I'm not getting our government's handling of this story, and I sense there's a lot of double talk. I don't believe you have to be an expert on China or briefed on the intricacies of the diplomatic affairs now to say what the right thing to have done was: keep Chen in the Embassy until his family could be reunited with them, mercilessly shining a spotlight on any Chinese government cruelty to his family with the help of the media.
Why is this so hard to understand?
I actually see experts saying on Twitter that Chen shouldn't have come to the Embassy without his family. Well, geez, you can forgive a blind dissident who has been under house arrest and beaten and tormented for years, who had to seize a moment of escape with a daring friend, falling numerous times and breaking his foot trying to jump over a fence, for not doing it exactly the strategic way you think he should have done it.
Seriously, you think a family with a small child are going to have a greater chance of getting inside the US compound than one man? Have you tried this lately?
So once he was there, the first objective was to announce that he was given temporary refuge, without this distractive talk about third-country processing requirements under US refugee or US asylum law requiring the applicant be inside the US. The Embassy can be provided as a safe have on humanitarian grounds.
The second objective was to give him medical care. A broken foot doesn't necessarily require a hospital visit, and surely there are excellent US Embassy physicians or some could be brought in to treat his foot and dehydration or whatever his conditions were.
Then the announcement should have been made firmly to the China that he was staying in the Embassy to recouperate, and that his family had to be untouched and allowed to join him.
Once the officials decided to use the wife as a hostage and beat and threaten her, the way should have been clear instead of confused: keep publicizing this, and keep telling the Chinese they look really, really bad that they can't let the family of a blind man with a broken foot have temporary refuge, with the decision to leave for abroad if they wish. They could say he needs medical treatment abroad or merely say it's a humanitarian case of compassion, and the Chinese have to concede it.
After all, they let tens of thousands of students and workers go to the US every year and do allow all kinds of families to go all the time. So if their point is that they don't let political critics go, they need to be called on that. Why? What's wrong with you?
I'm not understanding why the State Department holds private phone calls with the leading human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First (even though they provide some of the content later). Let's all have this be a public conference. The State Department press briefing was also strangely uninformed. They are just reading what they read in the press like reporters? They can't second guess people on the scene? They don't know? Why? Use the Internet and get some emails or use your smart phone.
Why did the US officials abandon Chen at the hospital? If it is true that they were just downstairs and he didn't know it, how is it that they couldn't immediately let him know that? We get it that doctors can shoo visitors out in the name of the patient's interest, and the Chinese were quick to do this. But they couldn't stand outside the door? They couldn't keep trying to get upstairs? Did they do that?
Chen says he kept calling the Embassy and didn't get an answer. Why didn't an official give him an emergency phone number to contact that they made sure was manned 24/7?
The State Department claims that once the threat was made against Chen's wife, they couldn't take him back. They claim they weren't the ones to pass that threat on to him on behalf of the Chinese secret police. That story needs going over. But once they learned of the threat, their objective should have been — just as it was with Fang Lizhi 23 years ago — to go get him and bring him back.
That's what George Bush did — he ordered Embassy officials who had let Fang Lizhi, a dissident scientist who had led protests in Tiananmen Square, leave the Embassy with a reporter after asking for asylum, and they brought him back. Eventually, he was brought to the US (sadly, Fang LiZhi died last month, or he could be reminding everyone about what the right thing is to do here.)
Say what you will about George Bush; he knew what to do when a Chinese dissident asked for help.
Yes, it might be hard to get to the wife in a Chinese province and then get her to the Embassy. But you demonstratively try. If you are literally physically thwarted by the Chinese authorities, you keep loudly denouncing this. You get reporters on it. Another possible angle is to have an international NGO come and accompany the family and serve as a witness.
The big point here is that the Chinese government looks bad harassing a blind man with a broken foot and beating his wife. They look REALLY bad. And that's what Chen was desperately counting on to work to shine light on his country's awful human rights situation. And yes, it's awful — this incident highlights all the reasons it is! — and we don't have to grovel and talk about the war in Iraq or drones in Afghanistan, which are also awful, in order to talk about this intelligently and effectively.
The Chinese look bad. That's what has to be leveraged in this case because they do. That's why we need to call their bluff.
And if people are whining that we don't have leverage with the Chinese, I'm sorry, I'm not buying it.
We have imports and we have educational and work exchange. These are privileges, not rights in the international system. The US is not required to allow droves of Chinese students and workers into the US. They can remind the Chinese of this.
Is this unacceptable thuggery in international affairs? That's what the Russians do when the Tajiks try to demonstrate against their interference in their security — they had nabbed two Russian pilots, and jailed them for contraband (we were never sure if they really had committed any crime) because they were unhappy at Russian demands for troop deployment and non-payment for a military base. The Russians instantly threatened to deport tens of thousands of Tajik guest workers. The pilot were then released.
I'm not suggesting to become thuggish in this way like Russia. God forbid. They could have done this more subtly and they are at fault in Tajikistan in the first place in ways we are not in China. But it highlights the reciprocity that in fact the US used handily in the Soviet era all the time. Each time a visa was denied, they denied one back. If there were lists of people the Soviets blacklists like critical writers or human rights activists, then the US also made a list of people they wouldn't let in (and the State Department still does this). Russia continues to have a complex and discretionary visa system that in fact still can cause problems like the Soviet era, i.e. when they expelled the journalist Luke Harding. So yes, the US visa process is no picnic, but it's a response to the Russian arbitrariness (like procedures that allow only NGOs with registration with the Foreign Ministry to invite their counterparts, and only with another layer of discretionary approval from the Foreign Ministry and further hard-copy paperwork with the consulate.)
All the US has to do — as much as we are in debt to the Chinese, as much as we are trying to get their cooperation — is say that exchange is a privilege and not a right. And they will see the numbers go down in direct proportion to how they handle this case.
Why am I suggesting the Chinese be reminded that visas are a privilege not a right? Because they've come to take for granted that droves of them can study or work here, and yet that massive interchange of people is not leading to a more liberal regime. It is not changing these people in any way, for the most part, and they themselves generally don't feel any obligation to try at all even subtly to pressure their own government.
Example. Once I was working with a group of activists and students on the Darfur issue. They were expressing their frustration after years of not getting any progress. There were campaigns around the Chinese Olympics that were very weak and frail because the international human rights establishment ducked the challenge of supporting a boycott. People in the Darfur movement endlessly made appeals to first the Bush then the Obama administration, but they "had little leverage" and did what they can, sometimes badly, but they weren't the point.
The point was that there were other veto-wielding countries in this situation — Russia and China — and nobody ever lobbied them. Russia, which had ample supplies, refused to provide helicopters to the UN mission simply because the Sudan government didn't want them to be there. They refused to put any pressure on the Sudanese because they never do on their fellow authoritarians. The Chinese have enormous oil interests in Sudan and refused to do anything to upset the applecart. India, a democracy, also did not get involved. The conversation was about what Silicon Valley, which had tremendous dependency on China as their factory, might do (and wasn't doing).
So I said that every student and IT worker should sit up, look around, and see the Indian, Russian, or Chinese person sitting right next to them at the library table or the cubicle. They should ask every Indian, Russian, and Chinese person in our country on a student or work visa: do you know about this situation? Why don't you care? Why aren't you doing anything about?
That people find this an "unacceptable" approach due to the interpersonal dynamics of it is exactly why I push it. Why? Of course we don't hold individual people responsible for their governments' actions. But every one of these representatives of a BRICS developing nation usually harbours anti-American sentiment and beliefs, indoctrinated in their home school systems and elaborated by the kinds of professors they meet once in the US. Why? Their countries all have massive human rights problems of the sort that either don't occur in the US, under the rule of law, or which have remedy in an independent judiciary. Why don't they call people on their lack of activism?
Most of them will either say they don't think their country is the problem (but it is, indeed), or that they can't do anything because their country is too oppressive, and they would get in trouble if they protested. Well, let's publicize that fact more than we do.
But in a few cases, the student or worker will say, "Yes, I'll sign your petition." Or even "yes, I will come to your teach-in or even your demonstration." The reason why we see waves and waves of passivity on this question is because nobody ever asks. They let the Chinese students on their campus hold themselves aloof and never engage with them under the theory that it is hopeless. Every other group is constantly confronted about every politically correct thing. Why not human rights in these countries? The Russian engineers professional groups and associations never feel any reason to put human rights posititions on their agenda, even though there are Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility and Business for Social Responsibility and every other thing like that when it comes to America's ills. Why not challenge them? Start now, today, with that person next to you.
My point is that we have swarms of people in this country getting an education and earning a living, but it isn't a real exchange. It is not a real engagement. If anything, they are succored in their anti-Americanism in our system and everyone thinks that has to go on forever in the name of liberalism. Why?
Then there's this idea that we "need" China for its "help" on Iran and Syria and North Korea. But they never do help. They are always hindering. You can negotiate and negotiate and they always refuse to do anything. To be sure, they did concede not to return some hapless North Koreans who escaped to China and sought refuge. But that was only because they were tacitly showing their disapproval about the missile launch. They should do more of that.
The National Interest believes that the Administration's refusal to get involved in human rights summit politics shows strength from Obama, not weakness. That is, he grimly refuses to get involved in other countries' internal affairs because he doesn't think it's in his immediate interest (America's interest?). Except the heart of the international human rights system is indeed refusing to concede the "internal affairs" argument because of the right to remind other countries of their universal obligations. The Human Rights Council's Universal Periodical Review is indeed predicated on the notion of peer review and peer pressure.
I think the National Interest's hard-ball interpretation of Obama's action is too convoluted by half for most people, who will see abandoning Chen not as a pragmatic act that got something from the Chinese, but as a cruel and unnecessary act that in fact got nothing at all from Beijing in any area at all. What do we get for abandoning Chen? Nothing.
Don Bacon makes the usual unconscionable and disgraceful Registan intervention on the Atlantic, claiming that these measly NED grants of $75,000 to Chinese human rights activists are some kind of unacceptable interference in internal affairs. And the droves of Chinese students and business people who reap all the rewards of America's free society without ensuring that their fellow citizens like Chen have the same rights?
