IBEGIN FROM THE UNCONTROVERSIAL fact that prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese had no word that we can translate as “rights.”

There were, to be sure, concepts whose meanings partially over­lapped with the meaning of rights. There were ideas and institutions whose roles might be argued to have served functions similar to those served by rights.

Suppose that instead of assuming that “quanli” meant rights, we ask what the word would mean to an audience of educated Chinese in the nineteenth century who did not benefit from special glosses or explana­tions. They probably would take it to mean what the characters had been used to mean for 2000 and more years: power and benefit.¹ To say that “one ought to enjoy quanli” then, would just mean that one ought to enjoy powers and benefits. What would our hypothetical audience make of this notion? The more thought we give to this question, the more ques­tions we realize must be answered before we can be sure of any assess­ment. After all, what powers and what benefits are we talking about? Must anything have been done to make the recipients merit the rewards? Does it make a difference who the people are - what roles they play in society?

One obvious source of answers to these questions on which our audi­ence could draw is Confucianism. The point of this thought experiment, in fact, is simply to motivate an examination of what the Confucian tra­dition has had to say about what powers and benefits we should enjoy, and why. This is important because, as I will argue in later chapters, to a ^[53] great extent I think that early users of “quanli” did mean something pretty close to what our audience from the previous paragraph would have assumed, and the theory and practical wisdom about quan and li on which the early users drew was largely Confucian.

Much of the discussion will focus on desires rather than on quan and li, because Confucian analysis tended to center on our motivations and characters rather than on our specific goals. Instead of asking which, among the many objects of our desires, should be fulfilled, Confucians ask which types of desires (if any) we should have. Answers to this ques­tion are varied because Confucianism has been, throughout its long history, a live and contested philosophical tradition. In fact, I will show that questions about desires are among the most troubling ones to neo­Confucian philosophers - that is, to those individuals who contributed to the revival of Confucian philosophy from the beginning of the Song dynasty (960-1279) on into the modern era.^[54]

This chapter is divided into two sections. I begin with early neo­Confucianism. Here we will see a doctrine advocating “no desires” which - whatever its merits - was easily used by power-holders to call for the suppression of people’s desires. Then I will turn to representatives of the strand within the Confucian tradition that valorized desires, stressing desires’ fundamental place in any satisfactory account of human moral psychology. These thinkers were critics of the earlier neo-Confucians, as well as of contemporaries who continued to advocate theses unfriendly to desires.We will see in the next two chapters that nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century advocates of quanli share important convictions with, and in some cases draw explicitly on, these pro-desire Confucians. They are thus an important source of what I am calling Chinese rights dis­course. Recognizing that the discourse has roots this deep in Chinese tra­ditions will help us, in later chapters, to assess claims about distinctive Chinese concepts of rights.