At their summit in Beijing this week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will discuss trade, the war in Iran, and other pressing topics, but one vital issue will undoubtedly be off the agenda: human rights.
This summit should be an opportunity for two of the world’s two most influential leaders to hold each other to account and challenge each other to uphold international norms on human rights. Indeed, both the United States and China are key members of the United Nations’ rules-based system intended to ensure respect for all people’s human rights.
But Trump and Xi are disregarding and dismantling that system.
Both men, in their own ways, have tried to co-opt the concept of human rights to promote their narrow economic and security interests, eliminate dissent domestically, and ignore human rights crises around the world – many of which their governments’ policies and practices have fueled.
We are thus about to see two perpetrators of grave violations meet, each one comfortable in the knowledge that the other won’t hold them accountable for their actions. If Trump’s pre-departure press conference is any indication, the gravity of human rights issues that should be on the table may be beyond the grasp of these leaders. When asked about political prisoner Jimmy Lai, Trump incomprehensively compared Lai to former FBI director James Comey, implicitly suggesting that it is excusable for leaders to imprison their critics.
The Trump administration is overseeing a mass deportation machine that rips families apart while empowering ICE agents who have targeted and killed activists. The U.S. military under Trump has kidnapped and killed foreign heads of state, rolled back years of work to minimize civilian harm during war, committed mass murder on the high seas under the false guise of a drug war, and continued to send weapons to Israel as its government commits genocide.
Meanwhile, the Xi administration entirely stifles free expression, freedom of protest, and freedom of religion, while committing crimes against humanity against minority groups. Xi’s government has interned or disappeared over a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang and has implemented draconian laws, not least the Hong Kong National Security Law, subjecting people to indefensible state control.
His government seeks to extend its repression beyond borders by surveilling, threatening and issuing bounties on activists overseas while pressuring other governments to shut down spaces where critical views may be aired. We recently saw the bitter fruit of Beijing’s transnational repression with the sudden “postponement” of RightsCon, the world’s largest tech and human rights conference this year.
Both Trump and Xi have worked openly and actively to undermine the international human rights system, threatening the very basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Beijing has elevated its version of the “right to development” above all other rights, while preaching a strident noninterference that subjugates any human rights concerns to business, economic, and security interests.
The Trump administration has promoted its own concept of “natural rights” to set the United States apart from global human rights standards, while eviscerating the State Department’s human rights expert teams and reporting system. The administration has sanctioned judges, prosecutors and even human rights groups supporting the International Criminal Court, launched devastating funding cuts for global human rights bodies and international institutions, and absconded from the U.N.’s human rights review process of the United States with no intent to re-engage – something no country has done before.
So we should not expect the upcoming summit to be a place where either man brings up human rights. Instead, the meeting will be a stark display of Trump and Xi’s joint, anti-human rights vision of transactional geopolitics.
Other countries must band together and insist that Xi and Trump stop undermining ongoing efforts to implement and improve the international human rights systems, which save lives, protect millions from persecution, advance the dignity of people around the world and increase global prosperity and security. The United States and China are not above these systems, nor can their people thrive without them.
It’s now up to our communities, civil society groups and individuals – both Chinese and American – to turn to other governments and U.N. member states to demand the accountability that these leaders will not require of each other.
