Talks with Beijing U.S. balancing act

The Obama administration faces a delicate balancing act in human rights talks with China that began Thursday: It looks to pressure China to improve treatment of its citizens while not angering a country that is crucial to U.S. international interests.

The two-day meeting in Washington also gives the administration a chance to answer criticism that it ignores rights abuses while pushing for Chinese support on Iranian and North Korean nuclear standoffs, climate change and other difficult issues.

This may be a difficult time, however, for the United States to take a tough position in the private meeting. The talks, which have resumed after two years, come ahead of a major gathering of top-level U.S. and Chinese officials this month in Beijing that will focus on the countries’ intertwined economic and security interests.

“We hope they do more than talk,” Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, said about this week’s meeting. “The U.S. side must send a credible, serious human rights message.”

Disagreements over human rights have for years been irritants in U.S.-China relations. This week’s talks come as the countries try to repair ties after a rough period. President Obama infuriated China by recently announcing a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing as its own, and by meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader China calls a separatist.

At the head of the U.S. delegation is Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights. He said in an interview ahead of the talks that the United States would not shy from raising difficult issues.

“The challenge is to find a way to communicate those differences respectfully but directly,” Mr. Posner said.

He said human rights could not “just be isolated to a few days of discussion every other year, every year; it’s part of the broader relationship.”

The United States regularly criticizes China for abusing its dissidents, the lawyers who try to defend them and average citizens looking for free access to information. In response, China has shot back that the United States is rife with crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, speaking of the talks during a regularly scheduled press briefing Thursday in Beijing, said, “I believe that dialogue is better than confrontation.”

Activists have been unhappy with the Obama administration’s approach to China’s rights record since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a trip to China in early 2009, said human rights issues should not interfere with improving U.S.-China ties.

Ms. Hom said the United States should use the rights dialogue to raise the cases of imprisoned dissidents and, when the talks are finished, both sides should lay out what was discussed and set up benchmarks for ways to get results.