For decades after US President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China, the West's engagement with the country was defined by core security and economic interests, and only then by human rights. But in just the past few years, these priorities have been inverted.
NEW YORK – Despite US President Donald Trump’s indifference toward the issue, human rights have assumed a central place in the mounting confrontation between the United States and China. Between imprisoning much of its mainly Muslim Uighur population, imposing a new security law on Hong Kong, and expanding its Big Brother-like surveillance state, China’s flagrant human-rights violations have helped to inflame US-China relations more than at any time since President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. The long Sino-American honeymoon that followed that diplomatic breakthrough is now definitively over.
NEW YORK – Despite US President Donald Trump’s indifference toward the issue, human rights have assumed a central place in the mounting confrontation between the United States and China. Between imprisoning much of its mainly Muslim Uighur population, imposing a new security law on Hong Kong, and expanding its Big Brother-like surveillance state, China’s flagrant human-rights violations have helped to inflame US-China relations more than at any time since President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. The long Sino-American honeymoon that followed that diplomatic breakthrough is now definitively over.