Human rights can mobilize social movements and political change but can also be used in an ahistorical and politically opportunistic manner. The importance of human rights in the current international political discourse necessitates a scholarly understanding of and a critical reflection on the mechanisms, effects, and problems with the human rights discourse. Jamie Gruffydd-Jones’s new book, Hostile Forces, offers insights into these issues by examining how international human rights pressure transpires in China. It starts with the puzzle that Chinese authorities have made foreign criticisms of their human rights violations quite freely available to the public, in contrast to the prevailing wisdom that China’s vast and sophisticated censorship apparatus can easily block inconvenient voices. This puzzle directs our attention to the importance of citizens in understanding why international human rights pressure has been ineffective in China. How foreign pressure can influence the direction of internal forces is a research gap this book addresses.
Using a mixed-methods approach, Hostile Forces offers a compelling answer to the preceding puzzle. It finds that the Chinese public generally receives foreign criticisms of China’s human rights records in terms of defending their country against hostile outsiders. Using psychological theories of motivated reasoning and social identity, the author argues that Chinese citizens tend to fit new information into existing beliefs rather than updating beliefs based on new information. Furthermore, their attachment to the Chinese nation as part of their social identities tends to foster nationalism while rejecting foreign criticisms. These psychological theories are not unique to the Chinese people; the author offers several examples outside China to show their explanatory power. However, if these psychological tendencies are shared across the world, they imply that foreign criticisms of human rights toward any country could receive a defensive response.
Building on theories explaining individual-level beliefs and behavior, this book then explores variations in how Chinese citizens react to foreign criticisms. Not all citizens are attached to their nation to the same degree and in the same form. Moreover, the target of foreign criticism varies, from specific leaders to the regime as a whole. Survey experiments and interview data show that pressure from Western countries tends to make Chinese people, even young and liberal ones, less willing to show their support for human rights causes. Specifically, the data show that Western criticisms may make the Chinese people see the issue as a conflict between China and Western countries rather than focus on the issue itself. In other words, the source of international pressure is a crucial factor in whether people respond positively or negatively. More importantly, this impact is prominent when people don’t have a strong opinion about a topic. When people already have strong opinions, such as on the issue of pollution, they tend to be receptive to international pressure, even when it comes from an apparently hostile source. Of course, this citizen response is partly cultivated by the government’s propaganda narrative that links foreign criticisms with China’s experience of colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, public reaction reveals how foreign criticisms transpire in China: they tend to antagonize and distract. The outcome often reduces the prospect of human rights improvements by the Chinese government.
The other side of the issue is how the government selectively publicizes and manipulates foreign human rights criticisms. Hostile Forces illustrates an important dilemma faced by the Chinese government. If international human rights pressure can backfire, it has incentives to make sure its citizens hear and read about such information. Meanwhile, such information might motivate activists and dissidents to seek international solidarity. Therefore, what to censor and pass on to the citizens become questions with severe consequences. The author argues that an under-pressure government needs to make the public “see the issue as one of international competition, and not individual injustice, to make them focus on the threat to the nation’s standing rather than the content of the human rights violation” (p. 26). In the case of China, its history of colonialism, nationalism, and geopolitical competition features prominently in the discourse to frame issues as harming the nation’s standing. This mechanism makes it easier for the Chinese government to frame foreign criticisms as hostile when it comes to issues such as separatist movements and breakaway territories and generic criticisms from countries such as the United States and Japan.
Hostile Forces offers a compelling account of why the international human rights discourse has not been effective in China. From there, it develops lessons for improving human rights policy. Although the research is well crafted, the theoretical reflections could go deeper. For example, the book treats the role of historical experience with colonialism and imperialism as a variable that explains why certain authoritarian governments can more easily create stronger sentiments toward “hostile forces” without acknowledging the real weight of history. History can indeed be manipulated by the existing regime to further its rule, but this should not negate the real reactions toward a nation’s own history. Treating it as a mere variable that adds a tool to the autocrats’ arsenal risks overlooking deeper problems with the international human rights discourse.
Another area for deeper theoretical reflection is the political origins of the international human rights discourse. As the book shows, Chinese state media launched a counterattack on the human rights records of the United States as early as the mid-1990s. The argument was that “criticism coming from the United States, with its own poverty, injustice, and discrimination, was hypocritical” (p. 52). In this book’s framework, this counterattack is seen as part of the geopolitical competition narrative of how the Chinese government creates “hostile forces.” This narrative is that countries like the United States criticize China for containing its rise to maintain their own strategic advantage. However, this counterattack narrative also reveals a more serious problem with the international human rights discourse. For human rights to be effective as a concept and strategy, there must be a two-way street, meaning that all countries must be willing to acknowledge and confront their own human rights issues. Otherwise, countries with worse human rights records will always find a way to delegitimize the human rights discourse writ large and quite effectively. If democracies cannot lead by acknowledging and confronting their own issues, then human rights discourse will hardly be effective and may even backfire.
Finally, this book could go deeper and more critically by examining the connections between the human rights discourse and Western interventionism. Studies by critical theory scholars and scholars from the Global South should be considered and engaged when we try to understand how the international human rights discourse works and why it has not been effective in countries outside Western democracies. Despite the opportunities for further theoretical advancement, Hostile Forces offers valuable insights into the challenges of international human rights discourse in the context of a rising China. It is a must read for scholars and policymakers to understand current developments in Chinese politics and their implications for the world.
