Hillary Clinton recently paid a visit to China, one of the stops on her first diplomatic trip to Asia. This visit has proven to be controversial, due mainly to one specific comment she made. In a nutshell, this comment expressed her feelings that ‘China’s myriad of human rights violations shouldn’t get in the way of working together against climate change and the securities crisis.’ Almost immediately, her words provoked a firestorm of anger from human rights organizations. I can’t say that I’m exactly sure how I feel about her words, and the light this casts on the views of the Obama administration. Since Hillary was in China as a representative of the United States and the Obama administration, I’m going to assume that the general gist of her little speech represented the general views of our executive branch of the government (note that I say in general, not in the absolute). My basic interpretation of what she had to say? ‘China, we need your money, plus, we shipped out a lot of our jobs to you, so, we aren’t going to bother you too much about the continued suppression of your people and the Tibetan people. Plus, we worry more about climate change than silly things like human rights, so, let’s be friends!’ So, I overexaggerated it a little. Many of the news articles I have been reading on the topic have been doing the exact same thing as well. I can’t help but be a little frustrated that the Chinese government is putting on an obvious fa’ccedil;ade, and Clinton is going right along with it. Many articles, for example, mentioned that Hillary met with ‘women’s rights activists.’ What wasn’t mentioned, however, and wasn’t learned without a lot of further digging, is that these women were only from government-approved groups. Wow, how’s that for activism? Several more progressive newspapers noted that well-known Chinese activists were held under careful military house arrest during Clinton’s stay. After Clinton left, Chinese newspapers heralded her visit as a wonderful one, and ‘this type of attitude should be adopted by many other government leaders.’ I do believe in global climate change.’ I have never really been able to understand those who deny it, especially the fact that it’s hurried along by the actions of man. Perhaps one of the points of accidental contention is that it is mistakenly referred to as ‘global warming,’ but that’s a topic for another column. I don’t feel that this threat should be discounted, especially because I am an ecology and animal lover. Still, this brings up an interesting point. What’s more important? Should the U.S. fight for human rights, or work towards a solution to global warming? Is it possible to do both? I have to wonder, if the Obama administration puts more value on economics than human rights, what does this mean for the future of activism in America? Many people feel China would not listen to us about human rights anyway, so we should just put up with it and work with them to create solutions to other pressing matters. I honestly feel this is what Clinton was trying to say. However, the United States might not have the same prestige we once did, but I think we are one of the few countries that could still affect how the Chinese government treats its citizens. We still have a large amount of economic influence, which has proven extremely useful in the past. Instead, we are using this influence to, in a sense, encourage their bad behavior. Why do we do this? Is it our fear of economic loss? Is it our growing sense of entitlements from our government? I don’t really have the answers for any of these questions, but they are worth thinking about. This whole situation also serves to point out how one-sided our media can be today. One can’t get the entire story just by reading from one source, it takes a bit of digging. Watching how our new government relates to those of other countries should prove to be quite interesting.