http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3961-1234
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Abstract
China’s rise has been met with concern by human rights scholars and activists. Critics contend that China is using its clout to weaken the international human rights regime while simultaneously empowering abusive governments in the developing world. Against this backdrop, this study investigates whether China’s growing economic dominance has contributed to physical integrity rights violations in developing countries. Specifically, I theorize that China shields its major trade partners from international scrutiny, thereby weakening the external constraints that would otherwise prevent leaders from abusing human rights. Removing international-level constraints elevates the importance of domestic-level factors, such that whether China’s partners do or do not repress physical integrity rights is contingent on domestic political institutions. Veto players are of particular importance because they can constrain leaders that have been otherwise empowered through trade with China. Within this context, I hypothesize that the number of veto players in a given country determines whether trading intensively with China leads to more violations of physical integrity rights. Through analysis of country-level panel data, I find evidence that trading with China worsens physical integrity rights abuses in developing countries. However, this effect is weaker where veto players are more numerous.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful critiques and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Jonas Gamso is an Assistant Professor of International Trade and Global Studies at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management. His research focuses on trade between developing countries and the implications for sustainable development and governance. The author's work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and Policy Sciences, among other places.
Notes
1 For details on China’s trade, see the Observatory of Economic Complexity (Simoes & Hidalgo, 2011), available here: https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/chn/
2 There are certainly exceptions. For example, Risse and Babayan (2015) note that Western countries have prioritized stability over democracy in Arab countries. And Western nations are often willing to trade with partners that have poor human rights records (Bader and Daxecker, 2015).
3 For a more detailed discussion of human rights diplomacy by the US and the EU, see Wouters, Beke, Chané, D’Hollander, and Raube (2014).
4 The contradictory results perhaps reflect the mixed signals that Western countries send partners. For example, the US often uses human rights rhetoric in its dealings with foreign governments, but simultaneously supports authoritarian states that repress their populations (Sikkink, 2004).
5 Indeed, evidence suggests that China is capable of hindering democracy promotion efforts by the EU and the US (Chen & Kinzelbach, 2015).
6 Scholars argue that China’s non-interference approach serves its own interests. By advancing non-interference in its international relations, the Chinese state can deflect accusations that it abuses the rights of its citizens (Taylor, 1998) or infringes upon the self-determination of peoples in Xinjiang, Taiwan, and Tibet (Hanauer & Morris, 2014). Additionally, non-interference allows China to enjoy lucrative economic and political relationships with human rights abusers.
7 Western governments argue that China’s non-interference approach fuels authoritarianism and human rights abuses in the developing world (Regilme & Hartmann, 2018). It should, however, be noted that China’s rise, and whatever negative consequences are accompanying it, was encouraged by Western countries that sought to integrate China into the capitalist global economy (Dirlik, 2017).
8 The composition of trade between China and its partners in the developing world often follows this pattern (Gallagher & Porzecanski, 2010; Hanauer & Morris, 2014).
9 Indeed, evidence suggests that the countries that depend on Chinese trade do support its foreign policy agenda (Flores-Macías & Kreps, 2013; Piccone, 2018a).
10 All country-years in the sample classified as high income according to the World Bank’s Atlas Method (explained here: http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/allaboutfinance/new-country-classifications-2016) were dropped from the dataset.
11 This time series limits the analysis to the years following China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), as China’s membership in the WTO led to the vast expansion of its trade relations with other countries of the developing world (Drysdale & Hardwick, 2018).
12 The Amnesty International Reports are only used for the measurement of physical integrity rights, as opposed to empowerment rights, such as freedom of speech, which CIRI also measures.
13 For more details on the Physical Integrity Rights Index see Cingranelli and Richards (1999, 2010), and the CIRI codebook (available here: http://www.humanrightsdata.com/p/data-documentation.html).
14 Studies that use the Political Terror Scale include Poe and Tate (1994), de Soysa and Nordås (2007), and Zanger (2000), among others.
15 For discussion of the Political Terror Scale and comparisons between it and the Physical Integrity Rights Index see Wood and Gibney (2010).
16 See Cingranelli and Richards (2010) for discussion of critiques of CIRI.
17 See Table A1 in the Appendix for descriptive statistics of all variables used in this study.
18 Trade agreements also appear to affect human rights (Hafner-Burton, 2005a, 2005b, 2011).
19 Evidence also suggests that strong human rights protections attract foreign investors (Blanton & Blanton, 2007; Garriga, 2016).
20 Fein (1995) argues that there are more human rights violations in semi-democratic regimes or regimes in transition than in either fully authoritarian or democratic regimes.
21 While development and human rights protection were once seen competing objectives for poor countries, they are now widely understood to be complementary (Donnelly, 1984).
22 I draw GDP data from the World Development Indicators. Population data comes from Bader and Daxecker (2015), who drew their data from the World Development Indicators.
23 This data comes from Bader and Daxecker (2015), whose coding follows Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Ericksson, Sollenberg, and Strand (2002).
24 Country-years in which the agreement was signed or ratified but not yet brought into force are coded ‘0’.
25 In this scenario, countries with poor physical integrity rights records direct trade to China because the Chinese government does not object to these abuses.
26 p values are also above 0.1 in some of the ordinal logistic regression models with year fixed effects (see Table A4 in the Appendix).
27 It should be noted that this interaction effect is driven by a relatively small number of countries with relatively large number of checks (7 or more). See Figure A1 in the Appendix for a version of the marginal effects plot overlaid with the frequency distribution for Checks.
28 This may partially explain the US’s withdrawal from human rights diplomacy under the current administration (Piccone, 2018b).
29 Or, perhaps, if Western countries undertake efforts to counter authoritarian influence and defend human rights.
30 That said, interaction models featuring these variables in place of Checks did not suggest a moderating effect. Results available on request.