Asked before he departed for Beijing if he would raise with the Chinese president the case of Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy activist jailed in Hong Kong, Donald Trump said: “I’ll bring him up.”
But, the US president added: “It’s like saying to me, ‘If Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ It might be a hard one for me.” Trump was referring to James B Comey, a former FBI director and a frequent target of Trump’s ire.
Trump’s flippant attitude towards human rights comes as no surprise. Since he took office, his administration has launched widespread attacks on civil liberties, from immigration raids to attacks on gender-based healthcare to cutting funding for civil rights groups.
But the near-total absence of human rights from current US-China dialogue is a marked departure from the diplomacy of previous generations – reflecting both the transformation of the US in the Trump era and China’s increasing confidence on the world stage.
The Chinese Communist party now “seems immune to so-called condemnations and the international community”, said Ren Quanniu, a disbarred human rights lawyer.
When George W Bush visited Beijing in 2008, he insisted on attending a Sunday church service to press his case for religious freedom in China.
When Barack Obama made his state visit the following year, he urged China’s then president Hu Jintao to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.
Both Bush and Obama have themselves been accused of war crimes and human rights abuses related to the US’s “war on terror”. But their public support for minorities and activists in China was welcomed by the country’s nascent civil society movement.
One of the most high-profile cases of US intervention came in 2012 when the Obama administration helped to evacuate a blind human rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng after he escaped from house arrest. (Chen later urged US voters to elect Trump, claiming he would “stand up to tyranny”.)
Even for less famous civil rights figures, support from the US can boost morale and lead to partial improvements in their conditions.
“I have been told directly by any number of Chinese activists that raising their case has made a difference,” said Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University in Washington. The difference might be an improvement in prison conditions or an easing of harassment outside prison.
The US’s retreat from its claimed position – even if it was always a somewhat false one – as global human rights defender comes at a time when activists say the situation in China has worsened.
Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he has cracked down on civil society, punished feminist activists, narrowed the space for religious and ethnic expression and made crushing dissent a priority.
Under his rule, China implemented a network of re-education camps in the north-west region of Xinjiang, which imprisoned up to 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the name of combating extremism. The UN said China’s policies in Xinjiang could constitute crimes against humanity, although Beijing strenuously denies those claims.
“These are very, very difficult times for human rights defenders,” said Sophie Richardson, the co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an NGO. “I don’t think any democratic government has really kept pace in its interventions with Beijing.”
During Trump’s first term, he took a more aggressive stance on China. His top team included many China hawks, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger. That administration sanctioned several officials accused of being connected to human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Trump’s current secretary of state Marco Rubio was himself sanctioned by China for his fierce criticism of the country’s human rights record when he was a senator (China nonetheless allowed him to accompany Trump to Beijing this week).
But those hawks have been sidelined and Trump, a leader who has displayed many autocratic tendencies himself, has expressed admiration for Xi.
On Thursday he told the Chinese leader: “You’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway, because it’s true … it’s an honour to be your friend.”
China, whose economy and military strength has increased rapidly in the past decades, has also grown more impervious to western criticism, which it long interpreted as lecturing and hypocritical.
In 2021, China’s State Council released a 28-page report about human rights violations in the US that opened with the quote: “I can’t breathe,” the final words of George Floyd, an African American man whose murder by a police officer sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
Ren said Chinese propaganda had also persuaded many ordinary people that criticisms from the US were driven by “hostile foreign forces” rather than genuine humanitarian concern. “Many people don’t care what the Americans say any more,” Ren said.
According to Trump, human rights did get a mention at this week’s summit. Although it did not feature in either side’s readout of the two-hour talks on Thursday, Trump told Fox News on his way home that he had discussed both Jimmy Lai and the case of several detained pastors with Xi.
He said that Xi was “seriously considering” releasing the detained religious leaders, many of whom were targeted during a recent crackdown on Christians.
That was welcomed by their relatives. Grace Jin Drexel, whose father, Ezra Jin, was detained last year, said: “It’s a major answer to our prayers and we’re also so grateful to everyone who has walked alongside us at the most difficult time.”
But when it came to Lai, a 78-year-old former media mogul with broad bipartisan support in the US, Trump said it was a “tough one”.