California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom some speculate may challenge Joe Biden for president in 2024, recently traveled to China to meet with political leaders there — including Xi Jinping. Yet he’s now facing widespread criticism for ignoring the opportunity to discuss human rights with Xi, and instead, focused on climate change.
During a press conference, Newsom confirmed that he and Xi did not discuss China’s many human rights abuses. When a reporter asked why Newsom did not bring the subject up, he replied, “I can’t be everything to everybody at every moment of every minute of every day. But I was very privileged to have the opportunity to dialogue with some of the most influential leaders in China about those [issues] in very direct and honest ways.”
The Hill further noted that he essentially argued that discussing climate change was more important:
I spent an hour with the Foreign Minister, and that was the appropriate venue on the basis of the conversations I had with the State Department under the basis of the fact that that would be a better place to communicate a more nuanced and detailed explanation of our points of view on issues of human rights and democracy, on issues related to Taiwan, issues related to international and foreign policy more broadly.
And we took the limited time we had with Xi, which we were told would be just 20 minutes and we had the opportunity to extend it to 45, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to reinforce the reason I was there: not as President of the United States, not as Secretary of State, but as the Governor of one of the largest states and one of the largest economies in the world, to focus on low carbon, green growth and I didn’t want to miss that opportunity and moment to influence this foundational agenda, which is bigger than any situational agenda in our lifetime.
He also claimed that any genocide being committed by China is essentially not as important as climate change, and said the Biden administration told him not to discuss human rights with Xi.
“I had an opportunity to talk about the most important issue in our lives, the most important issue,” he said. “Everything else is situational, this is the most sustainable issue. It’s changing everything… There’s no more consequential issue in the world today — long and medium term, and increasingly short-term — than the issue of climate change, as important as all those other issues are.”
Newsom’s answer was roundly criticized.
“It must make the Chinese dictator smile to see someone so naive come and kiss his ring,” Derek Hunter said in his article for The Hill. “Newsom just handed him a big propaganda victory, while also trading away moral credibility for empty promises.”
“In politics, a photo tells a story more so than anything else,” Blanca Begert wrote for Politico. “The Great Wall photo elicited a lot of eye rolls, but it was far from the most important image to come out of Newsom’s one-week trip to China. That would be the photo of him shaking hands with Xi — a political feat at a time of geopolitical tension that would be nearly impossible for any other governor, and hard for even national leaders, to land.”
Gavin Newsom, governor of the U.S. state of California, visits the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 26, 2023. (Photo by Xing Guangli/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Newsweek reported, “[A] group of 60 advocacy groups and non-governmental organizations released a joint statement Friday describing the governor’s trip as a move to ‘explicitly turn away from engaging on critical human rights issues,'” and that “[i]n a previous comment to Newsweek, Human Rights Watch acting China Director Maya Wang said that by framing climate and human rights as a trade-off, the governor was abetting the Chinese government’s efforts to marginalize human rights.”
“A true statesman isn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Yet Newsom received well-deserved brickbats for meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping and not mentioning that country’s well-documented human-rights abuses,” Steven Greenhut wrote for Reason, adding, “Newsom should at least try to make these meetings as substantive as possible. Instead, he’s just serving as a prop for a tyranny because, like Brown, he apparently believes that climate change poses such an existential crisis that nothing else really matters.”
China, to say the least, must be held accountable for its human rights abuses, and as someone with presidential aspirations, Newsom should have been willing to at least talk about it with Xi. Instead, he took the easy way out — and people suffering in China will continue to suffer.
The most notable current human rights issue in the region is the Uyghur genocide; it’s estimated that as many as two million Uyghurs, as well as other ethnic and religious minorities like adherents to Falun Gong, are currently being held in concentration camps in the Xinjiang region. The people imprisoned are said to be regularly beaten, tortured, raped, sterilized, and forced into abortions. Some have allegedly been forced into organ donation while still alive — without anesthesia. Uyghurs who escape are hunted down abroad and sent back to China for persecution.
Then, of course, there was China’s One-Child Policy; it has been relaxed, but the after-effects are still being felt, with an epidemic of violence against women, the highest suicide rate of women in the world, and millions upon millions of girls missing — aborted simply because they were female. The government has been attempting to reverse course, but is having little success.
Taking presidential-looking photo ops is one thing; anyone in a position of power and authority has a duty to speak up for those who don’t have a voice. Newsom had a choice, and he chose to keep silent.
