New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. viii, 250 pp. (Tables.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780197643204.
Many organizations have sincere motivations in promoting human rights, but are unsure how they can do so. A common hope is that public criticism of the abuses of regimes that violate human rights can foster change by embarrassing governments internationally and informing their publics in ways that undermine regime support. However, what if authoritarian governments can use international human rights pressure to buttress their legitimacy at home, causing such pressure to backfire? Jamie Gruffydd-Jones argues that this indeed happens in China.
Hostile Forces is divided into four sections, the first of which describes the argument. Gruffydd-Jones states that “while Chinese leaders have decried attempts to put pressure on them over human rights on the international stage, they have also sought to use that pressure as a tool to bolster their own domestic support” (4). In fact, the CCP has utilized international pressure to successfully reduce its citizens’ concerns over human rights. While China suppresses some human rights criticism, it publicizes other pressure in state-run outlets such as People’s Daily and other media sources. The CCP does so in the belief that by portraying human rights criticism as a hostile attack on China fuelled by international rivalry, citizens will defend China rather than focus on the injustices identified by the criticism. Of course, this strategy may backfire if reporting accusations of human rights abuses inspires activists, but overall, China has been successful in its approach.
In the second section of the book, Gruffydd-Jones delves into a variety of case studies to examine how the CCP has dealt with human rights criticisms. This includes occasions when the Party used violence in Tibet, Tiananmen Square in 1989, Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize, the jailing of Ilham Tohti, the arrest of Xu Zhiyong, the crackdown on human rights lawyers, and the suppression of demonstrations in Hong Kong. While state media sometimes repressed international criticism, especially since 2008 the media has openly responded to such criticism to proactively shape the narrative. Human rights pressure was most likely to be reported by the Chinese press when it involved a high-profile source such as the New York Times, when it focused on existing policies rather than new human rights violations, when criticism was directed at issues relevant to China’s territorial integrity, and when criticism came from the US. These are the types of human rights pressure that could most easily be spun into examples of hostile attacks on China.
The third part of Hostile Forces looks at how Chinese citizens respond to reports of human rights pressure, using a combination of experiments, interviews, and an Asian Barometer survey. In two national online surveys by the author regarding women’s rights, Gruffydd-Jones finds that a story that purports to portray American pressure on Chinese women’s rights policies reduces the number of people who think women’s rights are a problem in China, as opposed to neutral criticism or criticism from the African Union. Other variables are explored as well. However, the backlash to American criticism evaporates if the criticism is directed at Chinese leaders instead of the Chinese people. In surveys of people approached by interviewers in 2016, the source of international pressure mattered to respondents depending on the issue raised. For example, respondents were defensive after reading supposed American criticism of women’s rights and ivory usage in China, but not when reading American criticism of China’s environmental record. Further use of survey data shows that citizens were more likely to see China as democratic after Chinese news reports of President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, although the length of the effect was short.
The book ends with implications for human rights policy, using not just lessons from China but four other mini cases as well. Gruffydd-Jones concludes that a country can make human rights pressure on it backfire if two conditions are met: the narrative that human rights pressure is a hostile foreign attack must be believable, and the affected government must be able to manage the narrative at home. The lesson for human rights policy is that those who seek to improve human rights through pressure must be clear in who they are targeting, recognizing that pressure can be counterproductive. Further, some issues are more susceptible to pressure than others. To be effective, human rights pressure needs to have the right timing, target, topic, and source.
Hostile Forces is a fascinating book that will appeal to two crowds: China scholars and human rights advocates. Gruffydd-Jones makes a contribution by describing the dilemma of human rights pressure having unintended effects on citizen attitudes. The Party’s efforts to portray human rights criticism as hostile competition are made more credible by the fact that there is indeed a wide range of motivations for those that criticize Chinese human rights practices. The book is also innovative in its efforts to test how citizens respond to human rights pressure. While the techniques used are imperfect due to the limitations on social science research in China and there is some ambiguity on how the studies were carried out, the attempts to gather data were creative. Left for further research is the long-term impact on citizen attitudes of Party attempts to shape the narrative on international human rights pressure. Clearly the CCP believes that it can shape citizen perceptions in ways that give the Party greater legitimacy, but as Gruffydd-Jones demonstrates, the factors that shape citizens’ perceptions of stories are complex. The book also raises challenges to the international human rights community. How can it control the messages it hopes to convey without being used as a tool of the Party? While human rights criticism of China has multiple audiences, the effects on the Chinese public that hears such criticism through the lens of Party-controlled media must be considered.
Paul J. Bolt
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs