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[Lord Dullard]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57426678/u.s.-china-deal-sours-now-that-activist-chen-guangcheng-wants-out/

For those of you keeping up on this story, I'm curious as to what your thoughts are. This is a really sticky situation, the consequences of which could have long-term effects for US-Chinese relations.

[nenjin]

You cannot stand on the podium and declare that America stands for freedom and human rights, and turn the man away. I'm intensely interested what the administration's decision on this will be. It'll be a real test of what Obama puts first.

I really think we have a moral obligation to grant him asylum. But I'm afraid it will be handled in silence and we'll only know about what happened months later.

Here's a wikipedia article on the guy.

[Megaman]

Morality and goverment never co-exist for long.

[RedKing]

It's not as simple as that. There are a lot of Chinese wondering why the US is involved in this at all. And certainly the fenqing ("angry youth", i.e. the growing nationalist segment) see Chen as a troublemaker. From what I know of the situation, Chen's not a target of the central government, and in fact many within the central government are sympathetic to his cause. The problem is that he's embarassed the local government in Shandong, and that's who placed him under house arrest and seperated him from his family. I know it seems kinda ridiculous that the "totalitarian" central government is seemingly powerless to rein in the provincial government, but that's China for you. Decentralization of power and authority have been a problem for 4000 years.

Apparently what the US had worked out was a deal with Beijing to relocate Chen out of Shandong and away from the enemies he's made. But something happened in the last day or so to spook him, and now he wants out of China entirely. Turning him away makes us look like assholes. Granting him asylum makes us look like meddlers, and further undermines the image of America in Chinese popular discourse as a refuge for troublemakers.

Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of Chinese like America (with certain reservations), and really like American people. But the fenqing see us as a 21st-century British Empire. For those who might be history-deficient on this part, in the 19th century, the British Empire literally forced the Chinese at gunpoint into allowing opium sales to remain legal, even as hundreds of millions became addicts. They (and other European powers like France and Germany) forced the Qing government into granting concessions in Shanghai, Canton and Tianjin, where they promptly erected grand buildings and parks, and put up signs along the line of "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed". Extraterritoriality meant that European sailors could outright commit murder while on shore leave and get off with a slap on the wrist.

So yeah, China has a big-ass chip on its collective shoulder about foreign powers telling it how it should run things within its own borders, and with some good reason. For their part, I think the folks over at the State Dept. understand this, which is why they were working hard to find a solution that protected Chen without the hamfisted solution of asylum. We don't want to sweep in and "rescue" the guy, we want to help the Chinese find their own solution to their own problem. But by declaring he wants asylum, Chen's forcing our hand. Dunno how this is going to play out, but there will be negative effects either way.

[nenjin]

Reading over what Chen has been agitating for, again, it's hard for me to rationalize giving him back to the Chinese. He's not a violent terrorist.

To me if we don't grant asylum we're effectively saying we don't have a problem with indefinite Chinese detention of their own citizens, "soft house arrest", beatings and the like. We're always bemoaning how the Chinese handle political dissidents. This is our opportunity to combine opinion with positive action, and Chen gets his life back.

I'm not saying there's not political fallout, but honestly. What do we get from the Chinese by giving Chen back to them? Assurances that things will go better? They'll forgive some of our debt? One is a vague promise, and the other is a backroom deal that'd nauseate many Americans. Like you said, either outcome has negative consequences. And unless one of those negative consequences is all out war, I think Chen's life, freedom and our commitment to what we say we believe in should carry more weight.

[RedKing]

Let me counter with a hypothetical example. Let's say a Mexican national is seeking asylum in the US because he's afraid for his life back home because...well, it's Mexico. However, he does so by crossing the border into Arizona and gets stopped by Joe Arpaio's finest. Arizona announces it will be deporting him back to Ciudad Juarez, where a "welcoming party" is being organized by the Juarez cartel.

Now...should the Federal goverment be able to intervene and prevent Arizona from deporting him? Should it grant him asylum somewhere else inside the US?
Now what if we add the wrinkle of the Mexican government wanting him back because they want him to testify against the cartels?

No matter how you choose, you're pissing off somebody and "trampling" on their rights.


In this case, it's not about what we "get" from the Beijing government. If anything, we've been trying to find a way for them to save face in all this. It's about trying to cultivate a positive sentiment among the 1billion+ Chinese citizens. If we just pluck Chen out of the situation and fly him to California, it not only makes us look bad, it makes Beijing look weak and ineffective and potentially creates internal pressure from the fenqing segment (and the handful of sympathetic ears they have in the government and military) to make a show of Chinese strength by, for instance, preventing the airplane carrying Chen from leaving PRC airspace. Which potentially leads to a very ugly situation akin to the Hainan incident back in 2001.

The CCP is in a delicate balancing act of late, trying to push reforms without triggering a major backlash. Change comes two ways in China: very slowly and peacefully, or very quickly and violently. I think we're fully aware of this and keen on not making life more difficult for them. We know the current regime, they're technocrats not ideologues, and we can work with them. Push them too hard, and you may wind up with a cadre of hardliners running things. Or with political unrest and violence that would make Syria, Burma, Iran, etc. look like a squabble at an Arbor Day parade.

[Lord Dullard]

@RedKing, great posts. You have a very good grasp on the situation. I was actually about to write almost exactly the same thing about you re: not 'getting' anything from China, but you beat me to it. In fact, would you mind if I quoted your first post into the OP, since it's a very good summary of the delicacy of the situation as a whole?

@nenjin, I also believe Chen deserves freedom and safety. From a purely political standpoint, though, that's only one among many considerations that have to be made. The best outcome we could create is one in which the hardliners in China are marginalized in their unhappiness over our decision, while the majority of the populace and Beijing are mollified by being allowed to have some kind of say in the matter.

[nenjin]

Let me counter with a hypothetical example. Let's say a Mexican national is seeking asylum in the US because he's afraid for his life back home because...well, it's Mexico. However, he does so by crossing the border into Arizona and gets stopped by Joe Arpaio's finest. Arizona announces it will be deporting him back to Ciudad Juarez, where a "welcoming party" is being organized by the Juarez cartel.

Now...should the Federal goverment be able to intervene and prevent Arizona from deporting him? Should it grant him asylum somewhere else inside the US?
Now what if we add the wrinkle of the Mexican government wanting him back because they want him to testify against the cartels?

No matter how you choose, you're pissing off somebody and "trampling" on their rights.

I don't really find your Mexico example relevant. I mean, Mexico doesn't have the human rights record that China does. If they did there'd be more illegals begging for political asylum in the US. This is also not a case where justice needs to be served in the country of origin....he's already done his time, been under house arrest and been harassed by his own provincial government after the fact, separated from his family and turned into a non-person by his own state.

The political reality of China is something I'm sensitive to. But I keep coming back to how we handled things in the Cold War. We'd take defectors because it hurt and embarrassed our enemies and gave us an advantage, with the bonus of giving us an opportunity to preach from the moral high ground about human rights. Now that we're at peace, is our belief in human rights suddenly less important because it's got no tangible benefits? South Korea (and by extension, us) will take North Korea defectors any day of the week. Our relationship with NK is shit, and pissing them off has the potential to start missiles flying. We would not conceive of returning a North Korean to NK, even in the face of military retaliation. Yet we treat China differently.

Let me put it a different perspective. You've got a neighbor, and he has a wife. And he's beating the shit out of his wife. She comes to you, begging for help: asylum, a place to stay for the night until she can get to her mother's or just your intervention in some way. The husband approaches you and says "this is none of your goddamn business, how I treat my wife."

Do you avoid getting involved so your neighbor can "save face" and you can preserve domestic harmony in your neighborhood, instead of making it a big todo? The PRC always seems to get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to social change, and if things like Syria are ANY indication, they're not that interested in it. So I don't see why we should refuse to do what we know is right, to help a government that isn't going to change any time soon. Otherwise you're saying that we're trading a man's freedom for social change ? years down the line, or to not be the reason the Chinese powder keg finally goes off. Those aren't compelling reasons to me.

As for the 'angry youth'.....I'm guessing there are an equal amount of Chinese that hate the policies they live under and would be glad to watch Beijing not get its way this time.

[Zangi]

Let me add to your perspective...

Now, imagine you owe your wife-beating neighbor, China, a great amount of debt, for bailing you out of a sticky situation and that you are in great terms with him, frequently borrowing stuff from each other.  Obviously, some of that stuff may get banged up, but it can be overlooked cause of the beneficial relation.  Also consider that your wife-beating neighbor has a significant presence in the community.

Compare the wife-beater with your other neighbors, Libya, Syria and North Korea... who cares about them?  You don't like them, you don't do much of anything with them...  Lawn wars with the NK and hey, you just helped Libya's wife lynch the fellow and are now telling Syria, the other wife-beater to stop curb stomping his own wife, trying to rally the neighbors against the sod.

[nenjin]

So freedom and human rights are negotiable as long as you have some reasons to like the person who is withholding them? That should make for a really rousing speech on the campaign trail. And if your wife beating neighbor has a significant presence in the community...to me that's an even stronger argument for doing something. If you don't, who will? The people with absolutely no power?

[Zangi]

So freedom and human rights are negotiable as long as you have some reasons to like the person who is withholding them? That should make for a really rousing speech on the campaign trail. And if your wife beating neighbor has a significant presence in the community...to me that's an even stronger argument for doing something. If you don't, who will? The people with absolutely no power?

Short answer, yes.

Long answer, you still gotta live with the bastard if you can't mutually resolve the situation... unless you plan on starting a lawn war, which could escalate to fisticuffs...

This is essentially Ideology versus Political Reality...

EDIT: Its not like you can convince China's gigantic family to lynch him... cause you know, a lot of them are probably the same, if not worse at the wife beating...

[Bauglir]

Sounds like a better analogy would be if the wife in question's family had offered to let her stay with them, but she believed that they wouldn't protect her from her husband (the local government), so she was insisting on staying with you for whatever reason. But she's got a brother (the "angry youth") who really thinks things like this ought to stay in the family, and happens to be a pretty rough dude who wouldn't think twice about damaging your property and working his way up to trying to break into your house and kidnap her if he only got the OK from an exasperated husband who isn't able to do it himself.

Shit isn't exactly simple, is what I'm saying.

[warhammer651]

So freedom and human rights are negotiable as long as you have some reasons to like the person who is withholding them

When i comes to politics?

Essentially, Yes.

Mind you, I don't agree with that, but that's how they play the game

[Lord Dullard]

So freedom and human rights are negotiable as long as you have some reasons to like the person who is withholding them? That should make for a really rousing speech on the campaign trail. And if your wife beating neighbor has a significant presence in the community...to me that's an even stronger argument for doing something. If you don't, who will? The people with absolutely no power?

Part of the problem is that America, through its trade and diplomatic relations with China, may have a much better chance of making long-term change in the country than through any other fashion. In fact, China is currently a lot more temperate than it was, say, twenty years ago. If those ties we currently have with China are threatened it could open the way for hardliners to take power under the byline that foreign meddling is overreaching Chinese authority in China itself.

'Freedom and human rights' should not just be priorities for this one individual. They should be our priorities for the entirety of the Chinese populace both now and ten, twenty, fifty years down the line. By giving hardliners a reason to seize power and popularity we'd actually be doing more to threaten individual rights. You must remember that major social changes take time. If you read an account of some of the actions taken during and in the years after the Revolutionary War in America, for instance, you'll see that we were hardly a shining light of 'human rights' for many, many years. And that's not even touching on the fact that we allowed slavery to exist in this country for nearly a century.

Honestly, I think we need to come to a solution that provides real safety and at least some degree of freedom for Chen while allowing Beijing to (at least publicly) appear to still be projecting authority, even if that comes at the expense of preventing Chen from getting to America. The only other factor to be taken into account is the American populace's view of such actions, so the administration would have to spin it carefully to avoid looking as if they were playing a game of appeasement.

[RedKing]

Again...this isn't "Beijing getting its way". This is "Beijing trying to figure out a way to handle the clusterfuck that Shandong created without looking like they have no handle on the situation whatsoever". Corrupt local and provincial governments have been the bane of China's existence since time immemorial. And at least half the time, the central authority -- be it the Emperor or the CCP -- are in the role of the benevolent power that can protect the peasants from the corrupt local officials. The other half of the time, you had terrible Emperors who were just as bad or worse than the local magistrates, and you had to hope you lived under the occasional good magistrate or governor who ignored the Emperor's demands.

China is the world's largest bureaucracy. Which means that no matter how reform-minded the central government might be, it faces major opposition from its subordinates who have an interest in maintaining the status quo and are already entrenched and have plenty of layers of red tape to shield themselves. Once the Shandong authorities have arrested Chen, Beijing can't just step in and tell them to let him go. Not without their own investigation and good evidence to show that the Shandong authorities were corrupt and that Chen is innocent. Now, to their credit, Beijing has said that they want to launch their own investigation. Hopefully, they'll actually figure out who was responsible and smack them down.

Of course, from the outside, most people will see "internal investigation" and assume it's a cover-up or that nothing will result from it. That's not necessarily the case. When local officials are corrupt but it doesn't make the news, shit does tend to go unpunished. When it makes the news and people are talking about it, shit gets done. When officials were taking bribes to look the other way and let contaminated milk into the supply? Probably would have been ignored until kids start dying and people started getting pissed off. And most of all, Chinese milk products started getting banned for export. Next thing you know, those officials are up against a wall with a blindfold and a firing squad. The corollary to that is that when local officials are corrupt, and their victims begin making noise and bringing attention to it, they (the local officials) crack down even harder, because they know if Beijing finds out the full details, they'll be kicked out of their cushy post at best, and facing a firing squad at worst.

My guess is that while Beijing and the US were working out this agreement to transfer Chen to somewhere else, somebody from the Shandong government passed a threat to him reminding him that his extended family still lives there, and if he knows what's good for them, he'll shut up and not tell Beijing anything else regarding their corruption. Hence, his very reasonable decision to pack up the family and get the hell out of Zhongguo, out of reach of the Shandong authorities.

That's a win for Chen (sort of...being forced into asylum in a foreign country probably isn't high on his list of life goals), and it's a win for the Shandong officials, because he's out of sight, out of mind, and they'll likely get off without a penalty. It's a loss for Beijing, because they look powerless to punish corruption in their territory, powerless to prevent their citizenry from fleeing the country, and powerless to keep the US out of its domestic affairs. It's also a loss for the US because it makes it look like we're trying to intervene, and it opens up the door for more and more dissidents to try and use the US as an escape plan when things get too hot. Honestly, Beijing needs these sort of people to remain in China and help them root out corruption at the local levels. They know it's there, they probably even know which officials are the worst, but without hard evidence and some weight of popular opinion on their side, it's incredibly difficult for them to penetrate the web of favors and kickbacks and entrenched interests and actually remove the worst offenders.

I know that sounds completely insane, but that's how it is (and I should note that decentralization of power and the struggles of the center against the provinces, in both China and India, was the subject of my master's thesis...I'm not just talking out my ass here).