Published Sunday, December 3, 2000

Erik Eckholm / New York Times

BEIJING -- Why is this man smiling?

In a picture splashed all over Chinese newspapers late last month, a beaming President Jiang Zemin is shaking hands with the chief U.N. advocate for human rights, celebrating an agreement by which outside experts are supposed to help China accede to treaties on personal freedom.

"Jiang Backs U.N. Rights Cooperation," blared a typical headline. The chipper tone seemed perplexing. After all, the two treaties, which China has signed but not ratified, would in theory require China to embrace principles that could upend Communist rule: freedom of association, the right to free labor unions, protection from arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion and more. And if there is one thing China usually rejects, it is outside interference.

Jiang and his fellow leaders apparently are confident that China can navigate diplomatic dialogues and possibly, in the future, loophole-ridden treaties. They may feel that they can gain diplomatic credit for cooperating at all, while changing their laws only as they are ready to and finessing any provisions that would really threaten the party's monopoly.

At the same time, virtually everyone, from foreign critics to party leaders themselves, agrees that surging economic and social change and the spread of the Internet will be vastly stronger forces for political change than any diplomatic agreements. The expectation that an emerging middle class will demand a political voice and the rule of law has, in fact, been a prime argument in the West for bringing China into the World Trade Organization.

Yet there are strong indications that this vision, too, will be sorely tested in the near term. Some experts, Chinese as well as foreign, worry about the risks of harsher rule as free trade throws angry workers into the streets and a daunting information explosion confronts the government's hapless censors.

"With the Communist Party fearing a loss of control during the transition, its instincts will be to crack down hard on dissent," said Anthony Saich, a Harvard University expert on Chinese politics. "We may well see a harsher period of rule in the coming couple of years as the party tries to manage these new challenges."

Along the way, the U.N. rights commission, the United States and other Western governments and a host of private human rights groups will be looking for ways to put pressure on Beijing. But as the ceremonies late last month suggested, outsiders often have only limited leverage.

Bending concepts

Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, praised China for signing the agreement, which will lead to seminars on delicate rights issues and expert training on legal procedures and related topics. But she was careful to say in public that repression in China has actually worsened in the last two years. Thousands of followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement have been sent to labor camps without trial, hundreds of democracy campaigners have been jailed and censorship of political thought has recently tightened up.

The remarks by Jiang during Robinson's visit also showed how the Chinese, by bending concepts to fit their needs, can frustrate those working for systemic change.

"The Chinese government has always supported international exchange and cooperation in the area of human rights because each country has its own way," Jiang told his visitor.

Robinson's protests against this slippery relativism, through her insistence that key freedoms have a single, universal definition, were never reported in the Chinese press.

International rights advocates had mixed feelings about the cooperation agreement, especially after discovering that it had been watered down from earlier drafts.

The New York-based group Human Rights in China noted that the agreement's training measures may help reduce China's notorious judicial incompetence and police brutality. But the group added that the agreement may have little impact on the deeper problem of policies that intentionally violate basic rights.

Human Rights Watch, also based in New York, described the agreement as "part of a slow dance with Chinese authorities, on the assumption that some contact is better than none."

But several rights groups noted that China's sincerity is called into question by its refusal to fulfill an obligation under the anti-torture covenant that it has already ratified.

China has so far prevented a required international inspection and report on its practices, refusing to allow the unfettered access to prisons and prisoners that is a standard practice among other countries that have signed the treaty.

The two treaties now in the spotlight are the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. China's parliament has recently debated ratification of the first but is far from taking up the second,

Each covenant has provisions that challenge basic tenets of Communist rule, but there are also exceptions granted when a country says its security or social order is threatened.

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