Xi Jinping’s regime is the world’s worst human-rights abuser — but weakening its repressive grip on its citizens is no simple task.
Xi Jinping’s regime is the world’s worst human-rights abuser — but weakening its repressive grip on its citizens is no simple task.
T he Chinese Communist Party has concluded its 20th National Congress and confirmed Xi Jinping’s dictatorship. Despite frenzied chatter about a supposed coup against him and only slightly more plausible speculation about delegates’ setting limits on his power, Xi will likely rule for life.
This is obviously unfortunate for anyone in the People’s Republic of China who has their own thoughts and wants to make their own decisions. The PRC may be the world’s most egregious human-rights abuser. Other regimes, such as North Korea’s, are more brutal. But Beijing governs far more people and has a greater ability to spread authoritarianism beyond its borders.
Civil liberties, free speech, and political freedom didn’t exist in the world created by Mao Zedong and his fellow communist revolutionaries after they established the PRC in 1949. They took less than three decades to make China number one among the 20th century’s totalitarian states in total number of citizens killed: The Black Book of Communism estimated the death toll at between 46 million and 73 million.
Thankfully, mass murder ended after Mao’s death in 1976. The hundreds or thousands killed during the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 barely counted as a rounding error compared to the millions killed on Mao’s watch. Although pervasive violations of human rights remained the norm in the PRC, controls loosened greatly after Mao’s death and remained lighter even after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The post-Mao system, though authoritarian, afforded citizens more breathing room. So long as one did not challenge Communist rule, a certain amount of debate was allowed. There were independent journalists who reported primarily on provincial misdeeds and human-rights lawyers who fought (mostly without success, of course) repression in court. Foreign academic exchanges were common. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the Unirule Institute, could carefully critique government policies.
Unfortunately, over the last decade Xi has retraced the “Great Helmsman’s” steps, significantly tightening controls over what the Chinese people can do, say, and even believe. Observed Freedom House:
China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to tighten control over all aspects of life and governance, including the state bureaucracy, the media, online speech, religious practice, universities, businesses, and civil society associations, and it has undermined an earlier series of modest rule-of-law reforms. The CCP leader and state president, Xi Jinping, has consolidated personal power to a degree not seen in China for decades. Human rights activists and lawyers continue to speak out, though at great personal cost.
Xi views Western thought as a threat to be criticized, resisted, and suppressed. These ends are to be achieved by centralizing and strengthening the party’s and Xi’s power. The regime spends more money on a vast domestic-security apparatus to control its own people than it does on defending China against presumed foreign enemies.
Although Xi has focused on restricting civil and political rights, of late the PRC has been extending its control over economic and personal activities, such as LARping, a form of play-acting popular in the U.S. The breadth of this assault was captured in a lengthy report published by the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party Human Rights Commission:
The Chinese Communist Party regime has intensified an assault on all human rights throughout China—not only the atrocity crimes perpetrated against the Uyghurs and Tibetans, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, but violations [of] all human rights affecting every group and individual throughout the country.
Internet censorship is detailed and comprehensive. Beijing once simply blocked online activity it deemed inappropriate, but has now begun punishing, including with jail terms, those who violate its rules. Visitors to the PRC typically use a VPN to get around the so-called Great Firewall, but even that has become more difficult in recent years.
Relatedly, the Xi government has hamstrung foreign journalists. Last year, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China reported:
Chinese authorities dramatically stepped-up efforts in 2020 to frustrate the work of foreign correspondents. All arms of state power—including surveillance systems introduced to curb coronavirus—were used to harass and intimidate journalists, their Chinese colleagues, and those whom the foreign press sought to interview. For the third consecutive year, not a single correspondent said working conditions improved, in response to an annual survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. Foreign correspondents were targeted in alleged national security investigations and told they could not leave the country. China cancelled press credentials and refused to renew visas, resulting in the largest expulsion of foreign journalists since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre more than three decades ago.
Beijing has effectively wiped out independent, investigative journalists. Those attempting to cover the country’s Covid crackdown were detained and sometimes quarantined. The human-rights bar has been destroyed, with lawyers disbarred and/or imprisoned. Independent NGOs such as the Unirule Institute have been shut down.
Even cooperation between Chinese universities and their foreign counterparts is carefully scrutinized now, and many speaking invitations extended to foreigners must first be approved by Beijing. The government has emphasized “patriotic education,” meaning unabashed indoctrination. Religious persecution has greatly intensified, with the government treating CCP doctrine as sacred scripture and expressing its desire to rewrite the Christian Bible.
Torture is common. So are televised confessions, including by foreigners, meant to discredit dissenters’ criticism of PRC practices. Such admissions are procured through threats of harsher punishment and maltreatment of relatives. Beijing has engaged in “hostage diplomacy,” arresting Westerners to win the release of its own citizens. The regime is building an intensive surveillance state. The so-called social-credit system, though not as pervasive as sometimes asserted, monitors citizens’ behavior and has been used to punish those who do not faithfully follow regime dictates, including political dissidents. Some analysts charge that the Chinese government continues to practice “organ harvesting” in its prisons.
The PRC has also imposed especially oppressive regimes in three unique geographic areas. Tibet has long suffered under rule designed to suppress Tibetan culture, grow the Han Chinese population in the region, and strengthen Beijing’s political control. With passage of the Hong Kong National Security Law in June 2020, the central government effectively destroyed the traditional British civil and political liberties that underpinned the “one country, two systems” model that had previously set the city apart from the mainland. In Xinjiang, Beijing has incarcerated a million or more people, mostly Uyghurs but some of other nationalities too, in reeducation and forced-labor camps. Washington and several other governments have termed these actions genocide, since they constitute an attempt to kill a culture (though not a people). The hardship suffered by Xinjiang’s Uyghurs has been enormous, as even the United Nations recently recognized.
Although Beijing’s violations do not directly threaten the security and liberty of foreign peoples and states, they reinforce the regime’s worst external practices. A regime so unconcerned about life and dignity at home will not respect the rights and interests of those in other societies.
Defending human rights is a shared responsibility. Private groups should organize to highlight abuses, embarrass criminal perpetrators, and press for change. Governments also should advocate for the freedom of people in other countries — while recognizing the practical difficulties and trade-offs in doing so.
PHOTOS: Chinese Communist Party Congress
Hypocrisy, evidenced by American policies toward Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other human-rights hellholes, undercuts Washington’s credibility. Moreover, U.S. leverage is limited. Official criticism brings international public attention but rarely changes foreign practices. Elsewhere, progress is most likely when objectives are modest. Narrowly targeted measures, especially those aimed domestically — barring suppliers from using forced labor, for instance — are most likely to achieve positive results.
Alas, results typically fall as stakes rise. Sanctions applied to entire foreign populations — usually in hopes of indirectly weakening governments and/or pushing people to revolt — punish the innocent and rarely work. Targeting specific perpetrators of human-rights abuses through laws such as the U.S. Magnitsky Act punishes the worst offenders but does little to change government policy in the places where the abuses occurred.
Indeed, human-rights abuses have continued for years in countries under foreign sanction. For instance, former Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, a CCP hand puppet, was left unable to find a bank after Washington threatened financial penalties against any institution doing business with her. But Lam did not fly to Beijing, confront Xi, and demand that he allow democracy in Hong Kong. And even if she had done so, the PRC would not have relaxed its policies.
Unfortunately, repression is essential to China’s political system. It is how CCP officials, from Xi on down, retain power, perquisites, wealth, status, and everything else that sets them apart from the rest of the Chinese population. Human-rights abuses go to the very nature of the CCP’s control. For most authoritarian regimes, self-preservation comes first, so they are unlikely to make fundamental political changes even under great foreign economic pressure. Beijing is unlikely to yield, except at the margins, despite sanctions.
Of course, Washington could continue piling on tougher penalties. But the U.S. already is using its economic influence against Beijing in many areas. The Trump administration initiated a trade war of dubious effectiveness. The Biden administration has escalated the economic battle with China over control of the world’s most advanced technologies. Chinese investments in U.S. enterprises long have been restricted. Assorted human-rights penalties have been applied to Chinese entities involved in North Korea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Russia.
Yet ironically, the very proliferation of sanctions reduces their effectiveness. The greater the demands, the more the PRC would have to transform itself to comply, the less likely the demands are to be met. Moreover, multiplying sanctions today leaves fewer options for discouraging other disfavored behavior tomorrow. Washington might do better tempering its ambitions and concentrating on a smaller number of high-priority targets.
One positive though indirect approach is to undermine Chinese repression by breaching foreign information barriers. Broadcasts into foreign nations have traditionally been a weapon in America’s fight against tyranny, not without problems but still useful. Today, governments should also target barriers to online access.
One strategy is to use trade laws and negotiations to challenge Internet restrictions. Another is to work with private activists to break through or circumvent foreign controls. Such efforts should seek to empower oppressed peoples and increase hope for the long-term transformation of authoritarian systems.
With Xi’s consolidation of power, Beijing’s assault on the Chinese people’s freedom will continue. Indeed, Xi has become the new Mao, only more disciplined and determined to assert the PRC’s power abroad. Americans and other people of goodwill must respond firmly but thoughtfully, with a commitment to helping the Chinese people gain control over their nation’s future.