The Other Side of Shame: China and the Transformation of Global Human Rights

Human rights scholarship has predominantly focused on naming and shaming as the central mechanism for promoting and enforcing human rights. Far less attention has been given to what we theorize as the "other side of shame": public statements in which one actor assesses another's human rights record not by denouncing violations, but by expressing encouragement for real or alleged improvements and intentions to advance human rights. We argue, first, that the use of this “other side of shame” has increased markedly and, second, that this trend is driven by China. Why does China pursue this strategy, and how effective is it? We contend that China promotes its distinct human rights vision through specific procedural and substantive norms: procedurally, fostering non-confrontational engagement; substantively, advancing the idea of development as a human right. Using data from the Universal Periodic Review, we test this argument with a new dataset on China's human rights diplomacy. Modeling Chinese recommendation behavior through two-way fixed effects regressions and exploiting random variation, we find that China actively shapes emerging global human rights norms, significantly influencing other states.