China’s human rights foreign policy in the Xi Jinping era: Normative revisionism shrouded in discursive moderation
| Author | Chiahao Hsu,Titus C Chen |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120957611 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Chinese foreign policy: A Xi change? |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120957611
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(2) 228 –247
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120957611
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China’s human rights foreign
policy in the Xi Jinping era:
Normative revisionism
shrouded in discursive
moderation
Titus C Chen1 and Chiahao Hsu2
Abstract
This article applies mixed methods to examine if PRC leadership change in 2012 – from the Hu
Jintao government to the Xi Jinping administration – has led to significant changes in China’s
international human rights policy. Empirical analyses characterise a discursively moderate China
whose international human rights statements in the Xi-era are no more contentious than during
Hu Jintao’s time. Despite its communicative moderation, Xi’s China is found to have pursued an
agenda of international human rights policy that is more ambitious and revisionist than before.
China under Xi’s rule is no longer content with passively defending its human rights governance
model but has actively promoted this model internationally. The Xi Jinping administration has
undertaken to market its illiberal model of national development as the new universal framework
for the international human rights system. By doing so, Xi’s China is bound to undermine the
liberal foundation of international human rights norms.
Keywords
China, human rights, sentiment analysis, text analytics, United Nations, Xi Jinping
Introduction
Since the early 1990s, China’s relationship with international human rights institutions
has been a contentious subject in both academic and policy circles. China has been
known for its extensive and deepening participation in the United Nations human rights
regime (Kent, 2007). China has, on its own initiative, drawn up and implemented three
consecutive national action plans for human rights (2009–2010, 2012–2015, and 2016–
2020) and has regularly hosted multilateral human rights conferences. Notwithstanding
1Institute of Political Science, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 804
2Si Wan College, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 804
Corresponding authors:
Titus C Chen, Institute of Political Science, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 804.
Email: chentitus@gmail.com
957611BPI0010.1177/1369148120957611The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsChen and Hsu
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Chen and Hsu 229
its deepening engagement with international human rights communities, China has held
grudges against, and publicly challenged, the liberal foundational norms of interna-
tional human rights regimes, which prioritise individual liberties and political freedoms
over state power (Kinzelbach, 2012; Yang, 2017).
This article examines whether PRC leadership change in 2012 – from the Hu Jintao
government to the Xi Jinping administration – has led to significant changes in China’s
human rights foreign policy.1 We conduct empirical analyses on China’s international
human rights statements made by the two PRC leaderships (2008–2018). We find that
China’s human rights foreign policy has both changed and continued in Xi Jinping’s era.
The Chinese human rights foreign policy presented in our research is more complex and
multi-faceted than that presented in prior studies. Our research suggests that China under
Xi has proactively sought to market and mainstream its state-centred norms and princi-
ples in the international human rights system. Rather than passively defending the state-
centric model of ‘rights protection’, Xi’s China has leapt forward to market its illiberal
model of national development as the new universal framework for the advancement of
human rights.
The article is composed of six sections, beginning with a review of existing literatures
on China’s official human rights conception and its human rights foreign policy.
Following the literature review, we introduce four research questions that guide the
empirical analyses. The second section introduces the object of analyses and the research
methods – text analytics, sentiment analysis, and regression analysis – that are to be
applied for empirical studies. The third section presents findings from empirical analy-
ses that measure the impact of PRC leadership change on the communicative patterns of
China’s human rights foreign policy. We find that the change of PRC leadership has no
significant effect on the level of China’s discursive engagement with multilateral human
rights institutions. Nevertheless, we do not have strong evidence to claim that Xi Jinping
has criticised Western human rights issues more negatively than his predecessor, as pre-
vious research suggested.
The fourth section examines whether PRC leadership change in 2012 has additive
effects on China’s human rights statements that championed the rights-as-capacity con-
ception. The regression analysis finds no significant association between leadership
change and Chinese human rights statements that championed Beijing’s ruling capacity.
The fifth section examines whether the leadership change is associated with more inter-
national PRC statements that considered liberal human rights norms as a source of politi-
cal threat to state sovereignty or regime legitimacy. Contrary to the existing literature, we
find that China’s human rights foreign policy in Xi Jinping’s time is no more hostile to the
liberal human rights norms than in Hu Jintao’s.
The last empirical section presents the finding that China under Xi Jinping has
moved beyond the passive-reactive mode of engagement with multilateral human rights
institutions; instead, Beijing has increasingly shifted to a proactive approach, seeking
to rewrite the liberal human rights norms and claiming ownership of global governance.
Our research confirms the observations of prior studies that Xi’s China has pursued a
leadership role in multilateral institutions. Four decades of engagement with the rules-
based international society has failed to transform China’s political system and its for-
eign policy (Economy, 2018; Minzner, 2018). Given China’s growing influence in the
international normative order, it is all the more imperative, as Kinzelbach presciently
urged nearly a decade ago, to ‘take China’s language on human rights seriously’
(Kinzelbach, 2012: 301).
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