U.S. and Chinese diplomats will meet in Beijing Wednesday to discuss human rights, following a notably terse and last-minute State Department announcement Thursday. The meeting is part of a now-annual routine: The State Department issues a report on the human rights situation in China, China answers with its own indictments of the United States, and diplomats meet in the spring to discuss.

Human rights were never intended to be a routine, and the perpetuation of this practice threatens the power of the idea. By manipulating human rights as a political tool without ensuring their fulfillment at home, the United States risks devaluing the language of human rights and damaging American reputation abroad.

The U.S. and Chinese governments have vastly different views on what human rights are, and this is largely a hangover from Cold War thinking. The Cold War began in 1948, as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was finished. As the world lined up on ideological sides, the list of human rights got split into two – social and economic rights, such as welfare guarantees and employment schemes, landed on the Soviet side, and Americans lined up behind civil and political rights. Each side postured about how the other failed, using the doctrine as a political weapon. But the wall fell and should have freed a new generation of thinkers of the sharp ideological separations that led to a never-intended separation of human rights.

This perceived conflict between civil-political and socioeconomic human rights is one of the most contentious issues in the philosophical and legal literature on human rights. It amounts to an intellectual hangover from four decades of split ideology, and there are blatantly clear arguments to resolve it.

Essentially, human rights depend upon each other, and the fulfillment of the whole list suffers when any of the rights are denied. Take the right to free expression as an example. Without some basic education, it is worthless – the speaker has nothing critical to say. In the other direction, civil and political rights ensure that economic and social guarantees function as they’re intended – Chinese reforms that actually led to calamitous famine in the Great Leap Forward wouldn’t have happened if those who were starving could have spoken up and challenged ill-formed government plans.

Neither the United States nor China has a great human rights record. Severe poverty persists in the wealthiest nation on earth, and our educational and health care systems are an embarrassment. This is a human rights issue on par with suppressing speech or arbitrary arrests, if the argument sketched above goes through.

The recent disappearances and arrests of political figures such as Ai Weiwei raise grave concern about human rights in China, and the continued detention of Nobel Prize laureate Lu Xiaobo is simply ridiculous. These abuses are more of an affront to the American mindset that puts civil and political rights above all others, but this mindset is inappropriate from a human rights perspective that is appropriately holistic.

Human rights have the power to be a transformative idea, and governments that wield it to condemn political rivals like China or justify military intervention must take up the impetus to secure social and economic rights for all of their citizens to be consistent.

A major component of the practical power of human rights lies in naming and shaming, and meeting in Beijing to raise concerns about the recently deteriorating human rights climate in China is needed. But for these meetings to have true effect, both sides must make a better effort to own up to the human rights treaties they have signed.

Scott Collison is a senior philosophy and physics major. His column appears every Wednesday, and he can be reached at smcollis@syr.edu