Foreign Affairs

On China, Human-Rights Diplomacy Doesn’t Work

The hard facts of great power competition should guide U.S. planning.

In a packed DC briefing room last Tuesday, Sebastian Lai spoke cautiously, each word carefully weighed. His father, billionaire Jimmy Lai—77, Catholic, and Hong Kong’s most defiant publisher—is languishing in what Sebastian described as an overheated cell, denied air conditioning and, at times, even communion. “Without the eye kept on Hong Kong,” Lai intoned, “my father will most likely die in prison. There is no chance he will get a fair trial.”

Flanking him were his father’s British lawyer, Jonathan Price; Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), a longtime advocate for Chinese dissidents in Washington; Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute; and Robert Wilkie, former VA secretary and co-chair of American Security at AFPI, which hosted the event.

Lai spoke with striking gratitude to President Donald Trump, calling him a leader with “the drive and the experience,” and suggesting that the challenge now is “getting all leaders to follow his lead.” With Trump’s visit to Britain only a week away, the implication was clear: Lai hopes that Washington can stiffen London’s spine at a moment when the Labour government is edging toward a pragmatic normalization with Beijing. He also lamented that his father’s trial has been dragged out for years—most recently over health concerns—leaving him in limbo more than 1,700 days since his arrest. As a Catholic, Lai also stated that he would welcome Pope Leo’s public support for his father’s cause. 

Without pressing outright, the subtext of his appeal was unmistakable: Trump must pressure Prime Minister Keir Starmer into linking Jimmy Lai’s case with Britain’s normalization effort. “If they can send 5,000 people to raid your building,” Sebastian suggested, “then this is not just about the free press—it is about commercial rights.” 

Drawing on the precedent of apartheid South Africa, Smith—who previously chaired the Congressional-Executive Commission on China alongside then-Senator Marco Rubio and who nominated Lai, along with four other individuals detained by the Chinese government, for a Nobel Peace Prize this year—framed the case for linking trade to human rights as a moral imperative. He pointed to May 26, 1994—the day President Bill Clinton severed the link between the continuation of China’s Most Favored Nation trade status and its human rights record—as the moment, in his words, “we lost China.” Pausing, he added with insistence: “We have to get it back.”

Smith and Wilkie reached for the Cold War to frame their arguments, invoking the case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—the dissident writer whose release from the Soviet Union in 1974 came only after sustained U.S. and Western pressure. Washington, they said, had made human rights a bargaining chip in its dealings with Moscow, keeping trade negotiations on the table while pressing the Kremlin to fly its most famous prisoner of conscience to the West. It was, in their telling, an example of how moral clarity and strategic leverage could work hand-in-hand. 

Wilkie conceded that China today presents a different challenge than the Soviet Union of the 1970s, but both men returned to Solzhenitsyn as evidence that trade and human rights need not be mutually exclusive.

I asked the panel to clarify what “linking human rights and trade” would look like in practical terms, particularly given a regime as resilient and entrenched as China’s—and the reality that every measure the U.S. imposes, China can mirror. “Why hasn’t a prisoner swap been put forward?” I added. “It seems like the most concrete, straightforward answer.”

Smith’s answer wove together a range of references: “It wasn’t the Chinese Communist Party that threw out Japan after World War Two,” he said, critiquing Beijing’s historical self-perception. References to the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the exposure of U.S. tech giants like Google, Circo, and Microsoft to the Chinese government peppered his response.

He insisted on moral framing. “I would ask that our top people speak out—care about the use of torture and the despicable mistreatment of a brave and heroic figure like Jimmy Lai,” he said, underscoring Lai’s stature as “the quintessential newsman that just wanted to tell the truth.” Trade, he argued, could be a vector of change: “The trade will really make a difference.” 

And yet, as has been true every time I have pressed a congressman on China, there remained a palpable gap between the moral argument and the strategic reality. If this is merely strategic posturing, that is understandable—China hawks may have a rationale for elevating the Lai case as part of a broader commercial strategy, even without explicitly saying so. Still, it is hard not to detect a limited grasp of the Chinese Communist Party’s perspective in these wider discussions, and a persistent sense that the U.S. simply assumes its moral or economic arguments will carry weight.

Herein lies the tension. The posited approach appears predicated on the belief that human rights leverage can move Beijing, that linking moral pressure to economic incentives could prod a regime obsessed with “stability maintenance.” As a source deeply involved in China policy revealed to me, even at the highest levels of the U.S. government, there is a widespread misreading of how much—and why—the CCP cares about theaters like Hong Kong and Taiwan.

To the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan is a renegade province, a living reminder of China’s unresolved civil war. Beijing officials are not merely resistant to Western pressure on the issue; they are obsessive about Chinese claims on the island. In such a context, it is hard to view moral pressure as a catalyst for change. It might not be what our leaders want to hear, but it’s the truth. 

Even when Smith tried to conceive of how releasing Lai could be good for both major world powers—asking “What does Xi Jinping get out of this?”—it appeared that his purported reading of Chinese inclinations is, at best, optimistic. To be fair to Smith, again, there might be a difference in the message and the assessment. 

But Beijing can—and likely will—continue to deny and delay the Lai case, while advancing its own narrative that the billionaire was a foreign asset acting against the interests of the Chinese state. In an era of great-power competition, why would China yield to economic pressure over such a prisoner? And why has there not been more discussion of a conventional prisoner swap?

For all the rhetorical flourish, a closer look suggests there is little reason to believe that tying trade to human rights fundamentally shifts Beijing’s calculus. With most other levers constrained, human-rights diplomacy remains the least reliable tool for driving real change—noble in intent, but limited in effect. Principles matter, but realpolitik cannot be ignored: Washington has only a narrow set of tools at its disposal, and none seem capable of producing the kind of transformation that the human rights advocates imagine.

The deeper issue is not simply the direction of U.S. policy, but the assumptions that underlie it. To compete effectively with China—and to remain the most important actor in world affairs—American leaders must strive to read Beijing as clearly and carefully as possible.

Henry Kissinger was once dismissed as naive, even apologetic, for insisting on understanding Moscow on its own terms. Yet that effort at comprehension remains the essence of strategic seriousness. The same is true today: Seeking to understand China does not make one weak, it makes one a realist. America’s most costly errors have come not from weakness of will, but from gaps in understanding. Whatever course our government chooses, it should be guided by a clear reading of Beijing’s calculus—not by parallels to historical apartheid, but by the hard facts of great-power competition today.

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