Human rights takes a back seat

Beijing: Hillary Clinton has told China's leaders that America considered human rights concerns secondary to economic survival.

Arriving in China on her first visit as US Secretary of State, she promised a new relationship between the two countries, one she considered to be the world's most important of the 21st century.

Clinton landed in Beijing from South Korea, where she criticised the "tyranny" of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. However, she offered a hand of friendship to Kim's ally, China, contradicting hostile policies both she and President Barack Obama promised in campaigning before the presidential election.

She said she would continue to press China on issues such as human rights and Tibet, but added: "Our pressing on those issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."

Obama's campaign pledges to protect American jobs from competition from low-wage economies and to force China to revalue its currency were received badly in Beijing.

However, Washington has been left with little choice but to improve ties in the wake of the financial meltdown, in which the huge trade imbalances between the two have led to a debt crisis in the US and an export crisis in China.

Clinton referred to a Chinese aphorism that "when you are in the same boat, you should keep the peace on the crossing".

Chinese human rights activists said yesterday that police had harassed and intimidated them so they would not speak out during Clinton's visit to Beijing.

"I am under house arrest because Hillary Clinton came," Zeng Jinyan, one of China's most prominent dissidents and wife of jailed activist Hu Jia, told AFP via an internet message.

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders group added that a number of dissidents had been put under residential surveillance, questioned and followed by Beijing police in an effort to silence them during Clinton's visit. Their comments came after Clinton said she would not press China's communist leaders on the sensitive issue of human rights during her visit to Beijing so that the two sides could focus on major issues of global concern.

Clinton's comments triggered a fierce reaction from human rights groups around the world, with Amnesty International saying it was "shocked and extremely disappointed".

US state department officials said Clinton was likely to go to church in Beijing on Sunday, something former president George W. Bush did when visiting to highlight lack of religious freedom in China. But they said Clinton's churchgoing was "private" and would not be open to the media.