a fifth modernization (democracy) in addition to the four favored by then party leader Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese government finally released Wei, deporting him to the United States after President Jiang Zemin’s visit in 1997, but the governments of Burma and Singapore have proved to be deaf to foreign criticism on human rights grounds. The Chinese government’s record of releasing political detainees when the issue is raised with it discreetly has not been bad. In his press conference of March 1999, Premier Zhu said, “We welcome foreign friends criticizing us in our work, but don’t be impatient,” noting that he has grown accustomed to “friends from abroad pulling out lists” of pro- democracy activists whom they want released from jail.15
In the final analysis, two aspects of human rights policy transcend mere political rhetoric and deserve our attention over the long haul. First, the United States must strive to retain the respect of the relatively small group of Chinese elites who will eventually come to have influence or hold power in the next century. Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, divides the Chinese people into three broad categories in terms of their attitudes toward politics.16 The first category is made up of the leaders of the Communist Party. “Their main concern is keeping power in their hands,” says the Dalai Lama, and they are in that sense no different from other Asian ruling elites, like the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the military in Burma, whose main concerns are preserving their own positions of power.
