Song & Silence

My director read this draft, smiled pityingly, and gave me back a heavily marked version. I wove those shreds into a new press release, which she sent to more people in the organization, who tore it to shreds again. The debates raged within HRW for two weeks. Finally we reached agreement and drafted a public letter to Yahoo!, which gained some press coverage.

But this in turn was just one step in a much longer campaign on the role of US corporations in Chinese Internet censorship which came to include press releases, advocacy meetings, op-eds, and a year after I left HRW, a full-length report.

This campaign in itself could have been a full-time job. But while we were working on Yahoo!, the world kept turning. Chinese activists were imprisoned, prisoners released, protests squashed, lawyers beaten, scandals covered up and uncovered. As China researcher, my job was to stay on top of all of it—by monitoring Chinese-language news and developing a network of sources. I also had to learn enough about international law and the organization’s mandate to be able to answer the question, “What should HRW do about this?” Occasionally the answer was another press release; more often we waited and collected more information, or raised the issue behind the scenes.

This steady barrage of crises requires a researcher to do constant triage: juggling emails, phone calls, and people at the door while keeping a long-term strategy in mind. The hectic pace can be tiring, but it can also be exciting. Meanwhile, and this was the second key difference from academic life, I was learning to work as part of a team.

Working as a Team

A junior academic aims to establish her individual prestige, while a human rights worker builds the power of the organization. An academic speaks of how “I” published an article or invented a new theoretical paradigm, but, I learned, a human rights researcher talks in the first person plural: “we published a report,” “we ran a successful campaign.”

This is because HRW and similar groups are made up of dozens of experts—on countries and issues—as well as professional advocates. (Advocacy is the art of persuading global political leaders to take action. Just publishing a report accomplishes little if you don’t also knock on the doors of power holders, hand them the damning evidence and request specific actions.) Several of these internal experts have input into every word the organization publishes, meaning a report that took three months to write might take another six months to publish. Publishing in a peer-reviewed journal was a walk in the park by comparison.

Everything is collaborative. On a good day, this interdisciplinary approach meant that my China research benefited from experts who had worked on the same issues in South Africa, Kazakhstan or California. On a bad day, debates got heated—most human rights workers are lawyers who don’t back down from an argument. But even those fights can lead to smarter strategic decisions. Fortunately, unlike some simmering academic feuds, human rights debates seemed to flare up and die down quickly.

But I found the most challenging difference between human rights work and academia when I planned my first project, on discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS in China.

Strategic Research Reports

Instead of soaking up observations and gluing them together with high theory, I now had to learn to design short-term research projects whose parameters were set by international rights law and whose scope was national, not local. Human rights reports can be used to force dictators from power or press criminal charges, so I had to become a positivist, meeting strict standards of evidence.

However, foreign human rights groups are forbidden to do research in China. Openly working with anyone could lead to their imprisonment. The country where I had studied and worked for years had suddenly become hostile to my presence. I struggled to get even a handful of the dozens of interviews needed to corroborate facts. Still, despite the severe risk to them, quite a few Chinese activists seemed eager to have contact with foreign human rights groups.

Some China experts warned us that because HRW took a critical stance, condemning state abuses, the government would ignore us. Certainly, most Chinese officials refused to meet openly with us. But a few told us privately which human rights issues forward-thinking officials were concerned about which informed our team’s strategy. While the Chinese government publicly condemned our reports, behind the scenes, some officials were using the same reports to do internal lobbying.
HRW’s first report on discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS in China came out in 2003. It included interviews with young men who had been turned away from hospitals and denied treatment because they were HIV-positive. I probably won’t ever forget the voices or the despair of those teenagers.

The report came out just as the UN and international officials began to call on China to confront AIDS, and so it got global media coverage which leveraged our position in advocacy meetings. As HRW traveled to meet with UN, EU, and US officials, giving them the report and urging them to raise the issue in China, we found them receptive. Global pressure grew, while Chinese activists also pushed from inside.

Soon there were some changes. In fall of 2003, for the first time, China’s premier publicly called on the country to fight AIDS. China began to offer access to treatment to some people with AIDS. A few provinces passed policies prohibiting hospitals from refusing care to people with AIDS. We’ll never know how heavily the HRW report weighed in these changes; but that’s also the nature of teamwork.

Shifting from academe to human rights work is challenging, and it is probably not for everyone. It was a good fit for me personally; in fact, I am now starting my own organization, Asia Catalyst, to support local human rights groups in Asia. Over time, I’ve become resigned to the fact that I’ll probably never unpack those boxes.