Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China
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- Human rights must be protected in all instances—It’s a moral obligation and a more probable impact
- Contention Two: Harms (Democracy)
- Other countries model China’s politics—the result is war, inequality, and totalitarianism
- Contention Three: Solvency
China Human Rights 1ACFirst, the PLAN: The United States federal government should pass legislation mandating multi-national corporations located in the People’s Republic of China to follow the Sullivan Principles. Contention One: Harms (Human Rights)
Williams, March 2016 [Thomas D., Ph.D. Theologian. Permanent research fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture, Notre Dame University, 3/8 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/08/report-china-had-worst-year-ever-for-human-rights-abuses-in-2015/] Human rights and rule of law conditions in China have been on a “downward trend” since Xi Jinping took power as Chinese Communist Party General Secretary in 2012, resulting in 2015 being the worst year on record for human rights violations in China, according to a recent Congressional report. For the commemoration of International Women’s Day on March 8, rights groups denounced China’s dismal record of rights abuses targeting women, especially regarding China’s draconian family control policy. Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart News that “forced abortion and involuntary sterilization continue under China’s new Two-Child Policy.” “Unmarried women and third children continue to be forcibly aborted,” Littlejohn said. “Women are still routinely sterilized after their second child. On International Women’s Day, we call upon the Chinese government to call off the womb police and immediately to abandon all coercive population control.” In its 2015 report, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) documented measures by the Chinese government to “silence dissent, suppress human rights advocacy, and control civil society,” resulting in a situation of oppression that is “broader in scope than any other period documented since the Commission started issuing Annual Reports in 2002.” On March 1, 2016 the Commission released a Chinese-language Translation of an Executive Summary of its report, stating that 2015 saw “the tightening of controls over the media, universities, civil society, and rights advocacy, and on members of ethnic minorities.” In its report, the Commission said that China’s coercive population control policy, now known as the Two-Child Policy, continued to employ torture methods such as forced abortion and sterilization despite a widespread public outcry. Many provincial laws in China explicitly instruct officials to carry out abortions for “illegal” pregnancies, with no requirement for consent. The CECC report highlighted the anti-woman practices of Communist authorities, who just before International Women’s Day had detained five women and “held them in abusive conditions for more than five weeks” for planning to distribute brochures against sexual harassment. To make up for the enormous gender gap caused by decades of sex-selective abortions, trafficking of women and girls for forced marriage and sexual exploitation is on the rise in China, the report said. There are currently approximately 37 million more men living in China than women. CECC leaders said that China’s recent switch to a Two-Child Policy was a mere distraction from the reality of the “deadliest and most hated” policy of forced population control, and called on President Obama and world leaders to insist that China abolish the practice completely. “Families that want a third child will still face the pressure to abort their child or pay exorbitant fines,” said CECC Chair Rep. Chris Smith regarding the Two-Child Policy, which began officially on January 1. The Congressional report states that “China is not moving toward a rule of law system, but is instead further entrenching a system where the Party utilizes statutes to strengthen and maintain its leading role and power over the country.” Many of China’s religious and political prisoners are subject to “harsh and lengthy prison sentences” as well as various forms of extralegal and administrative detention, including arbitrary detention in “black jails” and “legal education centers,” the report stated. The report said that China’s Communist Party leaders are seeking a “new type” of U.S.-China relations and aim to play an expanded role in global institutions, while continuing to ignore international human rights norms. China’s entrenchment in absolutist control over the lives of citizens in defiance of the rule of law have significant implication for U.S. foreign policy, the report said. “The security of U.S. investments and personal information in cyberspace, the health of the economy and environment, the safety of food and drug supplies, the protection of intellectual property, and the stability of the Pacific region” are all “linked to China,” the report stated.
Human Rights Watch, 2014 [Independent human rights organization, “World Report 2014: China”, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/china-and-tibet] Rapid socio-economic change in China has been accompanied by relaxation of some restrictions on basic rights, but the government remains an authoritarian one-party state. It places arbitrary curbs on expression, association, assembly, and religion; prohibits independent labor unions and human rights organizations; and maintains Party control over all judicial institutions. The government censors the press, the Internet, print publications, and academic research, and justifies human rights abuses as necessary to preserve “social stability.” It carries out involuntary population relocation and rehousing on a massive scale, and enforces highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Though primary school enrollment and basic literacy rates are high, China’s education system discriminates against children and young people with disabilities. The government obstructs domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record, insisting it is an attempt to destabilize the country. At the same time, citizens are increasingly prepared to challenge authorities over volatile livelihood issues, such as land seizures, forced evictions, environmental degradation, miscarriages of justice, abuse of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequality. Official and scholarly statistics, based on law enforcement reports, suggest there are 300-500 protests each day, with anywhere from ten to tens of thousands of participants. Despite the risks, Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing censorship boundaries by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrongdoing, and calling for political reforms. Civil society groups and advocates continue to slowly expand their work despite their precarious status, and an informal but resilient network of activists monitors and documents human rights cases as a loose national “weiquan” (rights defense) movement. These activists endure police monitoring, detention, arrest, enforced disappearance, and torture. The Xi Jinping administration formally assumed power in March, and proposed several reforms to longstanding policies, including abolishing one form of arbitrary detention, known as re-education through labor (RTL), and changes to the household registration system. It staged high-profile corruption investigations, mostly targeting political rivals. But it also struck a conservative tone, opposing constitutional rule, press freedom, and “western-style” rule of law, and issuing harsher restrictions on dissent, including through two legal documents making it easier to bring criminal charges against activists and Internet critics. Bo Xilai, once a rising political star, was sentenced to life imprisonment in September after a show trial that captured public attention but fell short of fair trial standards and failed to address widespread abuses of power committed during his tenure in Chongqing.
Gibney, 2008 [Mark, he Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His latest book is International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles, “Responsibilities for Protecting Human Rights”, February, https://global-ejournal.org/2008/02/15/gibney/] Human rights are universal, meaning that each person possesses certain human rights by the mere fact of this person’s humanity. What does not matter – or at least what should not matter – is where a person lives, how much money a person has (or does not have), whether that person’s country has (or has not) became a party to any particular international human rights treaties, and so on. Who has the responsibility for meeting these “universal” rights? The (universal) response of states has been that each country is responsible for protecting human rights within its own borders – but that no state has human rights obligations that extend outside of its own territorial jurisdiction. But what if a country is not able or is not willing to protect the human rights of its citizens? Or what if human rights are being violated, in large part due to the actions of outside states? It is here that the silence of the international community has been deafening. Thus, notwithstanding near-universal declarations of the “universality” of human rights, the responsibility for protecting human rights has been based almost exclusively on territorial considerations. What has this territorial approach to human rights given us? Unfortunately, not nearly enough. Looking at violations of economic rights alone, we live in a world where an average of 50,000 people die every single day due to preventable causes. Yet, notwithstanding this incredible level of human rights atrocities, the territorial approach to human rights has essentially gone unchallenged. However, this has started to change and it has come from the most unlikely of sources: the “war on terror.” To state matters bluntly, the reason why “enemy combatants” are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and not in some location in this country is that American government officials are of the mind that U.S. obligations under international law do not extend outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. Under this (territorial) approach to human rights, the U.S. government is not bound by the Torture Convention and the Covenant on International Civil and Political Rights (both of which the U.S. is a party to) when it is operating outside the territorial borders of the United States. This same kind of rationale is behind the policy of “extraordinary rendition.” The idea is that the U.S. has not done anything wrong or unlawful when individuals outside the United States are being kidnapped and sent to some third country for “interrogation” purposes – albeit at the behest of, and under the direction and control of, American authorities. Again, the argument is that American obligations under international law are only applicable to actions within the United States. Fortunately, most people have been able to see behind this façade. That is, they have recognized that territorial considerations should not be used in this manner to demarcate where a country’s human rights obligations begin – but, more importantly, where they end. Most people seem to believe that torture is illegal whether it takes place in Fort Benning, Georgia, or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In that way, the “war on terror” has helped us see that territorial considerations oftentimes make little sense in the context of protecting human rights. This is not to suggest that “territory” does not matter at all or that states have the same human rights obligations outside their borders as they do domestically. Neither of these propositions happens to be true. Rather, each state has the primary responsibility for protecting human rights within its own domestic borders. However, what we have completely failed to recognize are the secondary responsibilities that the rest of the international community has when the territorial state has not been willing or able to offer human rights protection. And what also has to be said is that this is not simply a moral obligation – wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if we provided some assistance to starving children in some other land – rather, it is a legal obligation. This is most clearly seen in the language of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, one of the so-called International Bill of Rights, whereby each state party to the Covenant has (legally) obligated itself to protect the economic rights of “everyone” by means of “international assistance and cooperation.” What does “international assistance and cooperation” mean? What it means is that when children in a particular country are being denied an education (to choose one example), this not only constitutes a violation of human rights by the territorial state – but this also constitutes a human rights violation on the part of the rest of the international community, which has pledged to protect those rights. The point is that human rights are universal, but so are the duties and responsibilities to meet those rights. This is what the framers of the International Bill of Rights, and all of the other international human rights treaties, sought to achieve. This is the only way that the notion of human rights makes any sense. If human rights protection were something that individual states could (and would) do individually, there would be no need for any international conventions. Stripped to their barest essentials, what each one of these treaties represents is nothing less than this: that everyone has an ethical as well as a legal obligation to protect the human rights of all other people. Sadly enough, our inability to recognize the extent of our own human rights obligations has constituted the greatest human rights failure of all. Contention Two: Harms (Democracy)
Diamond, 2012 [Larry, Senior fellow at Hoover Institute “Why East Asia—Including China—Will Turn Democratic Within a Generation”, March 24, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/why-east-asia-including-china-will-turn-democratic-within-a-generation/251824/] It is not only modernization--the spread of democratic values and capacities in tandem with rising incomes and information--that is feeding the escalating pressure for democratic change in China. As Yun-han Chu notes in his contribution to this set of essays, the growing density of ties between mainland China and Taiwan--including direct access (through travel and satellite television) to political news from the highly competitive and even raucous democracy that is Taiwan--is serving as an additional stimulant to the growth of democratic norms and aspirations in China. The irony of Communist China's relentless push for closer integration with Taiwan is that it may well begin to generate political convergence--but not in the way that the Communist leaders imagined. Rowen's projections were a bit mechanical in assuming that economic growth would necessarily drive gradual political change toward democracy in China. Instead, it seems increasingly likely that political change in China will be sudden and disruptive. The Communist Party leadership still shows no sign of embarking on a path of serious political liberalization that might gradually lead to electoral democracy, as their counterparts in Taiwan's then-dominant Nationalist Party did several decades ago. Instead, the rulers in Beijing are gripped by a fear of ending up like the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev, who launched a process of political opening in hopes of improving and refurbishing Soviet Communist rule only to see it crumble and the Soviet Union itself fall onto the ash heap of history. Torn by intense divisions within their own ranks and weakened by the draining away of power and energy from the center to the provinces and a congeries of increasingly divergent lower-level authorities, China's political leaders seem as frozen and feckless on the grand question of long-term political reform as they are brisk and decisive in making daily decisions on spending and investments. As Francis Fukuyama notes in an essay in the Journal of Democracy, the one flaw in the otherwise impressive institutionalization of Chinese Communist rule is its lack of adaptability. For a regime whose specialty is producing rapid economic change, such rigidity is a potentially fatal defect. With every month or year that ticks by while corruption, routine abuses of power, and stifling constraints on expression go unchecked, citizens' frustration mounts. Already, protests erupt with ominous frequency across tens of thousands of Chinese localities every year, while subversive and democratic ideas, images, and allusions proliferate online, despite the best efforts of fifty-thousand Internet police to keep Chinese cyberspace free of "harmful content." As Minxin Pei has been arguing for some time and as he asserts again in his essay here, the strength of the authoritarian regime in China is increasingly an illusion, and its resilience may not last much longer. As frustration with corruption, collusion, criminality, and constraints on free expression rise, so do the possibilities for a sudden crisis to turn into a political catastrophe for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Beyond the ongoing frustrations with censorship, insider dealing, abuse of power, environmental degradation, and other outrages that can only be protested by antisystem activity of one sort or another, there are, as Fukuyama notes, the big looming social and economic challenges that China faces as the consequences of its one-child policy make themselves felt in a rapidly aging (and disproportionately male) population. Jack Goldstone reports that China's labor force stopped growing in 2010 and has begun shrinking half a percent a year, which "will, by itself, knock 2.2 percentage points off China's annual economic growth potential." Urbanization, a key driver of productivity increases, is also slowing dramatically, and the growth of education "has clearly reached a limit," as the number of college graduates has expanded faster than the ability of the economy--even as it faces labor shortages in blue-collar industries--to generate good white-collar jobs. The Chinese economy will have to pay for rapidly rising wages and cope with industrial labor shortages even as it comes under pressure to finance pension, welfare, and healthcare benefits for the massive slice of the populace that is now moving toward retirement. Moreover, as it manages all this, China will need to address growing frustration among college graduates who cannot find jobs to match their expectations. If the suspected bubbles in the real-estate and financial markets burst as these twin generational challenges are gathering force, political stability in the world's most populous country may well become no more than a memory. Increasingly, the CCP faces the classic contradiction that troubles all modernizing authoritarian regimes. The Party cannot rule without continuing to deliver rapid economic development and rising living standards--to fail at this would invite not gradual loss of power but a sudden and probably lethal crisis. To the extent that the CCP succeeds, however, it generates the very forces--an educated, demanding middle class and a stubbornly independent civil society--that will one day decisively mobilize to raise up a democracy and end CCP rule for good. The CCP, in other words, is damned if it does not, and damned if it does. The only basis for its political legitimacy and popular acceptance is its ability to generate steadily improving standards of living, but these will be its undoing
Lagon, 2015 [Mark, PhD, is president of Freedom House and former U.S. ambassador-at-large to combat trafficking in person, “Prosperity Without Democracy? Demystifying the China Model”, July 28, https://freedomhouse.org/blog/prosperity-without-democracy-demystifying-china-model] China’s immense economic growth without political freedom has led many foreign leaders to emulate its model. In Africa, Ethiopia and Rwanda have done so, achieving significant gains in the wake of war and genocide. But the recent Chinese stock-market crash, which saw shares plunge by some 30 percent between June and July, hints at major systemic flaws. If one looks below the surface, there is ample reason to question the proposition that autocratic regimes are better equipped to produce prosperity for their people than their democratic counterparts. The implications are twofold. On the cautionary side, states that adopt China’s model not only limit political and civil rights to which all people are entitled. They also risk producing the same stark inequality seen in China, which could ultimately undermine social and political stability and hold back further growth. On the opportunity side, political liberalization in China would not just serve the universal values of freedom, pluralism, and transparency. It would also accelerate innovation and growth, and create a more equitable economic order in the country. Such a democratic and hence more dynamic China would truly be a model for developing states around the world.
DIAMOND, 1995 [Larry, Senior fellow at Hoover Institute; http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/PDF/Promoting%20Democracy%20in%20the%201990s%20Actors%20and%20Instruments,%20Issues%20and%20Imperatives.pdf] This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built. Contention Three: Solvency
Lee, 2008 [Daniel, professor of ethics at Augustana College (Illinois) and director of the Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics, “Human Rights and the Ethics of Investment in China”, Spring/Summer, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23562835] In a piece that ran in the Washington Post with the headline "Business Can Change China," Jim Hoagland, characterizing the Sullivan Principles as "a turning point in the struggle against apartheid [in South Africa]," suggests that the South African experience provides a precedent for what U.S. companies might do in China. He notes, "The Sullivan Principles shifted the discussion from self-justifying theories about business advancing social change to the practical steps of what happened every day in the workplace." He adds, however, "Neither the original code of conduct nor the more general Global Sullivan Principles announced at the United Nations in 1999 fit the situation exactly. That is why U.S. firms need to develop a similar code of business conduct with Chinese characteristics."59 Unfortunately, like newspaper columnists everywhere, Hoagland ran out of space before he got to the specifics. He is right, however, in suggesting that U.S. firms need to be involved in drafting such a set of guidelines. The Global Sullivan Principles can provide a framework. To be fully useful, however, they need to be augmented by guidelines more specifically tailored for China, just as the original Sullivan Principles were specifically tailored for South Africa. And they need to specify concrete courses of action that it is realistic for U.S. and other multinational companies to accomplish. There would be considerable incongruity, of course, in (1) suggesting that U.S. and other multinational companies need to be involved in drafting these guidelines and (2) then proceeding to specify what these guidelines should be. It might be helpful, however, to bring up particular areas of concern to put on the table for discussion. These include: 1. compensation guidelines, including specification of minimum wage guidelines for areas of China that do not have such guidelines; 2. prohibition of practices such as levying fines on employees that reduce their take-home pay below levels specified by compensation guidelines; 3. specification of what "respect [for] employees' voluntary freedom of association" means with respect to the possibility of unionization and collective bargaining; 4. minimum workplace health and safety standards; 5. specification of responsibilities for improving the quality of life for employees outside the workplace; 6. appropriate ethical guidelines for suppliers; and 7. effective ways of monitoring compliance.
Lee, 2008 [Daniel, professor of ethics at Augustana College (Illinois) and director of the Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics, “Human Rights and the Ethics of Investment in China”, Spring/Summer, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23562835] Rather, the moral responsibilities of U.S. and other multinational companies are more narrowly focused. In particular, these responsibilities pertain to the ways that they conduct their own operations—matters such as treating their employees with respect and dignity, providing a safe work environment and appropriate levels of compensation, and, as noted above, doing what they can to ensure that their suppliers comply with appropriate ethical standards, threatening termination or nonrenewal of contracts if suppliers fail to comply with the ethical standards specified in supplier codes of conduct. It also means that when they use their ability to influence government policy, which, as the case of the proposed new labor law noted above illustrates, is far greater than many imagine, they ought to do so in ways that are supportive of their employees' rights and well-being. In short, what is needed is constructive engagement, not destructive engagement. There is a related point to be made here as well. The more that the Chinese economy and the U.S. economy are intertwined, the more difficult it will be for the Chinese government to ignore U.S. concerns with respect to human rights and other matters. Moreover, as participation in the global economy fosters the emergence of a rapidly growing Chinese middle class, the socioeconomic conditions will be in place for the Chinese people to demand a greater measure of freedom and more participatory forms of governance. Put in slightly different terms, though it might not be the job of U.S. and other multinational corporations operating in China to serve as advocates for house churches, contributing to the prosperity of the growing Chinese middle class might well help create a situation in which the Chinese government, with whatever degree of reluctance it might be inclined, gives in to growing social pressures and allows a greater measure of freedom of religion. The same is true with respect to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and other basic freedoms, as well as more democratic forms of governance. Hoagland is right. Business can change China. China today is vibrant, rapidly growing, and changing. It is a land of opportunity but also a country with a flawed human rights record. Progress has been made in the struggle to ensure universal human rights for all those living in this, the most populous country in the world. Much, however, remains to be done. Guided by a revised set of Sullivan Principles specifically tailored for China and/or by internally generated codes of conduct that are specific and focused, U.S. and other foreign companies can be a positive force for change. Such is the vision of what is possible. And such is their obligation if they are to take seriously the most basic notions of social responsibility. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2015 2015 -> Police Militarization 2015 -> 2015 ihbb championships: hs history Bowl Round 4 – Prelims First Quarter 2015 -> Wrtp/big step · 3841 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, wi 53208 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 December 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Darton College 2015 -> Training Workshop on Planning and Implementation of Multi-Sectoral Development Programme (MsDP) in Bihar Date : 6th 2015 -> Rao bulletin 15 June 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 September 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 August 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Science, and transportation united states senate Download 2.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
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