Russia and China: World-Power Authoritarians Who Hate Human Rights.
Mega-Problems That Won’t Go Away, Part 1
The idea of human rights is fundamentally a constraint on sovereign power. People have rights because they are inherent to human dignity — not because some Great Leader has bestowed them. While there is some conception of fundamental rights and limits to state power in virtually every culture, the modern human rights idea historically is most closely associated with the natural rights philosophers of the West, and fits fairly easily into a Westphalian conception of limited sovereignty and checks and balances on the sovereign. But limits on the sovereign and rights for all is a pretty popular and adaptable idea. At the United Nations, the principles of human rights are so tightly woven into that institution’s Charter and practice it is unacceptable for any nation to directly reject the idea of human rights obligations. So, while democratic governments are often the most reliable proponents, even autocracies give human rights some lip service.
Nonetheless, almost all governments reject human rights constraints on their behavior from time to time, and a considerable bloc of governments consistently work to undermine institutions of the UN and other bodies that might impose them. Two of the most significant are Russia and China, both global powers with awful human rights practices, entrenched practices of autocracy, and networks of influence that range from “mini-Me” client states to democracies tied to them by trade. Both are permanent members of the UN Security Council, where they can block binding action against themselves or their clients, rendering that institution toothless.
Russia was an imperial power that over time has lost significant parts of its empire, a fact Vladimir Putin regrets and is trying to reverse. Some parts of the Soviet world remain highly autocratic as well as closely tied to Russia, among them Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan. These countries seek to limit and punish independent political activity and criticism of their leadership, squelch protests, and tend to be hostile to the rights of women and sexual and gender minorities. Russia can count on their support at the UN, where Moscow has often acted as a spoiler to human rights progress.
As a member of the Security Council “Perm 5,” it has vetoed condemnation of the war in Syria, the 2009 extension of the UN mission in Georgia, a 2007 resolution demanding the return of democratic rule to Myanmar, and vetoed a Security Council resolution naming climate change a threat to world peace. But its actions in Ukraine (and its veto of Security Council condemnation of its invasion), drew a strong backlash, resulting in the General Assembly voting to take Russia off the UN Human Rights Council. Some have even called for Russia to be ousted from the Security Council, though this seems unlikely to happen.
While Moscow continues efforts to make friends and influence countries around the world, much of its activity is in self-defense – justifying its invasion of Ukraine to a skeptical and nervous world, suppressing its own dissenters, finding ways to skirt sanctions, stalling UN progress on regulating cyber warfare, and projecting disinformation to build support for its perspective and distrust of Western democracies. Whatever the result of Russia’s current war, its material power and global influence are likely to take a hit as a result. Russia is not going away, but it increasingly leans on another world power for support, namely…
China. China is well-known for its position of resisting any criticism of its terrible human rights record or those of its allies as “interference in internal affairs.” It is also a staunch campaigner to weaken the UN human rights framework and is not shy about using coercive diplomacy, economic sanctions, and even arrests of foreign nationals to show its displeasure.
This year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a precedent-setting report on China’s abuses in Xinjiang including possible crimes against humanity in conducting mass arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, family separations, torture, and religious persecution. That’s one terrible conflict and repression scenario. But China has three strikes in recent history. The practice run for the crimes in Xinjiang was Tibet, where the government virtually criminalized local religion and culture, and encouraged massive in-migration of ethnic Han Chinese to dilute Tibetan identity (and yearnings for autonomy). Strike three: China throttled Hong Kong’s nascent democracy movement in 2020, imposing national security legislation on the territory, and a wave of prosecutions of pro-democracy figures began shortly after, continuing into this year. The former security chief who presided over the crackdown, John Lee, became Hong Kong’s new chief executive this year.
Although like Russia, China is a former imperial power that retains strong influence over some of its former tributaries that now feature communist autocracies, such as Vietnam and North Korea, China is far more integrated into the world’s economy, making sanctions tied to its abuses particularly difficult to achieve. One need only glance at the difference between the global response to China’s human rights abuses (a report issued on the last day of the High Commissioner’s tenure, that was not taken up by the UN at all) and to Russia’s (three international criminal investigations). Whatever lessons Beijing is drawing from Russia’s Ukraine invasion will need continual reinforcement if its worst impulses on human rights are to be checked.
In the coming years, China is likely to soften its particularly aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy in the face of both domestic and foreign policy challenges. Xi Jinping’s signature zero Covid policy spurred rare public protests around the country at draconian lockdown measures. Beijing announced it would reverse these policies and local governments abruptly complied before sufficient health measures were in place to handle the predictable wave of infections. The result is likely to be high mortality rates this year, and further public discontent and loss of trust in leadership. China has also just reached the end of its population growth spurt, with the first decline in six decades, portending future labor shortages.
China’s economy, however, will probably rebound from the slow growth of the lockdown era, possibly contributing to global inflation. While their Belt and Road Initiative’s foreign infrastructure investments lagged during the pandemic, they will likely continue, with Latin America being a growing market for both China’s investment and propaganda efforts. In the United States, a growing concern to limit China’s influence is one of the few points of bipartisan consensus, with federal and state authorities banning TikTok on government phones, and President Biden placing export controls on sending advanced semiconductor chip technology to China.
This has put into tight focus China’s intentions towards Taiwan, which recently began rearming itself and imposing mandatory service on its citizenry. While some resumption of diplomatic dialogue between the US and China was spurred by the Biden-Xi meeting this year, tensions between Beijing and Washington remain quite high. It remains to be seen how aggressively China will act towards the West, or whether its need to reassure foreign investors and market partners will moderate its policies.
Weakening China’s influence over the client states that enable its impunity is going to be hard, but necessary. Human rights groups have shied away from detailed economic reporting on China’s influence over the infrastructure of African and other developing economies, but others haven’t. The human rights challenge is how to provide these clients with viable alternatives for infrastructure and technological development without pandering to the corruption of their leaders. But there is no lack of need, so there are opportunities for other lenders to provide counterweight and alternatives as long-term partners.
Both China and Russia associate with weaker authoritarian governments that are among the worst human rights offenders and rejectors. China’s partnerships include nuclear power North Korea, and the communist autocracies of Cambodia and Vietnam They have also been wooing Equatorial Guinea, whose ruling family has plundered its oil wealth, leaving the rest of the population in astonishing poverty. Russia supports Belarus, Syria, the Central African Republic, and Cuba among others, and gets arms from Iran and North Korea. These patronage relations make it more difficult for the international community to exert pressure for human rights improvements and give China and Russia proxies and supporters at the UN to stymie collective action. China and Russia also sit in the position of mediators and leverage points whenever other nations try to counter the international threat these states pose — whether it’s North Korea’s nuclear tests, or settlement of Syria’s conflict, or the global flow of migrants and refugees.
The lay of the land is, of course, more complicated, with varying degrees of dependency, “democratic” clients, shifting and partial alliances and obstructors, and a great-power contest everywhere for influence. There are other blocs of obstructors, including the states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which failed to protest the treatment of Uighur Muslims by China, defended member states from criticism at the UN Human Rights Council, and obstructed recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. There are mavericks in otherwise helpful blocs, like EU member Hungary, whose stealthy authoritarianism and hostility to migrants and sexual minorities have come to be admired by the U.S. Republican party. And powerful democracies enable abusive allies as well — the U.S. in relation to Saudi Arabia and Israel as an example — but here there is at least greater hope that domestic politics can provide a counterforce.
In this complicated territory, maneuvering for better human rights outcomes requires granular analyses of what issues which countries can be persuaded to support, where they might be persuaded to diverge from or criticize their partners, and how to separate at least some human rights issues from others.
For example, the government of Vietnam, which is extremely repressive of political rights, has shown more tolerance for LGBTQ+ rights. It formally dropped the ban on same-sex marriage in 2015, while not yet affording official protections of the law for these marriages. In another important step, it formally recognized this year that same-sex and transgender preferences are not “illnesses” in step with World Health Organization standards. These may be calculated moves by the government to brush up its profile internationally while avoiding any meaningful change in repressing political rights. Nevertheless, even small steps should be welcomed and further progress urged. Over time, progress in one area can inspire progress in others — whether helping local activists push boundaries or encouraging other states to follow suit.
At the UN, a movement for reform of the Perm 5 veto at the Security Council (particularly in situations of mass atrocity) gathered momentum this year, though the odds are still against it. It is not a great exaggeration to say the credibility of the UN is at stake on this issue, though it has been at stake for long before the Ukraine war. But the failure of the Security Council to adopt a resolution on Ukraine led to referring the situation to the General Assembly, which did. Additionally, the General Assembly later decided that it would meet with any Security Council member that vetoed a resolution. That’s not much progress (Perm 5 members usually have statements ready when they use the veto), but hey, it’s a first step. The impact of Security Council reform could be powerful for human rights, yet few human rights groups invest much in this issue.
In short, out-maneuvering the anti-human rights blocs is critical to international action on human rights. It goes beyond the naming and shaming tactics that are all too common in this space. An international issue that involves two economic and governmental juggernauts will require a great many tools including but not limited to: cajoling, positive conditioning, and strategic alliances that activists should encourage.
