For bluer skies, clear the air on rights

Popular awareness of environmental problems has grown immensely in China in recent years. Chinese people do not like fetid air, foul water or the prospect of a cooked planet any more than anyone else does. But the citizens who speak out on these issues are repressed. Government officials, whose interests are often intertwined with the industry and commerce that is responsible for pollution, do not want complaints about the environment to be expressed publicly.

For example, Wu Lihong, a farmer in Jiangsu province, began reporting on the dumping of industrial waste into Lake Tai in the early 1990s. The authorities told him to stop, and he would not. Today he is in prison, serving a three-year sentence on the absurd charge of extortion. Last year, Tang Zhirong, in Hunan province, complained about the effluent of an aluminum processing facility and received an 18-month prison sentence for obstructing official business. Now out of prison, Tang remains under 24-hour surveillance.

Sun Xiaodi, in Gansu province, complained for years about pollution from a uranium mine and recently accused local officials of fraud. In July he was sentenced to two years in a labor-reform facility for “illegally providing state secrets overseas” and “rumor-mongering.” His daughter Sun Haiyan was sentenced to 18 months on the same charges.

Near Chengdu, in Sichuan province, a crowd gathered in early May of last year to protest the construction of a chemical plant in their neighborhood. Chen Daojun, a freelance journalist who reported on the demonstration, is now in prison for three years for “inciting subversion of state power.”

These are not isolated cases; there are many like them throughout China. They are also the cases and the people whom Obama and Clinton set aside when they choose not to let human rights interfere with other matters.

In Shanghai, Obama did his best to speak directly to the Chinese people about universal values. (It was not his fault that he was given only limited time, with a prescreened audience, and was broadcast only locally.) The president spoke of human rights as valuable for their own sake. And he is right. But he also must see human rights as they relate to the challenges on which he wants to make progress with the Chinese government. Over the long term, human rights have everything to do with the quality of the Chinese “partner” that the American people are seeking.

Zhang Zuhua and Jiang Qisheng are two of the original drafters of Charter 08, a document calling for greater democracy and human rights in China. Originally signed by about 300 Chinese activists and intellectuals, it now has about 10,000 signatories.

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