Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Meetings of the minds
Yoo Soon-taek (left), wife of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kimoon, and Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan participate Saturday in the #EducationFirst for Sustainable Development conference at the U.N. headquarters. Participants affirmed their commitment to lifelong learning as key in ending poverty and hunger, and improving the environment.
UNITED NATIONS — After the South China Sea and cyberspace, the rivalry between the United States and China has found a new front: women’s rights.
President Xi Jinping of China today is hosting, along with the United Nations, a meeting to recognize the 20th anniversary of a women’s-rights conference in Beijing. Critics, however, point out that China imprisoned five prominent feminist activists this year.
Some 74 presidents and prime ministers are scheduled to attend the meeting, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.
President Barack Obama will not be among them.
Instead, his ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, will be leading the U.S. delegation. But at the same time, Power is using the occasion to highlight a campaign to shame China and several other countries for jailing female leaders.
The U.S. campaign takes up the cause of 20 imprisoned activists abroad, and it comes after an unsuccessful lobbying campaign to include activists among the speakers at the summit. While women’s-rights activists welcome the White House’s commitment to gender equality, they note that the United States has also lagged on women’s issues and has not ratified the leading global treaty on the rights of women and girls. The campaign has involved plastering the facade of the U.S. mission with an enormous poster that bears portraits of women who are political prisoners and is visible to the leaders entering the U.N. building across the street. Three of the 20 are from China.
The tensions over the summit coincided with a state visit by Xi to Washington last week and the announcements of bilateral agreements on cybercrime and climate change.
The parallel tracks illustrate what Xenia Wickett, who directs the U.S. program at Chatham House, an international affairs institute, calls a “textured relationship” between China and the United States, with cooperation on areas of mutual interest, like climate change, but discord on issues like human rights.
To both presidents, the women’s summit is important for domestic political reasons, she said. For Xi, the meeting is a chance to show an audience back home that China is a leader on the world stage, even if it does not convince the world that China has overnight become a champion of women’s rights.
For Obama, Wickett said, attending the gathering would be politically costly. “America is in campaign mode. It’s bash-China time,” she said. “President Obama would be condemned for attending an event like that, particularly in the political environment we have today.”
Instead, Power’s campaign has gained supporters in Congress, with a supportive resolution sponsored by Rep. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.
Musimbi Kanyoro, president of the Global Fund for Women, said she was disappointed that Obama would not be at the meeting.
“I would have liked him to be there,” she said. “His voice in regard to women, which has been good, would influence the discussion at that table.”
Kanyoro said she hoped that the United States would “invest heavily” in a shared agenda to promote gender equality at all levels. She expressed the same wish of China, saying she was not troubled by its prominence at the summit.
“China is a player at the table. China needs to take some responsibility through financing and to use part of its own growing influence in the world to pay attention to women,” she said. “We will have an opportunity to hold China more responsible for human rights and women’s rights.”
The conference, the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment or, informally, Beijing+20, is organized by U.N. Women, a small U.N. agency dedicated to gender equity.