Defending dissent

If Trump claims to put American values first, he should urge China to free ailing journalist.

The question of dissent and its relationship to patriotism has been much in the news lately. Some have argued that too much criticism can mean you don’t love your country and perhaps ought to leave it.

The danger in that message was made clear Tuesday when a relatively unknown blogger on the other side of the world was sentenced to 12 years in prison. That sentence and the story behind it has become a lesson for anyone asking what official hostility to dissent looks like in a nation without the civil liberties Americans too often take for granted.

China, which has long equated dissent with disloyalty, quietly announced the sentencing of dissident Huang Qi. Given his poor health, supporters say he’s not likely to live long enough to get out unless he wins a pardon.

Most Houstonians probably haven’t heard of Huang. He’s hardly the household name some of China’s most prominent pro-democracy reformers have been in the past. He’s certainly never won a Nobel Peace Prize, as did activist Liu Xiaobo, who died under guard two years ago for campaigning against Communist one-party rule.

For much of the past 20 years — when he’s been free of arrest or detention — he’s been ferreting out low-level wrongdoing — the kind that, when left unchecked, can ruin residents’ lives. So good was he early on that Beijing initially embraced him as a welcome aid in the capital’s war on local malfeasance.

But patience eventually ran thin. Huang has already served two sentences totaling eight years for charges related to acquiring or publishing information that was central to his public corruption investigations. In 2005, he was the first person to be convicted under China’s new internet criminal code, according to the BBC. He served a second sentence for “illegally holding state secrets” and was released in 2011.

Human Rights Watch reviewed the case and concluded the charges stemmed from Huang’s investigation into shoddy construction of schools that collapsed during an earthquake.

Three years ago he was arrested again for refusing to stop his mission of exposing municipal skulduggery of a type that any city might harbor.

“It’s such a terrible case,” Sophie Richardson, director of the China program for Human Rights Watch, told the editorial board, adding that too many activists have been allowed to die in prison or under guard by security officials.

“Qi was doing precisely the kind of work you would expect governments to welcome with open arms,” she said. “His focus was on cleaning up local government in his province.”

That kind of journalism is rare, especially in China.

It’s not clear how involved Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in Huang’s case. Many human rights activists are demanding Xi grant Huang a pardon. (On Twitter, look for #HuangQi.)

We join that call, but given the way Xi, now China’s president for life, has consolidated his own power and squashed voices opposing him, a pardon seems unlikely.

For Americans, the lesson in Huang’s troubled fate is that settling arbitrary limits on any dissent protected by the First Amendment is dangerous. Attacking critics of the government is a slippery slope. Branding them unpatriotic haters of the country they’re most likely trying to improve defeats the whole purpose of free speech. Dissent should not only be permitted, but welcomed.

There’s a second lesson, too, and it has to do with America’s increasingly tense relationship with China. In his 2017 inaugural address, President Donald Trump promised the world that from now on, every decision would be filtered through an America First prism.

That approach has been the centerpiece of Trump’s continuing war over tariffs with China. Just Wednesday, he announced the U.S. will add a new 10 percent tariff on imports from China worth $300 billion.

We’ve spilled a lot of ink arguing why the trade war is bad for America’s interests long term. But Trump is right about China to another extent. Its behavior — from the theft of intellectual property to its aggression in international waters to its treatment of dissidents — deserves a rebuke from the U.S.

So far though, America has been speaking as if through a muzzle. America’s economic heft is a big source of its influence around the world. But its long support for human rights is even more powerful. Leaving human rights out of the discussion, America is fighting a war with one hand tied behind its back.

America and its president should speak up for the rights of dissidents. Trump should demand Huang’s release. And as he champions free speech abroad, he should model his respect for it here at home.