Regular readers will remember how last week we slammed the UK and EU’s decisions to meet with the governor of China’s Xinjiang region, Erkin Tuniyaz, in the coming days.
Well, the good news is his trips to Brussels and Paris have been cancelled. Tuniyaz will have at least two fewer global centers to try to whitewash China’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. (The UK meeting is still on apparently.)
However, Beijing has announced that Chinese foreign policy chief, Wang Yi, will soon be visiting four EU countries, and the EU is expected to relaunch its human rights dialogue with China, too.
You may be thinking, “Oh, a human rights dialogue. That can only be good, right?”
Think again.
These bilateral meetings have been a recurring exercise in pointlessness for decades. There have been 37 previous rounds of such dialogues, and they’ve contributed zero to human rights progress in China. In fact, the human rights situation in China has only deteriorated.
The EU’s human rights dialogues with China are actually worse than pointless, because they give EU leaders an excuse to avoid discussing China’s abuses at the highest levels, where it matters most.
They can brush it off with, “Well, we discussed that elsewhere already,” and human rights are thus disconnected from issues Beijing actually cares about, like trade. With no EU leverage points or benchmarks in the mix, the dialogues are simply a box-ticking exercise, held with no ambition to secure positive change.
Worst of all, perhaps, the dialogues give Beijing a propaganda coup. Chinese officials can say they’re open to talking about human rights. It helps Beijing look good internationally – while committing crimes against humanity back home.