“Women’s rights are human rights”

Bill Clinton’s White House didn’t want Hillary Clinton to attend the Fourth World Conference on Women, held by the United Nations in Beijing in 1995. The Clinton administration was struggling to normalize relations with China, which had been all but severed since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. They feared that the first lady would lecture China’s hyper-sensitive government officials on their treatment of women, upsetting the slow effort to rebuild US-China ties.

But Hillary Clinton did go to Beijing, and she gave a speech that shocked both her Chinese hosts and her husband’s administration in its searing indictment of how China and other governments around the world treat women.
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