Perspective: Will the U.S. continue to put national interest over China’s human rights violations?
Omer Bekali, a former prisoner at a Chinese internment camp for the Uighur people, gets emotional while speaking during a news conference in Berlin in March. By Charles Kraus Charles Kraus is an historian at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The views expressed here are his own.
This is not the first time that the United States has had to choose how to respond to discomforting developments in Xinjiang, nor is it the first time that that choice has involved whether to put broader American-Chinese relations ahead of human rights. Almost 50 years ago when facing these questions, the Nixon administration prioritized pragmatic geopolitical calculations over human rights considerations.
Although Murphy transmitted the letter to the White House on Alptekin’s behalf , it is doubtful that it ever reached Nixon’s desk. State Department officials, and likely national security adviser Henry Kissinger, saw Alptekin’s requests as unfeasible to fulfill. Such was the realpolitik logic of the Nixon administration: avoiding irritants to which China was sensitive, like Taiwan or Xinjiang, for the sake of achieving larger diplomatic and strategic changes. Human rights concerns for the Uighur people were simply not a priority.
In light of this horrendous situation, Xinjiang deserves a prominent place in the United States’ China policy — regardless of how it might impinge on any grand strategic bargains that Washington is seeking with Beijing.
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