5.5 CONCLUSION

Two of the last three subjects of this chapter - Kang’s focus on individ­uals, and He Qi’s Lockean natural-rights doctrine - suggest that Chinese rights discourse may be moving, at the end of the nineteenth century, closer to what many in the West now take to be the mainstream of inter-

Conclusion

national ideas of human rights.

The idea of assigning rights to individuals certainly does pick up steam in twentieth-century China, though virtually all theorists will continue to maintain that groups have rights as well. Locating rights solely in collectivities, or perhaps more accurately solely in the members of certain collectivities, is nonetheless an idea that does not go away. For related reasons, it will be endorsed by supporters of both of twentieth­century China’s revolutionary political parties, the Nationalists and the Communists.

Conceptual changes thus continue in the new century, but termino­logical development starts to settle down. Yan Fu’s influential 1898 trans­lation into Chinese of Huxley’s account of social Darwinism, Tian Yan Lun, uses “quanli” to translate “rights.”^[145] In a letter Yan wrote to Liang Qichao - on whom see the next chapter - several years later, Yan expressed reservations about “quanli” as an adequate translation for “rights,” and considered a variety of alternatives.^{[146] [147] By 1904,Yan returned to “quanli” in his translation of Edward Jenks’s A History of Politics [Liu 1994d, pp. 20-1]. I will not dwell on the concepts Yan expressed through these different uses of “quanli”; in the next chapter I look instead at two of Yan’s contemporaries who wrote more extensively about quanli7 In their hands we will see important innovations coupled with striking and explicit connections not just to ideas discussed in this chapter, but also to the Confucians we met earlier. Chinese rights discourse is dynamic, while remaining, at least thus far in my story, distinctively Chinese.}