Obama Is Set to Discuss Rights Issues With China
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON — A top State Department official said Thursday that there was a “growing sense of alarm in the United States about human rights developments in China,” vowing that the issue would feature prominently in summit talks between President Xi Jinping of China and President Obama in Washington next month.

The official, Tom Malinowski, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, cited concerns about a proposed law in China that would severely restrict civil society and nongovernmental organizations, as well as recent roundups of lawyers and activists.

“Our ability to have a very positive summit of the sort that the Chinese government and the U.S. government wants will certainly be affected by the extent to which things get better or worse in the interim,” Mr. Malinowski said, addressing reporters after the close of the 19th U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, in which diplomats from the two countries criticized each other’s record on human rights.

The Chinese diplomats raised concerns about recent police shootings in the United States. “The Ferguson case was raised briefly,” Mr. Malinowski said, “and I actually thought this was quite interesting because they said, ‘We all saw that on TV,’ and my response, without in any way diminishing the seriousness of the problem that we are facing in the United States, was, ‘Exactly, you saw it on TV.’ ”

Reporters in China are not free to report on similar episodes of violence, and victims, their family members and lawyers are not able to petition for redress without fear of retribution from the government, Mr. Malinowski said he told his Chinese counterparts, who did not participate in the news briefing.

Mr. Malinowski, who served for more than a decade as the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, has long been a prominent and passionate advocate for human rights. While he promised that the Obama administration would advocate forcefully on these issues with the Chinese, his ability to deliver on that vow is far from clear.

Mr. Obama has a long list of issues to discuss with Mr. Xi, including climate change, cybersecurity, open navigation of the South China Sea and economic concerns. And as China has become increasingly central to the global economy, its leaders have grown less willing to be lectured about human rights.

While the human rights dialogue is supposed to be an annual affair, the two countries skipped having one last year, something Mr. Malinowski said he could not explain. Even the timing of Thursday’s briefing — late in the afternoon on the eve of a visit to Cuba by Secretary of State John Kerry — all but ensured that it would receive little news coverage.

“China has become increasingly allergic to these human rights discussions,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “And China is strong enough now to set the terms of the discussion to its own benefit.”

China has the world’s second-largest economy, and it is so deeply integrated into the global economy that shifts in its policies or outlook have international repercussions. An abrupt devaluation of its currency this week, for instance, rattled stock markets around the world.

Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said that repression of rights in China had become so grave that Western governments could no longer ignore it. “It’s no longer easy to draw a line between human rights issues and everything else,” Ms. Richardson said.

A bipartisan group from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter this week to Mr. Obama urging him to make human rights a “key and public component of the agenda” during Mr. Xi’s state visit. But the senators acknowledged in their letter that the two leaders had a long list of issues to discuss.

Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, an international human rights organization based in Washington, said that China’s increasingly intense censorship of the Internet had become a vital business issue for many American companies, blurring the lines between human rights and economic interests. For that reason, she said, American officials must raise human rights concerns more forcefully.

“You can no longer separate the economic concerns of U.S. companies from the human rights concerns about citizens in China,” Ms. Cook said.

美放話：9月歐習會談人權 習近平別想躲

美國國務院助理國務卿馬里諾夫斯基十三日表示，「美國對於中國大陸人權發展的警覺逐漸提高」，並鄭重宣告此一議題將是九月「歐習會」的重點項目。大陸國家主席習近平九月將出訪華府，與美國總統歐巴馬會談。

紐約時報報導，美國國務院主管民主、人權與勞工事務的馬里諾夫斯基（Tom Malinowski）表示，美國對大陸正在研擬的一項法律，以及最近逮捕人權分子和律師的舉措表示關切，前述法律會嚴格限制公民社會與非政府組織的活動。

第十九屆美中人權對話活動十三、十四日在華府閉門舉行，馬里諾夫斯基在會後記者會上說，美中雙方都希望歐習會是一場積極正面的會晤。美中代表在前述人權對話中互相指責對方的人權缺失。馬里諾夫斯基說，中方代表關切美國白人警察射殺無武裝黑人的佛格森案，因為「他們在電視上看到這個消息」。

馬里諾夫斯基對於中方指責，毫不猶豫地回擊說，「沒錯，你們在電視上看到了美國種族問題的嚴重性」，暗批中方隻手遮天，箝制（媒體）言論自由。他說，他告訴中方代表，大陸記者無法自由報導類似暴力案件，受害者、家屬和律師上訴請願總得擔心遭政府報復。

馬里諾夫斯基曾任人權觀察組織華府主任十餘年，倡導人權不遺餘力。紐約時報指出，雖然馬里諾夫斯基十三日強硬表示人權議題將列為歐習會重點，但屆時能否如他所言還很難說。除了人權問題之外，歐巴馬與習近平料將討論氣候變遷、網路安全、南海航行自由權和經濟等議題。世界第二大經濟體中國大陸逐漸成為全球經濟重心，這點從人民幣這幾天貶值令全球股市震盪即足以證明。但也因為如此，中方領導人愈來愈避談人權問題。

美國亞洲協會美中關係中心主任夏偉說：「中方對人權問題日益敏感，而且他們現在已經強勢到足以決定利己的討論項目。」人權觀察組織中國部主任索菲．理查森說，中方對人權的壓迫已嚴重到西方政府無法忽視的地步，「要把人權與其他事務切割不再是容易的事了 」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/obama-is-set-to-discuss-rights-issues-with-china.html

2015-08-15．聯合報．A16．國際．編譯陳韻涵