Years ago, I ran into a famous passage of Conor Cruise O'Brien’s that helped me make sense of many things, including the real and imagined relationships my sinological friends and I had developed in China.
There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being. … Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births.
What Cruise O’Brien said of family stories is true of stories generally. It is the heart of their power. It is the reason that those of us who spent long stretches of our twenties, thirties, and forties in China—listening to the sagas of aging intellectuals, reading revolutionary and scar literature, watching the films of Xie Jin, Chen Kaige, and Zhang Yimou, and living through the reform period with Chinese friends—came to feel that we had a personal stake in China’s fate even if its stories weren’t exactly our own. They had talked their memories so deeply into ours that China’s modern history became nearly as formative for us as it was for them. We even internalized, to a degree, Chinese narratives that we rejected, including much of the Communist Party’s historiography.
Partial identification with China is not the same thing as “wanting to be Chinese” or, as they used to say in the Foreign Service, “going native.” It is not a fanboy obsession. It does not warp logic, skew values, or require rejection of our native traditions; I’ve worked on U.S.-China relations for forty years and am as chauvinistically a northern New York Irish American as ever. But traversing of one’s individual being does mean incorporating aspects of Chinese life into one’s own, even as we remain critical of them. This is what I take cognitive empathy—an important concept now weakened by overuse—to mean. Cognitive empathy, based in long study of China, is essential to the formulation of effective China policy and to the maintenance of peace.
It is not easily acquired. As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in The End of Education (Commonweal 2006):
How (can we) come to terms with cultures radically different from our own, so that … we learn, as far as we can, to speak as their inhabitants speak, to see as they see, and to think as they think (?) Such learning involves coming to understand ourselves, not as we customarily do, but as they understand us. And it at once raises the question of how we are to decide between their understanding of us and our own understanding of us, between their evaluations and ours … this question cannot be fruitfully formulated or seriously asked until we have assimilated, to some significant degree, the language, the way of life and thought, the works of literature and other arts, of some one particular alien culture. So we have to begin by learning, say, Mandarin or Japanese or Arabic.
Exactly.
Knowledge of China usually breeds empathy of two kinds: empathy for the suffering of individual Chinese—which inclines Americans toward human rights advocacy—and empathy for the historical sufferings of the nation as whole—which inclines many toward qualified admiration for China’s progress and an un-American degree of patience with the gradualist arguments for social and political development so often heard in China. Americans who went to China in the eighties know how poor they were and how far and how fast they’ve come against long odds.
I was reminded of Cruise O’Brien by In Search Of Lin Zhao’s Soul, a video that tells the story Lian Xi recounted in his 2018 book, Blood Letters, which I plan to read soon, and by Orville Schell’s forthcoming Inside China’s Secret Prisons, a copy of which just came in the mail. My September bedside table is stacked with the Anti-Rightest Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and forced labor.
This is unusual. I’ve spent little time on human rights over the past fifteen years. I lived in China and Taiwan throughout the Tiananmen period. I’ve had many older friends who were cruelly abused during the Maoist campaigns and younger ones whose creativity, intellect, and faith continue to be stifled by the CCP. I realize that millions more have been and are being systematically dehumanized by their government. But neither my Chinese friends nor fellow American China-watchers—with a few notable exceptions—raise these issues.
Human rights have faded from Washington discussions of China. My sense is that the reasons for the falling off in concern for human rights issues are the following:
Indifference is not a factor among any China watchers I know, but recall that, in 2022, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said publicly that "Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs, OK?" He later walked the statement back, but he was clearly speaking from the heart. We don’t know what percentage of Americans share his view.
Futility is surely more widespread than indifference. American politicians, universities, corporations, NGOs, and individual citizens made human rights representations to the Chinese government regularly after 1979. They have had an impact on individual cases and, arguably, on aspects of China’s development (see Progress, below), but after fifty years American concerns have not altered CCP attitudes toward state power or the dangers it faces from civil society, free speech, critical thinking, religious faith, art, or individualism. Human rights discussions between Chinese and Americans have long had a rehearsed, heard-it-all-before quality. Futility yields frustration, then boredom, and eventually, acclimatized silence. The final stage is forgetting. There is no longer any expectation in D.C. policy circles that Beijing will change its attitude toward individual rights. Donald Trump will not mention rights when he meets with Xi Jinping.
While it’s risky to admit it, boilerplate CCP responses to Western human rights arguments have an impact over time. Many Party talking points are specious, but some are not easily refuted: development, including development of liberal values, takes time and is culturally construed; Chinese people tend to value social stability more highly than Americans, who place a premium on individual liberty; American promotion of human rights is politically selective and therefore seems cynical. True, true, and true. There are rebuttals to these statements, to be sure, but we should acknowledge that some Chinese talking points make us squirm.
The views of middle-class, urban Chinese have taken much of the wind from the sails of human rights debates. Many of them share the CCP critiques of Western positions noted above. While they are critical of their government—often adamantly—there is scant evidence that they still look to the West for alternatives. This is a fundamental shift. In the 80s and 90s, Americans assumed that when they advised Beijing to be more democratic, they were speaking on behalf of an oppressed Chinese populace that yearned for democracy. In 2026, while there are still yearners out there, they are harder to find. Increased material and technological well-being and better health and educational outcomes—especially, in large cities—have reinforced belief in gradualism, stability, and self-sacrifice not only within the Party but among informed professionals, who show little sympathy for Uighurs, Tibetans, or Mongolians. Foreign human rights activists who used to believe they spoke for a silent majority must now recognize that they speak only for persecuted minorities. It’s not quite the same.
One of the greatest factors in declining Western urgency over China’s human rights record is Progress. China still operates more by Party dictat than rule of law, individuals can be disappeared without explanation, and entire peoples can be brutalized for transmitting their cultures and expressing ethnic solidarity. But the well-being of most Chinese has increased greatly over the past forty years, and they know it. Most seem to favor protecting what they have gained rather than risking it all for rights they rarely think about and may never obtain. We should respect their choices. It would be odd for me to tell a contented Chinese who can buy and sell me several times over that she should chance it all and demand the full slate of American civil rights. I made such suggestions in the 80s and 90s. I don’t anymore.
(Readers might accuse me of writing only from the viewpoint of wealthy urbanites and they’d be right, up to a point. Most Chinese I know are elites now, although most were more street—the children of PLA soldiers raised in coal-begrimed hutongs—when I first met them. I don’t claim to know or speak for most Chinese, hundreds of millions of whom are in dire straits. But when I meet poor Chinese in the countryside or third tier cities, my impression is that most aspire to be like Chinese urban elites, not like American citizens.)
A capacity for Introspection tempers American outrage over outrageous Chinese policies. Americans on the left and right disagree over which domestic human rights abuses are most egregious—abortion, banning of school prayer, the incarceration rate, especially of poor people of color, the death penalty—but they agree that the list of American sins is lengthening and that we are in the midst of our own spiritual crisis. It’s hard to preach to Chinese from that position. Awareness of our own failings takes the edge off our umbrage. This is not moral equivalency; it’s a question of decency, logic, and tactics; of whether the U.S. has the moral standing to ask other nations to adopt our principles. When I first went to China as a foreign service officer in 1987, that standing was often assumed by many Chinese as well as Americans. No more.
Perhaps the major reason for the de-emphasis of human rights in Sino-U.S. relations is the shifting balance of power. Americans are so occupied with Chinese industrial, financial, technological, military, ideational, and diplomatic threats to the United States that they don’t notice threats to the dignity of the Chinese people. The CCP is no longer malign primarily because of how it harms its own citizens; it’s malign because it might harm us. With that realization, the appointments, speaking invitations, and consulting dollars that support China experts have shifted to the security side of the ship.
Thus have our genuine concerns over human rights and rule of law in China been downgraded. Much of this re-contextualization has been a natural and necessary development. China watchers watched it happen with little comment. The men and women who dedicate themselves to human rights work (raise a flaming Zippo for Jerry Cohen) are now fewer in number and have a harder time getting to China and getting invited to Washington think tank panels on U.S.-China relations. Many of the loudest American attacks on China’s human rights record now come not from sinologists, but from politicians who know little of China and show scant introspection regarding the United States.
That is my framework for understanding why human rights questions rarely land in my in-box and why I rarely drop them in anyone else’s. I think it is sound and it usually seems adequate.
But it’s tricky when we get down to cases. Readers may be shouting, What about Lin Zhao? What about Liu Xiaobo? What about Xinjiang and Tibet? What about the standup comic Guo Degang, who was recently arrested for telling a joke? What about Gao Zhen, the 70 year-old artist who was just sentenced to three years in prison under an anti-slander law promulgated in 2018 for sculptures he’d created ten years earlier? Is Chinese state cruelty just a fact about China that can be logged and forgotten, like Canada’s love for poutine or Finnish wife-carrying competitions?
No. The way the CCP treats these people makes me, as Stilwell used to say after arguing with Chiang Kai-Shek, want to bite a radiator. I have never accepted the CCP’s argument that, because China has flourished under a repressive regime, repression is instrumental to Chinese flourishing. But many Chinese I respect who lived through the entire process do accept that argument, at least when it is other people who get repressed. They believe dissidents and free thinkers who buck the system have either been duped or are driven by incurably obnoxious personalities. On the other hand, most of the Chinese dissidents I know in America are loathe to acknowledge that the CCP has ever done anything of value for anyone. Listening to these two camps attack each other, my response is that I am clearly not Chinese and these are not my problems. Cognitive empathy seems to reach its limits.
The CCP itself is conflicted about empathy. It’s happy to host empathetic visitors if it can direct empathy toward its proper object—the past suffering of China at foreign hands. That’s what The Century of Humiliation narrative is about. But empathy for Chinese persons and groups who reject Party narratives is verboten. The CCP, in effect, asks foreigners who follow MacIntyre’s prescription and become linguistically and culturally competent in China, to exercise empathy without discernment, to develop knowledge without judgement. That’s why they’re so fond of IShowSpeed and other Chinamaxxers and not so fond of Perry Link and Andy Nathan.
I see no perfect solution for China watchers caught in these crosscurrents. Throwing up one’s hands and walking away isn’t an option; Americans who can communicate with Chinese, including CCP officials, have an obligation to do so in the service of peace. And if you’re in dialogue with someone, that someone gets a say in the terms of the interchange. China won’t tolerate American harangues any more than we’ll tolerate their running out the clock with boring platitudes. Fortunately, those aren’t the only options. In my experience, many Chinese, including some in government, are open to discussing human rights as long as they are understood as a human rather than as a Chinese problem. On those terms, engagement is possible.
And we must continue to engage with China, even as we oppose it on many fronts. The formula is simple: we cannot have an effective China policy unless we understand China in its totality, and we cannot do that unless we talk to them.
A comprehensive understanding of China must include—must be rooted in—the study of Chinese conceptions of the human and China’s traditional and current ideas about human flourishing. That is what traditional sinology was about, and it still has a role to play. Differing ideas about relations between government and the governed—about the good life—lie at the heart of mutual distrust behind China and the West and are a defining factor in the competition to shape global order. That is why American China experts, who are currently absorbed in technology competition, boning up on AI and Bitcoin, and tracking military capabilities, should again make study of Chinese cultural values an integral part of their professional practice.