USA Today, 29 April 2011
By Calum MacLeod

BEIJING — U.S. officials brought multiple questions to human rights talks this week in China, where the worst crackdown on dissent in years has seen scores of people detained in recent months. They’ll leave with precious few answers.

“Our disagreements are profound,” Michael Posner, assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said at the close of the two-day U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue on Thursday. China’s “serious backsliding on human rights” dominated what Posner called “a tough set of discussions.”

Concerning Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist and activist detained April 3, “we certainly did not get an answer that satisfies,” Posner said. On Teng Biao, a leading human rights lawyer detained without charge since February 19, “I continue to have real concerns,” said Posner, who also revealed the U.S. was no nearer making any contact with Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest in Beijing ever since her husband, jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in October.

The lack of results this week, in talks that mark the 16th round of the human rights dialogue since 1990, leaves some analysts questioning whether such exchanges should continue.

“What can we point to that is a concrete outcome of this process?” asked Joshua Rosenzweig, a researcher in Hong Kong for the Dui Hua Foundation, which lobbies for China’s political prisoners. “There are many recent indications that the Chinese side is increasingly reluctant to provide information about individual cases.”

Although China conducts similar bilateral talks with several other nations besides the U.S., “China would ultimately prefer human rights dialogues that discuss human rights issues and policies in a very general sense, without specifics of individual cases,” Rosenzweig said.

China’s state-run media insist the nation is making significant progress, and they reject U.S. criticism.

“Although China still faces tough challenges in improving rule by law and law enforcement, China’s human rights already have a solid foundation,” Liu Huawen, a human rights scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, wrote in the China Daily newspaper Thursday. The U.S. “continually seeks to politicize human rights for its own ends,” he said.

In the Communist Party-controlled newspaper Global Times, an editorial Thursday said that “most Chinese people are disgusted with Western pressure on human rights,” and it warned that the dialogue “will not progress under U.S. pressure.”

Human rights lawyer Li Fangping, a friend of detainee Teng Biao, said international attention, and the U.S.-China talks, are crucial to cases such as Teng’s. “His detention, for over two months now, is completely illegal. We are all very worried at this tense time. The effect of the dialogue may not seem direct or obvious, but there will be an effect and it will help,” Li said.

Posner defended the talks as one part of a wider U.S. government engagement with China on these issues. He said human rights will also feature at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue set for May 9-10 in Washington, and at a legal experts dialogue, long-stalled, that Posner announced would resume in June.

Despite the current crackdown, Posner said he remains optimistic that China’s people will enjoy more freedoms in the future. “The combination of people’s ambition, aspiration, the increasing openness of global communication and travel, all of those things suggest to me that, over the long term, there is going to be positive change here.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-04-29-china-human-rights-dissidents-talks_n.htm