Chinese Human Rights U.S. views of China in Human Rights is rooted in Orientalism.
Shih 3 (political science professor in Taiwan, National Chair Professor of the Republic of China, Adjunct professor at National Sun Yat-sen University, Life-time distinguished professor at National Taiwan University, M.P.P. from Harvard University, Ph.D. from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies (the University of Denver), Chih-yu, “Navigating Sovereignty World Politics Lost in China” Pgs. 27, 2003)//DD (JC)
Since historically China was not understood as a territorial state, students of China who treat it as a piece of sovereign territory and claim knowledge of China cannot be exempted from Orientalism. All of us use “China” in our daily language even though some of us are consciously aware of the problem of the term.6 Nowadays, the spatial dimension has dominated the temporal dimension when speaking of China. This is especially true in foreign policy analysis because the term “foreign” presupposes territorial limitation of China. What ostensibly exists inside of territorial China accordingly attracts more attention than how celestial China has become territorial China. This quest for an objective China typically examines China in terms of its distance from the model of liberal state, hence the operation and existence of civil society is critical to all political analysis.7 The concern for civil society in China culminates once a year in the U.S. human rights report, which painstakingly details cases involving violations in China. Stories of violations such as slaughter of female babies, jailing of dissidents, and suppression of religious freedom, and so on, easily take up front pages. All this portrayal of lacking civility carries with it a referential power that determines the location and the angle from which one approaches China as a territorial state.