Angle Stephen C.. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry. Cambridge University Press,2002. � 304 p.. 2002

China poses great challenges to human rights in theory and practice. In practice, China is considered, by the measure of most Western countries, to have a patchy record of protecting individuals� human rights. In the theoretical realm, Chinese intellectuals and government officials have challenged the idea that the term �human rights� can be universally understood in one single way and have often opposed attempts by Western countries to impose international standards on Asian countries. What should we make of these challenges - and of claims by members of other groups to have moralities of their own? Human Rights and Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to these questions in the first study of its kind. Stephen C. Angle integrates a full account of the devel�opment of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, although neglected, origins of that discourse in seventeenth- and eigh�teenth-century Confucianism - with philosophical considerations of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. Drawing on Western thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Allan Gibbard, and Robert Brandom, Angle elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics. His conclusion is not that we should ignore one another, though. Despite our differences, Angle argues that cross-cultural moral engagement is legitimate and even morally required. International moral dialogue is a dynamic and complex process, and we all have good reasons for continuing to work toward bridging our differences. Stephen C. Angle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan Uni�versity. He is the co-editor and co-translator of The Chinese Human Rights Reader (2001) and has published articles in The Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy East and West, and The Journal of Chinese Philosophy.

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

IN JUNE OF 1993, His Excellency Mr. Liu Huaqiu, head of the Chinese delegation, made the following statement in the course of his remarks to the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna:

1.1 RECENT HISTORY

1.2 CURRENT APPROACHES: INSIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS

1.3 THIS BOOK

Languages, Concepts, and Pluralism

WHAT EXACTLY DOES IT MEAN to say that speakers of one language have a different concept of rights than speakers of another?