As America's rhetoric cools, human rights just might blossom in Asia

By SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY

oon after I moved to Singapore, a taxi driver told me that although Indians had rights, Singaporeans had rice. Mindful of the implications of his comparison, I welcome Bill Clinton's recent decision to follow the European Union and not slam China for its human rights record. This is not because I think the record is anything but abysmal, for one Wang Dan certainly does not a summer make. I also suspect that Clinton has taken this momentous step only because he expects it to improve the atmospherics for his visit to China next week and to help reduce a burdensome trade deficit. But I hope, too, that Asian governments might be persuaded to demonstrate greater respect for individual freedom and civil and political rights now that the subject is free--or almost free--of East-West polemics.

Western advocacy plays into the hands of Asian politicians who either genuinely suspect the West's motives or need an excuse for their own illiberalism. It is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. Authoritarianism is exalted into a virtue when senior Singapore civil servant Kishore Mahbubani asks rhetorically, as he did in 1993 while discussing press freedom in India and the lack of it in China, "Yet which society is developing faster today and which society is likely to modernize first?" One would conclude that development needs a shackled media. However, even some Asians are coming around to the view that a free flow of information would have brought to light, and helped to correct, the nepotism and corruption that laid low Indonesia's promising economy.

Objections to libertarian politics are still occasionally trotted out, as when a Chinese delegate to a 1993 human rights conference in Vienna claimed that "individuals must put the state's rights before their own." From that follows the assumption that political rights undermine economic rights. It also suits some Asian politicians to pretend that this concern for freedom is only a Western fad. There is just enough truth in this defense to make it superficially plausible. For instance, China might never have been able to nurse its special economic zones to prosperity if 1.2 billion Chinese had enjoyed the Indians' constitutional guarantee of free movement and residence anywhere in the country. Similarly, the massive Three Gorges Dam might be delayed indefinitely if full provision had first to be made for the 1.2 million people who will be displaced. Also, while freedom and equality are relatively new concepts even in the West, evolving only since the European Enlightenment as a humanistic leavening for urban society, Asian cultures are hardly lacking in compassion. Yet organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch/Asia do sometimes sound almost proprietary about the cause. I can understand these activists' feeling that Clinton has surrendered an important bit of leverage over the Chinese. But while pressure is sometimes fruitful, it can also make universal values look like a counter in bilateral bargaining, thereby inviting shrill denunciations of bullying from China's friends and apologists.

Even when it wants to please, U.S. diplomacy is often insensitive to Asia's psychology. Indians still squirm with embarrassment when they recall how Lyndon Johnson, visiting Delhi as Vice President, jumped out of his car at the great mosque in the old city and yelled to the crowd, "Hi, folks! We want to help you." U.S. favor can be the kiss of death for nationalists elsewhere. Even governments that desperately want American protection are either loath to say so publicly or feel obliged to establish their patriotic credentials by attacking the Americans for a range of other "offenses"--whether it be browbeating Japan and South Korea to accept more U.S. imports, twisting Malaysia's arm over environmental damage or speaking up for dissenters like Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama.

The suspicion among some Asians is that, jealous of the region's rapid rise, the U.S. wants to blunt the edge of competition by robbing Asia's industry of its cost and locational advantages. Even if devious stratagems did not actually bring about Asia's financial collapse, some in the West took unseemly pleasure in discrediting those who had argued that authoritarian "Asian values" brought prosperity. The concern of Western government leaders was overshadowed by the response of some economists, financiers and newspaper commentators that sounded positively gloating to Asian ears.

It is particularly tragic that the rights of millions of ordinary Asians should be hostage to these attitudinal complexes. Though China signed one international covenant last year and has promised to sign another, human rights are still not respectable in parts of Asia. Perhaps Asians will now be able to remove the mote from their eye and take a long, hard look at the relationship between state and citizen. Even my cabbie might be convinced that rights and rice are both his birthright if Clinton's gesture helps to make demanding freedom look less like siding with the enemy.