Human Rights Hypocrisy

The country I come from has a human rights record that "fell far short of the internationally accepted norms," according to this year's U.S. State Department report on human rights issued on February 1. Still pretty hard to tell where I am from, isn't it?

Each year, more than half of the 190-plus countries covered in this annual report are discovered to have created or ignored serious human rights problems. The United States acts as the world's judge, overseeing everyone's behavior and then meting out the appropriate rewards and punishments.

So am I from Russia, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Indonnesia, or Vietnam? Even worse, I'm from China, a country U.S. politicians can never live with and big business can never live without. When President Clinton made the painful and controversial decision to extend China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status last May, Congress failed to use human rights--its traditionally lethal weapon--to exert sufficient pressure on the president. Let's not waste time trying to make sense of the subtle relationship between MFN and human rights, but rather focus on the second issue.

It will certainly take a long time before China can finally talk about the issue of human rights with confidence. If we carefully analyze history, we realize that the sad truth is that freedom by itself barely causes anything to change. If the hard-headed Chinese leaders were wise enough to realize that opening themselves to criticism could not hurt anything, China could become a "free" nation overnight.

Whether the U.S. is in the perfect position to pass judgment on human rights records is an interesting question. Now please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that if the United States were to appear on its own annual report of human rights, its record would also fall far short of internationally accepted norms. Not quite.

Nevertheless, I do feel obligated to point out some of the mistakes made by the authors of the annual report on human rights. Isn't there anything that they tend to overemphasize when examining other countries that is also happening not far away from the their office?

Back to the example of China again. The report describes the Chinese system of running prisons as "inhuman and degrading," but the statistics tell us that the crime-repetition rate in China is less than six percent compared with America's 40 percent.

The report accuses the Chinese government of restricting religious beliefs, yet nobody has been arrested simply because he believes in a certain religion. After all, having watched the Waco fiasco that took so many innocent lives, couldn't one say that religions in America are perhaps a little too unconstrained?

The report also condemns discrimination based on sex, race, and social status in the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislative body. Let me answer these allegations one by one.

One piece of evidence the report cites is that "only 21 percent of the members of the NPC are women." What about the percentage in the Senate and the House of Representatives? There are 54 women in both houses, making up an insignificant 10 percent.

All the 55 minorities in China are given proper quotas of representatives in the NPC, but how many Asian or Hispanic voices can be heard on Capitol Hill? Regarding social status, the mistake becomes more obvious. Over half of the NPC members come from farms and factories, and their average yearly income doesn't exceed $1,000. In contrast, there is no doubt that politics here is a game played by millionaires. If the NPC did have discrimination based on social status, the discrimination might be against the wealthy.

Of course China has a lot to learn from the United States, but I would say that there is room for the U.S. to improve as well. In this country there are more than seven million people who have no homes, and 40 million people who struggle under the poverty line--15 percent of the entire population.

Indeed, Washington currenly enjoys the reputation as the crime capital of our nation. Even the White House gets shot at occasionally. More than 20 percent of American students bring guns with them to school, while in China, most people don't get the chance to see a real gun in their entire life.

Most American politicians like to raise Tibet in their attack of China's racial problems. After taking their exaggeration into account, we see this is still a regional matter. Here in the United States, discrimination against minority populations has been a national dilemma since 1776. Over the past 20 years, Blacks have had an unemployment rate three times higher and a death rate two times higher than that of whites.

In 1965, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In 1973, it passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Why the United States has not yet joined either convention remains a mystery.

All of this makes me wonder whether the U.S. has been drafting a human rights report on other countries just to divert the nation's attention to other countries or to hide some of its own problems from the rest of the world.

Once again, in spite of my arguments, I still can't stress enough that the United States is by far the best place for human rights, a living model for the whole world. The concept of a nation itself implies an inevitable restriction of individual freedom; rights and liberties are not absolute. The record of the U.S., though arguably better than that of almost any other country, is still far from immaculate.

So, why can't we get less empty talk and more solid action? Why don't those people in Washington who work day and night to produce a million-word-long report every year since 1977 devote at least part of their energy and money into solving some practical questions?

Indeed, all of this paperwork on human rights is essentially nothing but an often powerless tool on the negotiation table. It never really turns anything around. China is still ruled by a stubborn Communist Party, and the homeless people hanging out in Harvard Square are still homeless.