Chinese diplomats celebrated Huawen Liu’s victory at the U.N., a boon to China’s efforts to get international organizations to justify its brutal policies.
Chinese diplomats celebrated Huawen Liu’s victory at the U.N., a boon to China’s efforts to get international organizations to justify its brutal policies.
A t the U.N. this week, Washington’s return to the Human Rights Council got more attention, but China made a quiet play that will allow it to redefine human rights amid the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality in Xinjiang and beyond.
Beijing won reelection to the council last year; the body’s obvious, egregious flaws are old news. On Tuesday Chinese diplomats celebrated their latest gains within the U.N. system via the election of a Chinese academic to the U.N.’s Committee against Torture. “Looking forward to his continuous contributions to the work of the Committee,” read a tweet posted by China’s mission to the U.N. institutions in Geneva.
Chinese diplomats certainly do have a lot to look forward to in his continued work. The election of Huawen Liu — who has served on the committee in an interim basis since 2020, after the resignation of a previous Chinese member — to a full four-year term is a boon to China’s efforts to create a self-perpetuating feedback loop where international organizations justify its brutal policies.
The committee is little known outside of Geneva, and many Americans might dismiss its ability to have much of an impact. But to do so is perilous, as China seizes an opportunity to cement its international legitimacy. Its ten members work to uphold the U.N.’s Convention against Torture by reviewing reports submitted by the treaty’s signatories, considering allegations of misconduct that might be violations of the convention, and sometimes running inquiries into those allegations.
Although the ten members are expected to act as experts representing themselves, not their countries, China vigorously promoted Liu’s candidacy — and his supposed “impartiality, dedication, and professionalism.” That endorsement by China’s ambassador to the U.N.’s Geneva offices should in itself raise eyebrows. Indeed, Liu, a longtime employee of a think tank controlled by the Chinese state who has evangelized for Xi Jinping Thought — the Chinese leader’s ideological doctrine — made dubious allegations about Washington’s human rights record, and defended Beijing’s suppression of democracy in Hong Kong as “objective and fair.”
In short, his presence on the committee hands the Chinese government an advocate who can exercise undue influence over the body’s proceedings.
The committee’s work, which recently resumed after an 18-month hiatus during the pandemic, is all the more relevant given recent revelations in China. In a shocking interview with CNN earlier this month, a former Chinese detective revealed new details about the systematic torture inflicted on Uyghurs by Chinese Communist Party officials, which he alleged includes such methods as “hanging people from the ceiling, sexual violence, electrocutions, and waterboarding.”
The list of Chinese actions that likely violate the U.N. convention is long. The State Department’s 2020 report on human rights around the world similarly describes at length the torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment perpetrated by the Chinese state: “There were credible reports that authorities routinely ignored prohibitions against torture, especially in politically sensitive cases.”
Nevertheless, a spokesperson for State’s Bureau of International Organizations declined to comment on Liu and only referred National Review to Foggy Bottom’s statement on the election of Todd Buchwald — a U.S. ambassador at large for global criminal justice during the Obama administration — to the Committee. While it’s good to see Buchwald, a well-respected expert with a solid track record on fighting mass-atrocity crimes, serve as a counterweight to Liu, it’s of little comfort to know that Beijing has this foothold.
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley panned the decision of U.N. members to elect Liu in the first place — and the Biden administration’s silence. “China is imprisoning and torturing a million Uyghurs for their religious beliefs,” she said in a statement to NR. “It’s unthinkable that the UN would put a representative of the Communist Chinese government on a committee against torture and it’s a disgrace that the Biden administration won’t call it out.”
In Liu, Beijing has successfully installed a stalwart of Xi’s rule. The professor previously led the human-rights center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), which is overseen by the State Council of China.
The academy poses an interesting case, because after the Tiananmen Square massacre it was widely regarded as having been supportive of the student protesters. However, in the years since 1989, the Chinese party-state apparatus reshaped the institution, transforming it into an advisory entity for the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee.
Liu’s titles sound impressive and commensurate with the roles that might be held by an independent academic — he is the director of the academy’s center for human-rights studies and deputy director of CASS’s international law program. But he serves a totalitarian system in which state-employed intellectuals are steered into justifying the party-state’s actions.
His recent contribution to an academic international-relations journal in Argentina is a case in point. He wrote an extensive article for the National University of La Plata explaining how Xi Jinping Thought is intended to shape international law, parsing the Chinese leader’s speeches in a positive light and denouncing Washington’s “unilateralism, isolationism, and pragmatism” in international law.
Importantly, Liu’s work there and elsewhere comments on China’s supposed development of human rights over time, marking what he deems to be achievements, and points out that China will bring its progress to the world through international governance.
“Not only can China, as the largest developing country, contribute to international governance, but also because of the irresponsibility, even perversity, and the threat to the international rule of law of some countries highlight the positive and important significance of China’s adherence to the correct ideology of the rule of law,” he writes in the journal article. He will make an argument similarly highlighting China’s “unique and constructive role and serving as the participant, builder and contributor of the international human rights governance” in a book that will be published later this month, according to the publisher’s website.
The Biden administration might also have to contend with Chinese mud-slinging from the committee, with Liu’s role now newly cemented. The academic is a reliable spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party’s talking points on human rights. The U.S. is guilty of publishing human-rights reports with contents “not based on real facts,” he wrote last November.
Hong Kong, where the Chinese authorities have imprisoned pro-democracy leaders, canceled elections, and prohibited freedom of expression, is presumably one issue on which Washington, according to Liu, spreads falsehoods. But Liu is willing to correct the record, on Beijing’s terms: He called a fawning March 2021 statement by U.N. Human Rights Council members backing China’s actions in Hong Kong “objective and fair” in an interview with CGTN, a Chinese state broadcaster.
Still, in one sense, China’s influence within the U.N. system seems to be receding. This month, the Chinese mission was forced to withdraw a resolution full of the party’s human-rights buzzwords after it found insufficient support. That was the second time it had done so; the first was last September.
But the party’s diplomats are finding other ways to do as Liu writes — shape international governance — and Foggy Bottom’s silence signals capitulation.