**Families Of Jailed Chinese Human Rights Leaders Press Biden For Meetings**
Families Of Jailed Chinese Human Rights Leaders Press Biden For Meetings
_Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClear Wire (https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/04/21/families_of_jailed_chinese_human_rights_leaders_press_biden_for_meetings__149137.html),_
During meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev or other top Soviet Union officials, **President Reagan often pulled out a card from his pocket and recited the names of the country’s jailed dissidents** and pressed for their freedom.
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The practice became such an annoyance to Soviet officials, human rights activists recall, that they often complained to Secretary of State George Schultz that Reagan’s constant focus on their government’s human rights abuses were impeding other areas where the two countries could make diplomatic progress.
Bob Fu, a prominent religious freedom activist and China critic who immigrated to the United States from China in 1996, said several Reagan aides told him about those tense exchanges as a testament to the power of directly challenging authoritarian regimes’ human rights abuses to spur international condemnation.
“ **I hope our president and vice president, whatever party is in the White House, would do the same as Reagan when they are meeting with China virtually or in person**,” Fu told a House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee hearing on Thursday. “That way \[Chinese officials\] can be reminded that this is serious, this is important.”
Sadly, Fu said, neither the current administration or any other since Reagan have prioritized and elevated human rights abuses in such a powerful way. Instead, when it comes to China, most of Washington has spent three decades pointedly looking the other way.
In late May of 1994, President Clinton abandoned a central foreign policy principle of his administration, announcing that he had decided to “de-link” China’s privileged trading status from its human rights record.
While Clinton acknowledged that China continued to commit serious human rights abuses, he said that broader American interests justify the policy reversal.
The pivot set the U.S. and other Western countries on a more conciliatory path with China. **It also paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization**, and in 2000, the U.S. granting Beijing permanent normal trade relations status, a legal designation allowing free trade between the two countries.
At the time, expanding U.S. business ties to China was a bipartisan cause. Led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it allowed American companies to move their manufacturing operations to China to take advantage of its cheaper labor and production facilities.
“The premise of this policy was that if the West opened our markets to China, that the Chinese economy and society would liberalize and that \[Chinese Communist Party\] leaders would come to see the world as the way of the West, valuing democracy, rule of law and critically human rights,” said Andrew Bremberg, who previously served as President Trump’s representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and is now the president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “We were wrong.”
Instead, Fu told the panel, the Communist Party has increasingly asserted far more control, and Chinese citizens are now experiencing the worst period of persecution since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
Over the last few years, the U.S. has acknowledged China’s genocide against the Uyghur Muslims, and has condemned President Xi Jinping’s tightening of CCP control in Hong Kong and his war on religion and dissent of any type.
Human rights advocates are now urging the U.S. government to more aggressively confront China about the startling scale of its human rights abuses and the arbitrary imprisonment of dissidents.
On Thursday, Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime human rights champion, urged President Biden to meet with Geng He and Sophie Luo, the wives of two prominent human rights defenders detained by China. The pair provided emotional testimony before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that morning about their husbands’ confrontations with the CCP and their detainments and disappearances
Smith also called on China to disclose the location and legal status of some Chinese human rights attorneys who either represented religious minorities and other dissidents or led pro-democracy movements in China and have since disappeared.
The two women testified that the Obama and Biden White Houses have not reached out to them about the plight of their husbands despite many attempts over several years.
“ **That has to change**,” Smith said, pledging t…
