You thought China valued human rights? Wrong

The sad, depressing fate of the Australia China Human Rights Dialogue tells us a great deal about the contemporary China-Australia relationship, and more broadly about the nature of contemporary leadership in Beijing.

But first it’s worth noting the substance of Xi Jinping’s speech to the 19th Communist Party congress. It was a powerful signal of the understanding that the Beijing leadership now has of China’s national position. In time, Xi told his party confreres in a speech at the Fidel Castro length of 3½ hours, China would become the most important nation on the global stage.

It strongly reaffirmed Communist Party ideology. This speech, and this congress, will repay lengthy analysis over time.

But it’s important to understand the significance of Beijing walking away pretty definitively from the formal Australia China Human Rights Dialogue. In its recent form this was set up by the Howard government with Beijing in 1997. There had been similar ­dialogues under previous Labor governments but this was certainly the most formal and, allegedly, important.

It played a pivotal role in the Australia-China relationship. It was led on the Chinese side by a vice-minister for foreign affairs and on the Australian side by a deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It was to be held annually, one year in China, one year in Australia.

The cynic in me always thought this institution served only one real purpose, which was to give the Australian government a way of claiming that it was raising human rights with China while not actually having to say anything about human rights publicly as, of course, the dialogues were behind closed doors.

The existence of this sort of dialogue was the justification for Australia ceasing to vote at the UN to condemn China over its many human rights violations.

Even so, the very existence of such a dialogue was an important statement of principle. It showed that we believed, and the Chinese more or less accepted, that human rights were universal. And it was a statement in principle, that while we certainly desired to grow rich off China and wanted a good relationship with it, we still had some concern for the human rights of Chinese individuals.

After the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the Beijing leadership was to some extent on the defensive. Once and future China enthusiasts such as Bob Hawke had wept in mourning the dead. The Beijing leadership was willing, therefore, to have discussions about subjects such as human rights.

There is no evidence the dialogue ever led to human rights improvements. In time, though, it did develop a strong institutional character. The head of the Australian Human Rights Commission attended, as did selected politicians and legal experts.

The formal emphasis of the talks quickly switched to the development of the Chinese legal system. This has been the default cul-de-sac that all Western discussions of human rights in China have found themselves parked in for at least the past 30 years.

When I was a correspondent in Beijing for this newspaper in 1985 and asked for a briefing from the Australian embassy on Chinese human rights, the discussion quickly moved to the happier subject of the long-term evolution of the legal system.

In the past few years, when Xi’s government has ruthlessly crush­ed all dissent, when the internet has been turned into a system of mass surveillance in an eerie realisation of George Orwell’s dystopian vision, when human rights lawyers have been routinely and arbitrarily imprisoned, when the fragile institutionalism of the Chinese government has been replaced by a cult of personality around Xi, it is almost inconceivable that anyone could still talk of the evolution of the Chinese legal system as a pro-human rights development.

The Beijing leadership, by effectively ending the formal human rights dialogue with Australia, has made it clear it no longer will make even the slightest pretence that it could care less about Australia’s, or any Western nation’s, views on human rights in China.

The last session of this notionally annual dialogue was held in Beijing in February 2014. All through the first half of 2015, Canberra was pushing for a date to hold the next iteration in Australia. It could never get a meaningful response from Beijing. Then, later that year, Beijing told Canberra it wanted to downgrade the dialogue to the level of deputy director general. This is several layers below the previous level. The equivalent in the Australian system would be assistant secretary, one of the most junior rungs of departmental leadership, well below a first assistant secretary or a deputy secretary, much less a secretary or a minister.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop declined the downgrade. Accepting it would have meant acknowledging that Australia no longer takes human rights in China seriously. The Turnbull government deserves great credit for sticking with this position. Canberra proposed sending a deputy secretary, without a huge accompanying delegation, to Beijing to discuss both human rights and the human rights dialogue. Beijing refused.

Early this year, Bishop wrote to the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, proposing the two countries agree to holding the formal vice-minister level dialogue every three years and hold annual talks at the deputy director general level as annual, “inter-sessional” events.

She received no response. Finally Wang was in Australia and Bishop thought he agreed to the proposal to hold the formal talks at vice-ministerial level every three years, and the lower level talks annually. He even proposed tentative dates for the first such meeting at the deputy director general level in Beijing.

But when Canberra tried to follow this up it was told that the low-level talks were all it could have. Vice-ministerial talks had disappeared. If it wanted any formal human rights dialogue at all, that was it. Bishop raised the matter again with Wang when she met him in Manila in August. But Beijing would not budge.

Even when the Turnbull government suggested the resurrection of the human rights dialogue might help secure the (ultimately rejected) extradition treaty, which Beijing wanted very badly, there was no movement.

This is the new attitude of the Beijing leadership. Human rights are a universal norm. Beijing now will not even pay lip service to something so basic.

Everything this tells us about contemporary leadership in Beijing is depressing. Canberra hopes Australia’s recent election to the UN Human Rights Council may give it an opening to raise the issue with Beijing again.

I don’t like its chances.