Recently, the governments of China and the United States have been engaged in a heated polemic on each other’s human rights issues. At the March 18 meeting in Alaska, the two sides opened with a war of words on human rights issues; next, on March 24, the Chinese State Department released its “2020 Annual Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States”; a few days later, on March 30, the U.S. State Department released its “2020 Annual Country Reports on Human Rights,” in which it harshly criticized China’s human rights issues. The back-and-forth was intense.
The U.S. government criticized the Chinese government for violating human rights, and the Chinese government criticized the U.S. government for violating human rights. Who is justified and who is not justified in this mutual accusation? Or are they both justified?
According to some people’s view, both the Chinese and American governments have violated human rights, and they are half and half, each other; or, one violates a little more, one violates a little less, fifty steps laughing at a hundred steps; or, it is a small witch to see a big witch. In short, they think that both the Chinese and American governments have human rights violations, but there is a difference in the degree.
Not true. The difference between the Chinese and U.S. governments on human rights issues is by no means just a difference in degree, but a difference in essence. The Chinese government is violating human rights; the U.S. government is not.
First of all, experience tells us that one of the simplest criteria for judging the goodness of a country’s human rights situation is whether or not the country has freedom of speech. Freedom of speech, of course, includes the freedom to express different political views, including the freedom to criticize the ruling party and the top leaders of the government. Taking this criterion to look at the human rights situation in China and the United States, it is clear who is better and who is worse.
Second, we must clarify the concept of what human rights are and what they are not, and what human rights violations are and what they are not.
On this key issue, the Chinese government, which violates human rights, knows better than anyone else. The People’s Daily published an article on April 8, “Narrow Human Rights Concept Full of Hegemony,” refuting the U.S. country report on human rights, saying, “In this report, the U.S. once again uses its narrow understanding of human rights as the so-called ‘human rights standard’ and classifies all situations that differ from its standard as human rights violations’.” The article says, “In the U.S. country human rights reports, however, individual freedoms and political rights, which are highly emphasized under the U.S. state system, are singled out for generalization.” This is tantamount to admitting that the U.S. certainly does protect human rights if the so-called narrow U.S.-style concept of human rights – which is actually what it is – is used as the standard. That is precisely what the American state system guarantees, while China is a gross violator of human rights. But if you use the so-called broader concept of human rights as the standard, then you have the United States violating human rights and China protecting human rights. I discussed this issue in my commentary last month, “Is it the bankruptcy of “American-style human rights”? I have already discussed it, so I will not repeat it here.
There are many problems in the United States, and most of the things listed in the Communist Party’s report on human rights violations in the United States come from the U.S. media itself. On the front page of the report are the words of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police last year, “I can’t breathe. It should be said that most of the things listed in this report are true, but they are not called human rights violations.
What do you mean by human rights violations? For example, in a ball game, a player who does not follow the rules is called a foul, but breaking the rules is not the same as breaking them or trampling on them, as long as the referee sanctions the offender according to the rules. The significance of the rules is that whoever breaks the rules will be punished, and the violator is punished to prove that the rules have not been broken, proving that the rules are working, thus proving the integrity of the rules exist. Only when the referee does not act according to the rules, it means that the rules are broken and trampled. The way to see if a game is following the rules is not to see if any player in it has committed a foul, but to see if the referee is following the rules and giving due sanction to the offender.
In the same way, by human rights violations, we mean the government. When we judge the human rights situation in a country, it is primarily about the government of that country, not about individuals in general. The issue of safeguarding human rights is primarily a matter for the government, and only the government can commit human rights violations. There is a difference between a thief taking your property and a communist government communicating your property, which is what is called a violation of property rights and human rights.
There are many bad things in the United States, but they are basically not called human rights violations. For example, there are police officers who use excessive violence against suspects in law enforcement, and that is certainly a bad thing. But it is only a human rights violation if the excessive police brutality is motivated by carrying out a government directive, or is sanctioned or condoned by the government, and thus actually reflects the will of the government and is a government action. Conversely, if a police officer uses excessive violence against a suspect, and the government pursues it and tries it according to the law, as if a player is punished by a referee for a foul, then it is not a human rights violation. This is the reason why cases like the Floyd case are not considered human rights violations.
When we say that the United States is a country that respects and protects human rights, we are saying that the concept of human rights is widely accepted in the United States, that there is freedom of speech and freedom of the press, that there are checks and balances on power, that there is an independent judiciary, that there is a trial system that reflects procedural justice, and so on. We know, of course, that the United States is by no means perfect, and that it has many, many problems of one kind or another. But since the United States has achieved the above, it is a country that respects and protects human rights. China today does not have all of the above, so China today is still a country that despises human rights and violates them. There is a fundamental difference between the two. Any view that denies this essential difference is extremely wrong.
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