Ellen Bork is a foreign policy analyst and human rights advocate who was a prolific contributor to The Weekly Standard from 1997 to 2017. She wrote extensively on China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and democracy movements across Asia, as well as broader international human rights issues. She has been affiliated with the Project for the New American Century and the Foreign Policy Initiative.
Liu Xiaobo, the literary critic, philosopher, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, died today at age 61. His death is an inestimable loss, and the circumstances cruel. Liu was serving an 11-year sentence for subversion for his role in Charter 08, a democracy manifesto and other writings critical of…
Since 1992, even before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, U.S. policy has been based on the premise that Beijing's Communist leaders value Hong Kong's autonomy. The theory was that Beijing would not want to damage Hong Kong and so could be relied upon not to undermine Hong Kong's…
Donald Trump likes dictators and likes to be liked by them. After meeting Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week, Trump called Sisi "a fantastic guy," gushing, "he took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it." Trump approves of the unprecedented repression that followed Sisi's…
Harry Wu, the former Chinese political prisoner died Tuesday at 79. In the 1990s, Mr. Wu used his personal experiences and research to bring the matter of forced labor—and the products they exported to the West—into the then vigorous American debate over human rights in China. Thanks to Mr. Wu, the…
In 1989, I lived a block away from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C. It sat on Connecticut Avenue, a major thoroughfare that runs from the White House past the city limits. In the spring of that year, as pro-democracy protests swelled in Beijing, crowds of Chinese…
Even in the context of China’s steadily deteriorating human rights situation, the developments of the last few weeks have been remarkable.
Growing up blind and poor in rural China, Chen Guangcheng had few prospects. Yet before he turned 40, Chen was one of China’s most famous human rights activists, known around the world after he became the subject of a dramatic standoff between the American and Chinese governments. Chen's new…
In January, Sri Lanka’s voters kicked out President Mahinda Rajapaksa for being corrupt, repressive, and too close to China. The country’s new government, led by President Maithripala Sirisena, promptly drew attention and not a little admiration for halting a Chinese-led development project, citing…
On Sunday, the leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy protests abruptly scrapped a poll of protester sentiment they had announced just days earlier. The idea of the poll had been to get protesters’ reactions to two bones thrown to them by the Hong Kong government in televised talks held on October 21.
Representatives of the student led democracy protests in Hong Kong are due to enter into a dialogue with the Hong Kong government on Tuesday. The prospects for success are not good. The two sides are far apart, with the government saying it will not even discuss the protesters’ chief demand – the…
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Beijing has dealt another setback to democracy in Hong Kong. On Sunday, August 31, China’s central government dashed hopes that the chief executive, the top official responsible for the city of 7.2 million people, would be democratically elected in 2017. Rather than open nominations to anyone,…
Despite the attention paid to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy as lacking an “organizing principle,” there wasn’t much new in her interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Mostly the exchange covered issues on which her differences with the president are…
At this writing, it seems that the hundreds of trucks sent by Moscow with supplies for the residents of Eastern Ukraine will be delivered without further incident. For over a week, the long convoy wended its way toward the Ukrainian border, carrying with it the prospect for a spike in tensions…
On July 30, Chinese communist authorities indicted Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual, on charges of separatism, a charge that could carry the death penalty. Tohti was detained in mid-January, and the timing of the indictment seems related to an attack the Chinese authorities claim was carried out…
Over half a million people filled the streets of Hong Kong on July 1, marching for democracy on the anniversary of the British colony’s handover to Chinese Communist rule in 1997. On June 29, an unofficial referendum organized by democracy activists concluded with 800,000 votes cast—more than…
In a 2007 article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “Let a Hundred Flowers Be Crushed,” the Chinese lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, told of being followed by security agents every year around the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre of democracy protesters. Pu responded by ushering the agents to a conference room at…
At the beginning of this month, two prominent Hong Kong democracy advocates visited Washington to seek America’s support.
General Secretary Xi Jinping of China is in Lyon, France today, the second stop on a European swing, his first trip there since taking over the leadership of China’s Communist party. He has already visited Amsterdam, where he met with President Obama. After France, including a visit to Paris, Mr.…
China’s Communist party leadership concluded an important agenda-setting meeting in Beijing on November 12. At this point much remains unclear about the decisions made at the Third Plenum of the 18th Communist Party Central Committee conclave, including changes to the One China policy, market…
Today, President Dalia Grybauskaite welcomed His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, to Vilnius, Lithuania. Two years ago, her Estonian counterpart, President Toomas Ilves, also defied Beijing by meeting the Dalai Lama. Their gestures of principle and graciousness, made in the…
Obama administration officials may be upset that China intervened to help NSA leaker Edward Snowden leave Hong Kong but they shouldn't be surprised. Beijing has intervened before to get its way on matters that were meant to be the purview of Hong Kong's independent judicial system and to stymie…
Much reporting on Burma reflects the mistaken impression that things have changed dramatically and for good. Yet last Saturday, three activists were arrested in connection with a rally outside the Chinese embassy in Rangoon against a Chinese-sponsored copper mine.
President Obama’s trip to Southeast Asia will take him to Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma. Relations with Thailand and Cambodia are relatively static, thanks to the former’s historic alliance with the U.S. and despite the latter’s terrible human rights record. Burma, on the other hand, is in the…
A cartoon on the front page of the August 2 Independent, a weekly journal published in Burma’s capital, showed a rider approaching a fortress painted with the stars and stripes of the American flag.
President Obama’s announcement last fall of a “pivot” to Asia has been greeted with skepticism. For one thing, there will be no appreciable increase in U.S. military assets in the region any time soon. Furthermore, even for an administration generally unconvincing in its commitment to the promotion…
Low expectations for the 17th round of the U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, conducted on July 23 and 24 in Washington, were borne out by Assistant Secretary Michael Posner’s briefing yesterday. Posner’s main points were that the dialogue is not a negotiation, but rather “just a piece” of “365 days…
Of the books I have read about China, The Corpse Walker, which I reviewed for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is one of my favorites. Written by Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker contains stories about the strange mix of people Liao met while traveling around China and serving time in jail for writing and…
The Chinese Communist party’s preoccupation with its leadership transition, expected to be made final next fall when Xi Jinping becomes general secretary, should not dissuade the U.S. from making a “strong intervention at the highest level” regarding Tibet, according to Lodi Gyari, who spoke…
Under secretary for political affairs Wendy Sherman’s visit to Nepal this week is a praiseworthy sign of American concern about affairs in that nation wedged between Tibet and India.
Obama administration officials touted the visit to the United States last week by Communist first secretary Xi Jinping as “relationship building.” Xi is widely expected to succeed Hu Jintao as general secretary next fall and to run China for the next ten years. So he arrived to an agenda that…
In a recent presidential debate, Congressman Ron Paul made a bizarre equivalence between a Chinese dissident taking refuge in America and Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan, as he was attempting to criticize American foreign and defense policies generally. And while it may come as a relief to…
Andrew Higgins’s article in today’s Washington Post, “China denounces ‘Hong Konger trend,” follows on the Wall Street Journal Asia’s editorial about Beijing’s attacks on University of Hong Kong professor Robert Chung, whose polling of public opinion shows a marked increase in those identifying as…
The Wall Street Journal Asia editorial page is covering the uptick in verbal attacks on Hong Kong individuals and institutions by Chinese Communist officials and their official press. So far, the list includes pro-democracy politicians and their supporters, the Catholic Church, and the top U.S.…
“China is the largest hypocrisy in the world,” Richard Gere told an interviewer from Indian television station NDTV yesterday, while attending a major Buddhist teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya. In the lengthy interview, the transcript of which can be read here, Gere argues that…
The Wall Street Journal Asia has published an editorial arguing that the process for “electing” Hong Kong’s next chief executive reflects the erosion of the “one country, two systems” principle that was supposed to allow Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and ultimately full democracy. The…
Another country has calculated that Christmas time is a good time to launch a crackdown on human rights. Following China’s harsh sentencing of two writers on subversion charges, Egyptian security forces today rolled up to several prominent democracy and human rights NGOs in Cairo and shut them…
The Communist Party sends more greetings of the season. A Guizhou court today sentenced another mainland activist, Chen Xi of Guizhou, to 10 years, on subversion charges for his writing. Chen Xi's sentence follows the 9-year sentence on similar charges for Chen Wei passed down by a Sichuan court on…
The Washington Post has an interesting story on the escalating verbal attacks from theChinese government on America's top diplomat in Hong Kong, Stephen Young. (The Wall Street Journal Asia editorial on the subject here: “Paranoia in Hong Kong.”) The Post’s Andrew Higgins reports that the Hong Kong…
For China’s communist leaders, Christmas is a time for repression. Liu Xiaobo, the writer, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was sentenced to 11 years for “incitement to subversion of state power” on December 25, 2009. The indictment listed several of his essays, as well as his role in the…
Vaclav Havel, who died yesterday, will perhaps be remembered most of all for his role in the civic initiative Charter 77, which led to his country’s Velvet Revolution and inspired dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc to defeat communism. Decades later, “living in truth” – his famous phrase from…
Senator Mark Kirk is pushing for the U.S. to engage in deeper strategic cooperation with China on drugs, terrorism, and Afghanistan. Speaking yesterday at the Foreign Policy Initiative’s annual conference at the Newseum, the Illinois Republican argued that the U.S. should build a supply line to…
Hong Kong
‘Sports diplomacy lives!” raved a former national security official traveling with the Georgetown University basketball team on a visit to China timed to coincide with Vice President Biden’s trip this week. That was before a brawl ended the Hoyas’ game against a professional Chinese team tied to…
Good for Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, for meeting with the Dalai Lama:
Lobsang Sangay was sworn in today as head of Tibet’s democratic exile government in Dharamsala, India. He succeeds Samdhong Rinpoche, the first directly elected Kalon Tripa, or chief of cabinet, who served two terms.
The author Liao Yiwu has left China. Repeatedly denied the right to travel abroad, Liao recently slipped out of China to Vietnam, and arrived last week in Germany.
In his speech at the State Department on May 19, President Obama called Egypt essential to the future of democratic reform in the Middle East and North Africa. As the largest and most influential Arab country, Egypt could in large part determine the course of the regional uprisings and the prospect…
Hillary Clinton is a big booster of Internet. Indeed, she is making Internet the central – and as best one can tell, the only – thrust of the Obama administration’s democracy policy. But even she acknowledges that in the wrong hands, technology is “not an unmitigated blessing,” as Clinton said in…
Jon Huntsman is about to leave the People’s Republic of China after less than two years as Washington’s ambassador. Human rights activists say he did a good job, at least by comparison with his predecessor, Clark J. Randt, Jr. That's not saying much. However, ambassadors planning a presidential…
It might have been reasonable to hope, some time ago, that Hosni Mubarak could have overseen a democratic transition in Egypt. But that is no longer the case.
As President Obama prepares to welcome China’s Communist party general secretary Hu Jintao to Washington for a state visit on January 19, it’s easy to get nostalgic about an earlier era in U.S.-China relations. Throughout the 1990s, there was at least the prospect that America would use the…
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese intellectual serving an 11-year jail sentence on subversion charges, has accomplished two great things.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo on October 8 is a huge problem for China’s leaders. It undermines their efforts to portray the Chinese Communist party as the legitimate representative of China’s people. And for that very reason, Liu’s prize is an enormous boon to the people of…
An EU diplomat and diplomats from 10 European countries tried to deliver a letter of congratualtions from EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso to Liu Xia, the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo at her home in Beijing. They were prevented from entering by guards. Liu Xia is under…
Here are a few reactions to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize on October 8 to the writer and literary critic Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced in December 2009 to an 11-year sentence for “incitement to subversion of state power” for his writings about democracy and human rights and his association…
When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, now serving an 11-year jail sentence, I could not help but think of a small, inspiring museum in Oslo called the Museum of Resistance. It tells the story of Norway’s courageous citizens who refused…
A source reports from Moscow that Mikhail Schneider, a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement, has been jailed for three days in connection with a demonstration on Russia’s Flag Day, which was held on August 22. He follows to jail Lev Ponomarev, a well known human rights activist, who also…
In the midst of an upheaval in the prosecution of the Afghanistan war, the G-8 and G-20 meetings, and the continuing saga of the BP oil spill, a political earthquake that took place in Hong Kong last week escaped notice.
President Obama has been heavily criticized for not supporting democracy activists abroad, making it his priority instead to “engage” with dictatorial regimes. In doing so, he has puzzled many activists who expected him to be at least as supportive, if not more so, than George W. Bush.
Cairo
The Obama administration is faltering on democracy and human rights. Take the president’s November trip to China. His “town hall meeting” was stage-managed by Communist authorities, and Liu Xiaobo, the most prominent dissident on a list given to Chinese authorities, was sentenced a few weeks later…
When rioting broke out between ethnic Han Chinese and Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, in far western China last July, the longtime regional Communist Party head, Wang Lequan, accused Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader, of instigating them from abroad. The riots, he said, “revealed Rebiya’s…
On Wednesday morning, Beijing time -- Tuesday evening EST -- Liu Xiaobo, the writer and activist, will be put on trial for "inciting state subversion." The trial date was announced last weekend and the timing is not accidental. Many top envoys from democratic countries are away observing the…
In two recent speeches, the president and the secretary of state have tried to answer criticisms that Obama administration foreign policy neglects democracy and human rights. Neither however offered much to suggest a change in the priority given to these objectives, or a hint that there would be…
The Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet, was in Washington last week and President Obama did not meet him. "Big mistake," said my Eritrean taxi driver on the way over to hear the Dalai Lama speak at an awards ceremony at Sidney Harman Hall on Wednesday.
Teng Biao, a Chinese lawyer, is a prominent member of the "rights defense" movement, which is attempting to use China's existing laws and institutions to protect human rights. After Teng and other lawyers offered to represent Tibetans arrested during widespread demonstrations in March 2008, the…
China's Great Train
The Corpse Walker
In a bold challenge to the Chinese government's crackdown in Tibet, nearly 30 dissidents have circulated an open letter titled "Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation." The dissidents' letter contrasts with the Communist government's arrest of hundreds of Tibetans and official…
I arrived in Hangzhou on a plane from Beijing one Saturday in August. Wen picked me up at the airport. We had met once, years before, at an international gathering in Jakarta. Back then, at dinner one night, the Americans around the table had argued over China policy. Afterward, I'd given Wen my…
A taxi ride in Washington, D.C., can be at least as thought provoking as a panel discussion at one of our local think tanks. Several weeks ago, I took a cab to a movie theater. When I told the driver I was going to see a documentary film about art stolen by the Nazis, he replied: "The Russians took…
Beijing is taking some heat for blocking, along with Russia, a UN security council resolution condemning Burma, but the Communist party has other things to worry about besides international opinion and an Olympic boycott. The friendly junta that gives China an outlet to the Indian Ocean is facing a…
ANSON CHAN'S DECISION to stand in a by-election for Hong Kong's semi-democratic legislature is good news. Her admirers in Hong Kong have waited for a long time for this beloved but aloof figure to, as she put it "put my money where my mouth is." Chan reached the top of Hong Kong's civil service,…
The Coroner's Lunch
HONG KONG IS coming up on the 10th anniversary of its reversion to Chinese rule in 1997. At the time, the gloss on turning over more than six million people to Communist rule was that Hong Kong's freedom and rule of law would influence the mainland, rather than the other way around. Another…
Chinese Lessons
I MET HRANT Dink, a journalist who was assassinated earlier today in Istanbul, in 2005. A Turkish businessman organized a lunch to introduce me to a few journalists and civil society activists who had attended a recent conference on the Armenian Genocide. The successful staging of the conference,…
WHILE PRESIDENT Bush was in Singapore last month, Chee Soon Juan, a leading democracy campaigner, addressed an open letter to him. The letter asked Bush to press Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, on democracy, arguing that "a democratic and free Singapore will not only benefit the people…
THE BURMESE JUNTA has repeatedly exposed the weakness of the international community. One organization in particular, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has had its reputation besmirched by its inability to bring pressure on a regime which has a record of brutal repression and…
China's Trapped Transition
The Armenian Genocide
DURING HIS RECENT TRIP TO Japan, South Korea, China, and Mongolia, President Bush extolled the region's wave of democratization as "one of the greatest stories in human history" and lamented the holdouts who are "out of step with their neighbors and isolated from the world." The president also made…
LAST MONDAY THE PROSPECTS FOR two men detained at Guantanamo Bay grew somewhat brighter. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom, a lawyer for Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim made a persuasive case that the government no longer has legal justification to detain the men because they had been…
Kabul
BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WANT TO upgrade ties with Indonesia's military. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has told Congress that the Indonesian military is cooperating in an investigation of the 2002 murders of two Americans and an Indonesian in Papua. This would clear the way to resume…
Losing the New China
Taipei
"WE HAVE good relations with China, the best relations we've had with China in 30 years," Secretary of State Colin Powell has been saying recently. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, the odds are several areas of conflict will soon make U.S.-China relations a lot rockier. Here are six…
THE GENERAL SECRETARY of China's Communist party could not have expected a better reception if he'd been Charles de Gaulle liberating Paris. The Eiffel Tower was illuminated in red and a Chinese cultural parade made its way down the Champs Elysées in honor of Hu Jintao's visit to France. While…
THIS MONTH, Hong Kong has been swept up in the most dramatic events since its 1997 return to Chinese rule. On July 1, half a million people marched to protest new national security laws that would threaten rights of association, press, and religion. Next, the defection of a leading pro-Beijing…
IN A FEW WEEKS, China will further extend its control over Hong Kong. Laws on subversion, treason, and sedition, among others, will be enacted by the partially elected legislature, whose anti-democratic members hold the majority under the Beijing-drafted constitution known as the Basic Law. Indeed,…
WHEN THE CHINESE leadership was forced to admit it had covered up the extent of the infectious disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, it responded with what many called the most serious political shake-up since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. The government sacked the…
"THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has not covered up. There is no need," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said last Tuesday in regard to the country's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). "We have nothing to hide," assured Jianchao. But shortly afterwards, CNN's satellite feed to a…
IT’S A FAIR BET THAT in his 30 years of policing, Zhao Zhifei, the deputy commissioner of China’s Hubei Province Public Security Bureau, had never been sued. Then he came to New York. On July 18, Zhao was served at his Manhattan hotel with a $50 million civil suit under federal laws that allow…
PRESIDENT BUSH SEEMS to be settling into a comfortable relationship with his party over China. His handling of the surveillance plane episode met with widespread support, and his pledge to do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan bucked up even conservatives. In late April, however, a fight broke out…
As if the world needed further proof that Hong Kong is faring poorly under Chinese rule, the Hong Kong government last week signaled a change in the way it will handle Falun Gong. Banned as an "evil cult" in the People's Republic of China, this eclectic spiritual movement has been mostly free to…
THE ALLURE of the China market has always had a seductive hold on America, and successive administrations have relied on American business to make the case for unfettered trade with that country. This year, however, there's a new twist. The potential influence of the Internet in China is now a…
For months now, the skies over Jakarta have been thick -- not just with smoke from raging forest fires but also with the planes of Clinton administration and IMF officials. Deputy treasury secretary Lawrence Summers visited, then defense secretary William Cohen, followed by International Monetary…
A prominent Hong Kong developer with links to Beijing explained China's cavalier attitude toward its commitments on Hong Kong. China, he said, views its treaty with Great Britain returning the colony to Chinese rule as it would a business contract -- perpetually open for renegotiation. In societies…