Mass detention of Uighurs has been superseded by trade talks

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing China Sanctions
BY AMY MACKINNON

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood participates in a protest march demanding the European Union take action against China in support of the Uighurs, in Brussels, on April 27, 2018.

Two human rights advocates who focus on China issues say they were told by U.S. officials last year that the Trump administration was preparing to impose sanctions on Beijing in December over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the country’s western region of East Turkestan.
The advocates were given to understand that the sanctions would fall under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. government to place travel bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers.
But when International Human Rights Day came and went on Dec. 10—the day the United States customarily unveils a tranche of such sanctions each year—no announcement was made. 

The administration squelched the plan in order to avoid harming trade talks with China.
“Discussions with government officials indicated that there would be sanctions forthcoming in December,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

A second human rights advocate, who did not want to be named, heard similar things in briefings with government officials.
Richardson said she has since heard from officials who expressed frustration that the sanctions issue was off the table due to the trade talks. 

She declined to identify the officials who had briefed her.
Rob Berschinski, the senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said his organization had also been “cautiously optimistic” that the sanctions on Chinese officials would be announced in December under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The U.S. failure to impose sanctions over China’s actions in East Turkestan—where it has forced up to a million Uighurs into internment camps—has been a big disappointment for the human rights community.
“While the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements, I think it’s important to remember that history is not going to remember the details of the negotiations but where the United States was on this massive human rights issue,” said Francisco Bencosme, the Asia-Pacific advocacy manager at Amnesty International USA.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was considering imposing Magnitsky sanctions in many places, including China.
A spokesperson for the State Department said: “The United States is developing a whole-of-government strategy to address the unprecedented campaign of repression in East Turkestan.”
“In regards to specific actions by the United States, the State Department does not forecast potential sanctions.”
At the Treasury, a spokesperson said officials would not “telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.”
A United Nations human rights panel has said China has turned East Turkestan, home to some 11 million people, mostly Uighurs, into a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

The Daily Beast has reported that China is also seeking to build a worldwide register of Uighurs who live abroad and has threatened to detain their relatives if they do not comply with requests for information from the Chinese police.
Many Uighurs living in the United States have family in the camps and face the dilemma to speak out—at the risk of more harm to their relatives—or keep silent.
“Every Uighur in the USA has family members in the concentration camps,” said Murat Ataman, whose brother, Dilshat Perhat Ataman, was taken to a camp in June 2018. 

Dilshat, an editor of a popular Uighur website, served a four-year sentence in prison between 2010 and 2014 on charges of endangering state security.
It took four months for Murat to learn that his brother had been taken to a camp. 

Uighurs in East Turkestan are forced to install monitoring apps on their cellphones, limiting their ability to communicate freely with the outside world and making it hard for their families abroad to track their whereabouts.
On March 27, Pompeo met with members of the Uighur diaspora. 

Among the group was Ferkat Jawdat, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2011. 

His mother and four of his father’s relatives are currently being detained in East Turkestan.
Five days after the meeting, Jawdat received a message from contacts in China that his aunt and uncle had been sent to the camps. 

Jawdat said that members of his family have previously been questioned about his activism in the United States.
“I decided to go public because I don’t know if I can save my mom or not, but I want to save the other people,” he said.
“China’s plan is to wipe out the whole nation. This will be written in the history books as a genocide... My children, your kids, they’re going to learn about this. I don’t want my daughter to one day ask me, ‘What did you do to stop this?’” Jawdat said.
Commenting on the suggestion that trade talks had been given priority over the mass incarceration of Muslims in China, he said: “The U.S. should give up some economic development to save our next generations.”
Members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeatedly called on the Trump administration to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in East Turkestan and have introduced sanctions bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“For nearly a year I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in demanding the Trump Administration impose sanctions on Chinese officials directly involved in putting roughly a million Uighurs into internment camps,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, said in a statement to Foreign Policy.
At a rally in support of the Uighurs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, successive speakers called for the United States to place sanctions on Chinese officials.
“Each time the world swears never again. When will we actually mean it?” said Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress.
Given China’s influential economic clout, many members of the Uighur community see the United States as their only hope.
Among Muslim countries, only Turkey has sharply condemned China for its treatment of the Uighurs and other Muslims. 

Muslim-majority states have even supported it. 

In 2017, Egypt detained and deported dozens of Uighur students back to China. 

On a visit to China this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom supported China’s right to undertake anti-terrorism measures. 

Last month, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose 57 member states have substantial Muslim populations—passed a resolution that commended China’s efforts to care for its Muslim citizens.
China has invested heavily in countries across Central Asia and the Middle East as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Berschinski of Human Rights First, who previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said 2018 was the first year that no sanctions were announced under the Magnitsky Act or the Global Magnitsky Act on International Human Rights Day.
No official explanation was given, although Berschinski suggested that perhaps a work overload at the Treasury Department may have been a contributing factor.
The Magnitsky Act takes its name from a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison after exposing widespread corruption. 

Passed in 2012, the law enabled the U.S. government to place sanctions on human rights abusers. 

The Global Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2016, extended that ability to the rest of the world.
“People are starting to get concerned that the administration is giving up on Global Magnitsky sanctions,” Berschinski said.

Fear of President Trump Walking on Xi Haunts China as Trade Talks Near End

• Beijing plays coy on summit, uncertain it can trust President Trump
• President Trump battling his own reputation for last-minute surprises

By Shawn Donnan and Kevin Hamlin

Donald Trump regularly touts the strength of his personal relationship with Xi Jinping, talking about the Chinese leader in the sort of warm terms U.S. presidents normally reserve for longstanding allies.
Yet as the world’s two largest economies inch towards a trade agreement designed to define and reorder their economic relationship for years to come, one question looms large: Does Xi trust Trump enough to get on a plane and seal the deal?
Trump and his aides have for weeks been pushing for Xi to agree to a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s club and resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to finalize a deal as soon as this month to end a dispute that has cast a shadow over the global economy. 

Trump himself has said that it’s only when the two leaders meet that the final details can be ironed out.
Chinese officials, however, have long been wary of putting Xi in a position where he might be embarrassed by an unpredictable President or forced into last-minute concessions.

“That is the real conundrum for Xi,’’ said Eswar Prasad, an expert on the Chinese economy at Cornell University who regularly meets with senior officials in Beijing. 

“The concern about being snookered by President Trump at the negotiating table is a real risk for Xi.’’
China’s worries are flipping the U.S. script on its head. 

As President Trump claims to be the first American president to stand up to Beijing, his aides have built a possible deal on a foundation of distrust. 

In their view, a China that has for decades lied and cheated its way to economic success cannot be trusted to live up to any commitments unless a deal has teeth.

“That’s the fundamental question,’’ Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, told Congress on Feb. 27. 

“What the president wants is an agreement that number one is enforceable.’’
Officials in Beijing insist they’ve played by international rules and just want to be sure President Trump won’t again kill an agreement at the last minute. 

President Trump has rejected at least two deals brought to him since he first hosted Xi at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017: One struck by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for China to cut steel overcapacity, and another negotiated by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last year. 

Both would’ve averted a trade war.
The latter one was particularly jarring for Xi, who faces pressure in China to avoid giving up too much in a deal with President Trump. 

Liu He came to Washington as Xi’s special representative, and declared to China’s state-run media that a trade war had been averted. 

After Trump backtracked, talks stalled for months until the two leaders met in December at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
Last month, Trump’s decision to walk away from his Hanoi summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un without a deal only reinforced China’s concerns about the president’s unpredictability.

President Donald Trump with Kim Jong Un in Hanoi on Feb. 27.

Former Commerce Vice Minister Wei Jianguo argues that because the U.S. and China are great powers President Trump would never walk away from Xi as he did Kim. 

The consequences would be too great. 

There are parallels for the Chinese.
In 1999, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji faced a nationalist backlash after a last-minute change of course by the Clinton administration threw a deal for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization into doubt.
Erin Ennis, who tracks the negotiations for the U.S.-China Business Council, said a President Trump snub of Xi this time around would be an order of magnitude greater than any previously. 

Then again, she said, “I don’t think the Chinese are the only government in the world that is not entirely sure what they are getting when they send their head of state into a meeting with the president of the United States.’’

Daily Talks
Trump has for months pushed to sign a deal, and that has fundamentally changed the dynamics of negotiations. 

In recent days both sides have held daily conference calls. 

China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday that Liu, Lighthizer and Mnuchin decided on arrangements for the next stage of trade talks, without providing more details.
China last week revised an offer on intellectual-property protection, one focal point of the negotiations, according to people briefed on the offer. 

It has also pledged to increase purchases of American goods by $1.2 trillion over six years and to open its market in some key sectors, raising hopes that it might finally allow U.S. firms to compete in forbidden areas such as cloud computing.
As a deal gets closer, Chinese officials also want the U.S. to agree that any commitments go both ways, particularly on enforcement.
The U.S. wants China to agree not to retaliate against any punitive measures Washington might apply if Beijing doesn’t meet its commitments. 

But Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen over the weekend countered any enforcement mechanism would have to be “two-way, fair and equal.”

‘Judge, Jury’
“I’m not sure if China would ever allow the United States to be the judge, jury and sheriff on these issues and that seems to be the core of what the U.S. is asking for,’’ said Wendy Cutler, a former senior U.S. trade negotiator who heads the Asia Society Policy Institute.
President Trump could see political benefits from walking away from a deal. 

He’s already facing questions about the quality of the agreement and whether the trade war he started -- and the economic damage it has brought in farm states in particular -- will prove to have been worth it. 

Experts inside his administration also fear President Trump is being led into a bad deal with a China that will remain a growing strategic threat.

Still, both presidents have their reasons to settle their differences.
President Trump is under pressure to prove his “America First’’ trade policies can deliver, the evidence for which is mixed so far. 

Since 2016 the U.S. trade deficit -- Trump’s own favorite metric -- has blown out by almost $120 billion, or more than 20 percent.
Meanwhile, a successful summit in Mar-a-Lago would enable Xi to silence his own domestic critics, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. 

"If he cannot get some kind of a ‘decent’ deal with President Trump and the economy continues to slide, the pressure on Xi will build up," he said.

Insane Clown President

Trump Pushes for China Deal in Hope of Fueling Market Rally

• Trump looking for win after abandoning North Korea talks
• Advisers said to make case of stock market rally on China deal

By Jennifer Jacobs and Saleha Mohsin

Donald Trump is pressuring U.S. trade negotiators to cut a deal with China soon in hope of fueling a market rally, as he grows increasingly concerned that the lack of an agreement could drag down stocks, according to people familiar with the matter.
As trade talks with China advance, Trump has noticed the market gains that followed each sign of progress, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. 

He watched U.S. and Asian stocks rise on his decision to delay an increase in tariffs on Chinese goods scheduled for March 1, one of the people said.
The world’s two largest economies are moving closer to a final agreement that could end their almost year-long trade war, an outcome that would also provide a boost to his efforts to seek reelection in 2020. 

A new trade accord that would provide Trump with a much-needed win after the collapse of his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump, who met with his trade team Monday, has expressed interest in hosting Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for a signing ceremony on a deal as soon as this month. 

His enthusiasm for a pact could shape crucial decisions such as balancing Chinese pressure to lift tariffs immediately against trade hawks’ arguments to initially maintain duties as leverage to assure good behavior by Beijing.
That provides an opening for China to seal a deal without giving major ground.
“China’s concessions probably won’t be very big because a lot of their demands are what we already plan to reform,” former finance minister Lou Jiwei said in Beijing on Wednesday, calling some U.S. demands for change "unreasonable."
Trump’s fixation on stock-market performance has shaped his assessments of his economic policies. 
Top White House staff know to be aware of how markets are performing when summoned to the Oval Office to speak with Trump because the president often asks: ‘‘What’s happening with the markets?’’
Advocates of concluding a deal within the administration have seized on that fixation to bolster their case, one person said.
Trump’s economic team has told him an agreement will unleash a market rally, the people said. Advocates of a compromise with China have also told Trump it is crucial to cut a deal soon to reap the full boost ahead of the election because benefits such as more Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans and other products will have a delayed impact and take time to reverberate through the economy, they said.
The White House communications staff declined to comment.
The trade war between the two nations has weighed on the stock market, with Renaissance Macro Research concluding that the S&P 500 would be 11 percent higher without the impact of the feud. Still, U.S. stocks have regained most of their losses from the autumn when investors were more pessimistic about trade prospects.
Some investors say a deal isn’t likely to have a major impact because it’s already mostly priced into the market as a result of the recent positive signals from the administration.
On the other hand, failure risks roiling stocks.
“The risk could be more to the downside, but on the other hand this would take away some certainty and that is good for companies looking to invest,” said Sebastien Page, head of global multi-asset strategy at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore.
“If we get a meaningful trade deal, there is some upside scenarios for emerging market stocks.”
Inside the White House, key economic advisers including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow are eager for a quick resolution to the trade conflict, while U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has taken a tougher line with China.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on March 5.

Trump is facing pressure from both parties in Congress, with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in a floor speech on Tuesday cautioning the president not to settle for a weak deal with China.
“But now, when you’re getting close to a victory, to relent at the eleventh hour, without achieving meaningful, enforceable, and verifiable structural reform to China’s trade policies would be an abject failure of the president’s China policies and people will shrug their shoulders and say what the heck did he begin this for if he won’t complete it,” Schumer said.

Keep ZTE Out of China Trade Talks

The company needs to be punished, not used as a bargaining chip.

Bloomberg

By The Editors
ZTE is a double offender. 

Donald Trump has indicated, via Twitter, that he’s prepared to make an enormous concession to smooth trade talks with China, offering upfront to ease sanctions on ZTE Corp., the country’s second-largest telecom equipment maker. 

But ZTE is being punished for deliberately violating U.S. sanctions — twice. 

The company’s punishment needs to be enforced, not used as a bargaining chip. 

If Trump goes ahead anyway, he stands to have a very hard time making sure the U.S. gets its money’s worth.
The American case against ZTE isn’t in dispute. 

The company was singled out in 2016 for doing business with Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. 

A $1.2 billion settlement last year was supposed to include internal punishment for the ZTE officials involved. 

Instead, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, the firm paid those executives bonuses. 

The U.S. then banned ZTE from buying irreplaceable U.S. components for seven years, effectively killing its business.
It is possible to conceive of different punishments for ZTE that would cause the company material pain without destroying its ability to operate. 

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is said to be exploring such options.
But if Trump were to soften the blow now, the cost to U.S. credibility would be substantial, weakening the effect of its sanctions on Iran, North Korea and others. 

That cost would hardly be reduced if the U.S. were able to improve its position in trade talks with China.
After all, the greatest threat the U.S. has to address in those talks is China’s use of unfair means to pursue technological superiority over the U.S. 

If anything, the ZTE case has made Chinese officials more determined to achieve self-sufficiency in key high-tech sectors. 

Lightening ZTE’s punishment would only encourage Chinese companies to continue cheating, and not only on sanctions.
Trump’s injudicious tweeting may have already diminished U.S. bargaining power. 

But it’s not too late to take ZTE off the table.