In mid March, the Chinese Information Office of the State Council released a report titled Full Text of Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009. Comprising nearly 10 pages of human rights violations in the United States, the report chronicled a panoply of incidents culled from the U.S. news media. They included violent crimes against property; racial discrimination; violations of civil and political rights (censorship, increased surveillance, detention and deportation); violations of economic, social, and cultural rights (homelessness, poverty, and unemployment); gender-based violations; and violations of human rights in other nations.
Criticizing the US for "posing as the world judge of human rights" and released through the Chinese news agency XINCHA the day after the U.S. State Department released its own report on international human rights violations, the report called the Americans on the hypocrisy of their own terms and criticized them for turning a blind eye to the violations in their own country.
Though the report was a somewhat crude public relations stunt and the details of the U.S. violations had been widely and readily recounted in the U.S. news media, the report's release nonetheless deserves consideration. It underscores the relativity of the claims we make about others and is particularly useful to those of us in ICA because it calls our attention to how universal claims can easily lose validity when confronted with on-the-ground conditions. Even in an area like human rights violations, where most would readily argue for maintaining the dignity of human life across national boundaries and geographic regions, shared assumptions about how life should be lived face bumps in the road when we embark on far-flung journeys. Those bumps should redirect our attention to the complexities of how issues unfold in practice.
This raises the difficult but open question of which criteria can generate agreement. While this is a goal we can and should fruitfully try to explore, in the meantime we might take note of these thoughts as we move into writing the final versions of our papers and presentations for Singapore. Though multiple issues - freedom of expression, attitudes toward GLBT individuals, the effects of so-called "soft authoritarianism" - drove our discussions as we contemplated the viability of holding a conference in Singapore, it is worth remembering that the calls to bypass Singapore as a conference site were also accompanied by sentiments from our own members that were not far from those expressed by the Chinese Information Office: Who among us is so free of violation as to censure others?
This is a roundabout way of saying that we can all do well to maintain respect for multiple ways of life as we travel to Singapore. To accept various social and cultural mores on their own terms, regardless of how we might feel about those terms, is a straightforward response to the limitations of universal claims. This is not a call to censor, silence or otherwise alter what ICA members feel needs to be said, regardless of whether or not they say it on Singaporean soil. But it is a call to recognize the futility of insisting on universal rules for everyone and a request to attempt to understand the complexity and multilayered nature of local conditions wherever and whatever they may be.
