China and the International Human Rights Regime: A Case Study of Multilateral Monitoring, 1989-1994

I. Introduction

The decision by President Clinton on 26 May 1994 to sever Most-Favored Nation trading status [hereinafter MFN] from human rights in US relations with China marks the end of a four year period in which MFN assumed the principal public role in the international monitoring of China’s human rights. This controversial decision has highlighted the difficulties involved in the bilateral monitoring of the human rights of a powerful state. Bilateral monitoring implicates the autonomy of two sovereign and, in most cases, effectively unequal states. Because of its political overtones, bilateral monitoring attracts the public imagination and may facilitate a short-term outcome.

Yet its advantages are the precise measure of its weaknesses. Bilateral mechanisms are open to abuse and to misunderstandings between states, and, in the very process of monitoring, their means overshadow their ends. In pitting the sovereignty and national prestige of one state against another they may have the counter-productive effect of mobilizing the very citizenry whose human rights are being abused in support of the abusing state. At the very least, they mobilize the state itself. As the outcome of the MFN case showed, bilateral monitoring is also vulnerable to political, strategic or economic trade-offs between states.

Some have argued that MFN was a blunt, imperfect instrument which was too dangerous to use: others that it was a lever too valuable to drop. ² A case could be made that the problem lay not so much in the mechanism itself, but in the way that it was wielded. Before 1993, MFN was a vague cloud hanging over the Chinese government, not threatening enough to constitute an open challenge to China’s sovereignty, but real enough to influence such important concessions as the release of leading dissidents. However, the executive order of May 1993 calling for overall, significant progress in seven specific areas of China’s human rights, and dropping issues of arms proliferation and trade from the MFN linkage, at once elevated the role of human rights in US-China relations and made the conditions so specific that it would be difficult to prove that they had been met. MFN was projected in a way that appeared to openly challenge China’s sovereignty and to place China in the role of ‘victim’ within UN human rights forums. When measured against a host of other variables, such as problems in the US economy, alterations in China’s geopolitical situation, China’s booming economy linked with growing domestic instability, and the strategic threat in North Korea requiring China’s diplomatic intervention, MFN proved wholly inadequate to its task.

However, the important issue is not the source of MFN’s failure, but the outcome of that failure. It is now clear that MFN, or any modification thereof, no longer represents a credible monitoring instrument capable of achieving an improvement in the condition of China’s human rights. What are the alternatives? As Maxime Tardu has pointed out in his general appraisal of the variety of pressures on a state’s human rights:

The many factors at work included, first and foremost, an awareness of their dignity by the persons concerned, under the influence of national human rights defence groups; international pressure exerted by NGOs; bilateral inter-state deterrence, in varying forms and degrees; diplomatic representations, measures of cultural and political isolation, withdrawal of economic and technical assistance, commercial boycott; the positions adopted by churches and religious groups; the implementation of complaints procedures at regional level (Council of Europe, the Organization of American States (OAS)) and within the sectoral framework of the specialized agencies of the United Nations, in particular ILO; and lastly, the activities of the United Nations. ³

The most logical and effective alternative to open bilateral pressures would appear to be a return to the multilateral mechanisms which were the mainstay of international pressure on China in the months immediately following the Tiananmen crackdown in June 1989. Because the United States and China are not members of any regional group that could provide a credible mechanism at...