Human Rights, Environment Likely Focuses of Mayoral China Trip

Mayor Bloomberg is planning to talk about human rights and the environment during a trip to China next week, but he said he does not intend to lecture anyone or tell Chinese officials that "the American way is the only way."

If he did not raise his concerns about press freedoms and human rights, he would be derelict in his duty as mayor, he told reporters yesterday.

"I think there are some opportunities to do it privately that probably would be more effective at getting the message across of what America thinks and what New Yorkers think is appropriate," he said. "It is up to other countries to take those things and incorporate it, change it, or do what they had been doing."

Mr. Bloomberg is visiting China next week before flying to the island of Bali in Indonesia for a United Nations conference on climate change.

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, Stuart Loeser, said in an e-mail message that the mayor plans on meeting with American diplomats in China, as he has done on other foreign trips as mayor, but his schedule abroad has not yet been finalized.

The press director at Human Rights Watch and the editor of a forthcoming book about China and the Olympics , Minky Worden, urged Mr. Bloomberg to raise concerns about human rights in public and in private during his trip.

"When people are asking Mr. Bloomberg to take up human rights issues, they are asking him to do nothing more than to press the Chinese government to fulfill their own promises," she said. "It is certainly not helpful to ignore a situation that is actually getting more repressive and not less."

Mr. Bloomberg said he is embarking on the trip because New York is home to roughly 500,000 people of Chinese descent, and as a center of trade and finance, China is important to New Yorkers.

He also appears to be preparing to speak about the city's environmental initiatives, noting yesterday that there is interest in China in New York's approach to the environment.

"After all, the Olympics are coming there, and as you know, China, as a bustling developing economy, has some real environmental concerns," he said. "The one thing I am not going to do is to lecture anybody on what I think they should do. It's tough enough for us to take care of ourselves."