China hosts global summit, has own take on human rights

BEIJING — Hundreds of participants attended the opening of a human rights forum in Beijing on Thursday in the latest installment of China’s energetic drive to showcase what it considers the strengths of its authoritarian political system under President Xi Jinping.

Beijing’s new outreach comes as the U.S. turns inward under President Donald Trump, who has set aside traditional U.S. advocacy of democracy and human rights in favor of an “America first” approach that has seen the U.S. withdraw from forums from the Paris climate accord to negotiations on a U.N. migration compact.

The “South-South Human Rights Forum,” drawing some 300 participants from over 50 mostly developing countries, follows a conference of political parties last weekend in Beijing also attended by hundreds of delegates, some of whom sung the praises of Communist Party rule. The gathering also comes on the heels of a twice-a-decade Communist Party congress in October, at which Xi declared that China now stood “tall and firm in the east” and had entered a new era seeing China “moving closer to center stage and making greater contributions to mankind.”

Addressing Thursday’s opening session, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the party congress had “identified the goal of forging a new field in international relations and building a community of shared future for mankind.”

“This is China’s answer to the question of where human society is heading, and it has also presented opportunities for the development of the human rights cause,” Wang said.

China’s growing confidence on issues like human rights is related to broader global trends, said William Nee, an Amnesty International researcher on China. “Obviously we’ve seen the Trump administration deprioritize human rights, we’ve seen issues like Brexit, and China is kind of stepping in the field and void,” he said.

“The Western liberal bastion is crumbling and China sees this an ideal moment to strengthen its own normative power,” said Jonathan Holslag, a professor of international politics at the Free University of Brussels.

Participants at the Beijing forum were mostly government officials, diplomats and academics from developing nations, plus representatives from the U.N., the Arab League, the African Union, the World Bank and the World Health Organization.