Joel Uppvall

Seven major US and international rights groups are calling on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make human rights issues a top priority in her meetings in Beijing next week with Chinese officials. In a letter to Clinton released Friday, the groups, which include Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, said that human rights should be considered an integral part of Washington’s policy toward China.

“We are acutely aware that the US agenda with China is a broad one,” wrote the groups, which also included Human Rights First and Human Rights in China. “But we believe that the desired economic, security, and diplomatic progress can be reinforced through more vigorous and public defence of human rights.” The letter comes on the eve of Clinton’s maiden voyage overseas.

As the secretary of state prepared for her tour in Asia, she received the letter calling on her to make human rights the major topic of discussion when she visits China. The letter is signed by seven human rights groups and states that “our organisations strongly urge you to make human rights issues a prominent topic in your public and private discussions with the Chinese leadership and people”.

In a speech at the Asia Society in New York Friday, Clinton addressed some possible issues for her visit to the region. “As part of our dialogues, we will hold ourselves and others accountable, as we work to expand human rights and create a world that respects those rights, one where Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi can live freely in her own country [Burma], where the people of North Korea can freely choose their own leaders, and where Tibetans and all Chinese People can enjoy religious freedom without fear of prosecution,” she said.

The issue of human rights in China is also relevant due to last December’s release of Charter 08, a political manifesto by Chinese intellectuals which, among other things, called for freedom of expression and free elections of public officials. Its publication led to the arrest of scholar-activist Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the driving forces behind the charter. The arrest was followed by a letter directly addressed to President Hu Jintao, signed by more than 60 scholars and writers outside mainland China, demanding Liu’s release. However, the matter of the US pushing China on the issue of human rights could be delicate. The economies of the two countries have become so closely interwoven, according to most experts that they will have to cooperate very closely to recover from the current financial crisis.

At the moment, Washington depends on China’s willingness to keep buying US Treasury bills to fund its stimulus package. In that respect, Washington’s willingness to make demands on Beijing with respect to human rights or other issues on which China has shown reluctance to make concessions carries major risks.

On the other hand, the health of China’s own economy depends to a not insignificant extent on the willingness of US consumers to buy its exports. “The difficulty is not just that the timing is off,” Minxin Pei, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New York Times. “Rebalancing the relationship means introducing elements that have friction. Those areas that have been ignored are precisely the more contentious ones.”