Conclusions

THIS BOOK HAS REVOLVED around two questions: whether

China can be said to have its own concept of rights, and whether countries with their own concepts of rights are immune from criticism phrased in terms of foreign rights concepts.

The grounds for these conclusions and the scope of their appeal vary from one to another. For instance, consider the following two proposi­tions: (1) We should conclude that China has a rich and distinctive rights discourse.

I also hope that most or all of my readers join me in affirming propo­sition (2), but I do so on slightly different grounds. Unlike the first claim, which appeals to all people in the same way, this second claim appeals to members of two different communities, and might do so on different grounds for each. In fact more than two communities are embraced by this second “we”: This is a proposition that I put forward for inspection and endorsement by all parties concerned with Chinese human rights theory and practice. Unlike the case with (1), endorsement of (2) may arise from a variety of perspectives, for a variety of reasons. As I made clear in the Introduction, I am not arguing that universal Reason demands that we seek consensus; if it makes sense to each of us to tol­erate, accommodate, and engage with one another, it must make sense on the basis of our own values. These values, of course, are not immutable - the very processes of accommodation and engagement under discus­sion may lead us to change our values in small or large ways.

The perspective I offer here on who “we” are and whether “we” will endorse all my conclusions rests ultimately on my commitment to taking seriously the claims of people who are not obviously parts of my com­munity. Taking their claims seriously does not mean acceding to them if they are wrong, but it does mean making room for their commitments in my understanding of how we can communicate, and perhaps even reason, with one another. The burden of Chapters 2 and 3 was to provide such an understanding, which can be summarized as three philosophical theses: concepts are inferentially articulated commitments; pluralism emerges from varying degrees of conceptual distance; and the conse­quence of pluralism is a menu of strategies one might find it sensible to adopt toward others, depending on one’s values and one’s situation.

It is crucial to see that I am not arguing for linguistic determinism, as that has been traditionally understood. Language use is a good window on the commitments our practices institute, but language itself is never determinative. My “pluralism” is about what is possible, and perhaps even likely, given our contingently different histories, but it is in no way necessary. Indeed, I have suggested that we may all have reasons to want to overcome pluralism, at least in many areas of our life. (In other areas, pluralism may enhance our lives without appreciable cost.) Let us also keep in mind that I have, for all practical purposes, rejected the utility of thinking of others’ languages or values as “incommensurable” with our own.

Among the strategies with which I have suggested one might respond to pluralism, parochialism is a particularly important instance.

In the middle chapters of the book, I have established at least four large theses, each related in part to Liu’s claim about Chinese distinc­tiveness. First, I have argued that one strand of the neo-Confucian tra­dition played a constructive role in the development of Chinese rights discourse. This argument spanned three chapters, as we looked first at the neo-Confucians themselves, then at ways in which their concerns played into the nineteenth-century origins of rights discourse - not least in Japan - and finally at the degree to which important thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth century picked up these same themes as they developed their ideas about rights.

The second and third theses that I have in mind are as much method­ological as they are historical: Historical traditions like that under study here are contingent, dynamic, and often interrelated with other such tra­ditions; and we should interpret these traditions from the inside, adopt­ing what Cohen calls a “China-centered” approach. I suggested in the book’s Introduction that a failure to adequately recognize the dynamism and interrelations of traditions was a problem with Alasdair MacIntyre’s theoretical account of these matters; a strength of my account, I believe, is the way in which its understanding of traditions and its detailed his­torical studies of such a tradition mutually support one another. The aspect of “China-centered” history which I have emphasized is analyz­ing Chinese concepts in their home contexts, though without being blind to the ways in which they have been related to, or even derived from, interpretations of foreign texts and terms. This approach has of course been supported at numerous points by my more theoretical contentions about the natures of concepts and of moral pluralism.

My final historical argument concerns the distinctiveness of Chinese rights discourse. I believe that this study conclusively proves that China has been the site of a robust and distinctive discourse about rights. One of the best and most recent bits of evidence for this is the way in which recent Chinese rights theorists, as we saw in the previous chapter, have analyzed the word “quanli” into its constituent parts and discussed rights in those terms. I have nonetheless been careful to say “distinctive” rather than “unique”: As we should expect from what I just said about the interrelations among traditions, Chinese rights discourse has never been hermetically sealed off from other developing traditions of rights discourse.

As I have already suggested, answers to this question must be under­stood slightly differently than the various theses that I have rehearsed up until this point. The difference is not that answers to this latest ques­tion depend on shared norms while the earlier claims do not: The philo­sophical and historical claims do depend on commitments to what counts as good evidence and good argument. The difference is that I am more confident that my readers share with me standards of argument and evidence than I am that (all) readers will share my moral commitments. For some readers, therefore, the normative conclusions to which I now turn will simply be articulations of that to which they are also commit­ted, while others may see some of these conclusions as challenging assertions.

On several general points I believe there should be widespread agree- ment.Where grounds for engagement exist, as they surely seem to in this case, we should pursue engagement vigorously - and we should do so on as many simultaneous horizontal planes as possible. As I argued earlier, horizontal engagement between members of sub-groups will often offer the best opportunities for mutual granting of normative competence and for mutual learning. If one is a Chinese politician, then a fellow politi­cian from Sweden, say, may be best suited for conveying the concepts, constraints, and commitments that characterize the larger (internally contested) moral arena in Sweden. This is because the Swedish politician will share more with his or her Chinese counterpart than would a Swedish stockbroker, and because the Swedish politician must, at the same time, remain engaged with others in his or her home community - the dimension I have called vertical engagement.

Add to this my claim that the logic of engagement pushes toward con­sensus, and one can see the appeal of overlapping horizontal engage­ments. Engagement pushes toward - but does not guarantee - consensus, since full-fledged engagement depends on granting each other norma­tive competence. We each expect the other to feel the pull of the sorts of reasons we find compelling. As I think through your reasons and you think through mine, each (ideally) with an open mind, I am likely to be swayed by your good reasons and you by mine: Remember that if we have granted each other normative competence, that means that we reason about values in the same way, and thus that we should find the same sorts of reasons “good.” Since I have made no claims about there being a single moral truth to which all who reason in the same terms must converge - perhaps these things are underdetermined by the avail­able reasons - I cannot claim that engagement will inevitably lead to con­sensus. Still, the pressures it exerts seem likely to push in that direction. Engagement helps us toward consensus in a second sense, as well: It nudges us toward ever richer or thicker consensus. I argued earlier that a thin consensus, based on thin values, can be unstable, and thus that we have reason to seek a more sustainable agreement.^[240]

Another idea with which all may agree is that the distinction between thick and thin values may often be a useful tool, but it is not a panacea. There may be universal agreement that corruption is a bad thing, but international attempts to do something about it may still founder on the variety of distinctive interpretations to which “corruption” is open in dif­ferent communities. The thin version of corruption on which all agree may still be enough to ground some practical measures, or at least - as discussed in the Introduction - to encourage local activists to pursue implementation of their own laws against corruption. Thin values also come very close to what I called in Chapter 3 “norms of accommoda­tion,” and their importance in this guise cannot be neglected. Norms of accommodation are values in accord with which groups agree to inter­act, even though both sides feel internally that the accommodative norms are inferior to their own values. Engagement is all very well, but it promises no immediate or even long-term results, so accommodations will continue to be very important.

A final general observation before turning to more specific normative claims: We cannot neglect the roles that power and politics play in shaping discussions of values. It is regrettable but inevitable that con­siderations of power influence what people say and do not say. The idea that such matters may shape our decisions is implicit in the framework I developed in Chapter 3:We base our judgments of what stance to adopt toward others, I said, in part on the costs entailed by the various alter­natives. Sometimes these costs will keep us quiet: If I stand to be harmed for speaking out, I may keep quiet; in other cases, I may want to speak but have no means to communicate widely. In still other cases the costs push us to speak or act, despite scruples we may feel, such as if we make repressive or even parochial demands in an effort to keep a powerless sub-group from suffering still greater wrongs. This last case is compli­cated by the difference that may exist between the sub-group’s norms and those of their oppressors: The former may welcome our interven­tion, while the latter find it repressive. This can help us to justify our actions to ourselves, but does not wholly dispense with their repressive nature. Pressuring the Chinese government on behalf of dissident intel­lectuals in China may sometimes fall into this category.

Most of the conclusions one can reach about how to react to the influ­ence of power upon value discourse must be highly contextual and care­fully balanced. There is at least one general thing we can say, though, which is that most of us will have good reasons to resist any attempts to monopolize a discussion, to cut off engagement, or to end efforts to establish dialogue. Given that moral traditions are dynamic and their dif­ferences merely contingent, we all have reasons to engage with others in the hope that they will come to think more like us, or that we will see reasons to become more like them - or both.

This is of course a very abstract consideration, unlikely to sway an unreflective dictator. In this context it would be well to note that the idea of dialogue over human rights has come under some criticism in recent years by non-governmental organizations like Human Rights in China (HRIC). They worry that dialogue will “displace other methods, includ­ing multilateral action at the UN and public censure” [HRIC 1997].They point out that the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has recently welcomed “dialogue” while rejecting “confrontation,” but the activities by members of the international community that have led to improvements in human rights conditions in China have almost exclu­sively been those which the Chinese government labels as confronta­tional. HRIC suggests a range of criteria for implementing successful dialogues, and concludes that “dialogue without pressure is nothing but appeasement and will merely serve to degrade the authority of interna­tional human rights standards” [ibid.].

I find myself largely in agreement with HRIC on how government-to- government dialogues should be conducted, and join them in rejecting the way that the PRC government has distinguished “dialogue” from “confrontation.” Frank criticism is an appropriate part of dialogical engagement with one another, so long as both sides are open to such dis­cussions. To their credit, HRIC recognizes that all governments “engag­ing in dialogue should be prepared to discuss their own human rights records”; in my terms, this is a necessary precondition for granting nor­mative competence to one’s dialogue partner, without which engage­ment cannot proceed. We must not resist discussion of our own shortcomings if we ask others to discuss theirs. This is a lesson the U.S. government would do well to heed carefully: Its refusal to take seriously Chinese criticisms of the U.S. human rights record does little to promote the kind of dialogue here envisioned.

It only remains to add that the dialogues described by HRIC are far from the only form of dialogue that should be encouraged. Horizontal engagement should be pursued wherever possible. Opportunities for engagement increase every day as global interconnections increase and communication technologies improve. In each context, we should value the respect that grounds toleration, and thus we should seek an accom­modation of our differences in a spirit of toleration. I argued earlier that Gibbard is wrong to assert that the endorsement of mutual respect is something intrinsic to normative discussion or to our shared human natures. Be this as it may, I do value such respect, and believe that others should as well. We should all value it because it makes for better com­munication and engagement, and because valuing treating others in ways they find legitimate manifests a kind of empathy with others which is itself valuable. Too often those of us in a position to influence public views about other nations - including scholars, the media, and authori­ties in both the United States and China - demonize or harangue rather than working toward open, balanced understandings and criticisms. The power of the market to shape our media, no less than the power of polit­ical leaders, needs to be carefully watched if we are to work toward a real accommodation, and perhaps ultimately consensus.

Now consider the provisional outcomes of the detailed engagement which I undertook in the preceding chapter. Several features of that dis­cussion bear highlighting. First, it is evident that I thought it appropriate to grant normative competence to contemporary Chinese rights theo­rists, academics and activists alike. It seemed to me that the kinds of reasoning in which they engage are perfectly accessible to us. I also pro­ceeded as if they would grant competence to me and to the thinkers on whom I drew. This is up to them, of course, and in practice will have to wait on the publication of that chapter, or this whole book, preferably in Chinese.^[241] My reasons for believing that they will take seriously my ques­tions and my arguments are several: (1) I take pains to draw on aspects of Western rights discourse that mesh particularly well with Chinese con­cepts; (2) I endeavor to demonstrate the potential for mutually fruitful dialogue, and emphasize my (our) openness to genuine two-way engage­ment, by stressing an area in which Western theory may stand to learn something from its Chinese counterpart; (3) it seems to me that the kinds of reasons to which I appeal are similar to the kinds of reasons on which they rest their own positions.

As I made clear in the previous chapter, my primary goals were to illustrate the possibility and potential fruitfulness of an open dialogue about rights. I consider the specific theses at which I arrived to be begin­nings, rather than conclusions, of arguments. Thoughtful engagement between Western and Chinese thinkers, comparatively common seventy years ago, is only just beginning to be revived. As I have emphasized, this engagement needs to take place alongside as many other levels of engagement as possible, and all of us who are engaging all of them also need to talk among ourselves and reflect on the various and tentative conclusions to which we come. I endorse Liu Huaqiu’s pluralism, though perhaps not in a way he would wholly recognize, but I reject his isola­tionism. It is certainly true that there is no abstract vantage point from which one can “think of the human rights standard and model of certain countries as the only proper ones and demand all countries to comply with them.” It does not follow, however, that I cannot ask of you to comply with my values - or else to convince me why you should not. Rather than giving us reason to end discussion, our differences with the Chinese should serve as a challenge to all of us to work toward a posi­tion of agreement superior - as judged from each of our perspectives - to where any of us stands now.