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:
The concept of human rights is a product of historical development. It is closely associated with specific social, political, and economic conditions and the specific history, culture, and values of a particular country.
Different historical development stages have different human rights requirements. Countries at different development stages or with different historical traditions and cultural backgrounds also have different understanding and practice of human rights. Thus, one should not and cannot think of the human rights standard and model of certain countries as the only proper ones and demand all countries to comply with them. [Liu Huaqiu 1995, p. 214]This statement contains two claims: first, that countries can have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human rights concepts different from their own. The principal goal of this book is to assess these two claims.
It is important that we know what to make of these two claims, for reasons that range from the immediate and practical to the broadly theoretical. Assessment of the two claims should influence activists and international lawyers, both within China and without. It should shape the activities of organizations that seek to transcend national boundaries, like the United Nations; if Liu is correct, the hope for global moral consensus expressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may seem naive or even imperialist. Especially since the end of the cold war, China has come to occupy a distinctive place in Western self-identities. Western media pay so much attention to China in part because it is seen as presenting an alternative, or a competitor, to ourselves.[I] Assessing Liu’s claims will thus also tell us something about how to understand ourselves. Are we in the West better, or just different? Or is the matter more complicated than this simple dichotomy admits?
Of course it is more complicated.
I will challenge the very notion that we can talk about “China’s concept” of human rights: In the first place, people rather than countries have concepts; in the second, people often diverge in their uses of concepts, even people who are citizens of a single country. Rather than reject Liu’s ideas out of hand, I will recast his claims in more careful terms. I will ask what concepts are, how they are related to communities, and how we use them to communicate. Instead of a stark choice between “different” and “better,” I will develop a nuanced account of moral pluralism that recognizes the variety of ways in which we can be different from one another, the different perspectives from which we can claim to be better, and the dynamic nature of our moralities. When situated in the concrete context of debates over human rights, these abstract issues take on an immediacy that makes clear their importance not just to philosophers but also to students of cross-cultural issues quite generally.Assessing Liu’s claims will also take me rather deeply into the history of Chinese philosophy. While a common caricature portrays Chinese thought as static, I believe that all philosophical discourses are both non- monolithic and dynamic: People disagree and debate, and things change. This perspective enables me to see how certain strands of the Confucian tradition paved the way for rights discourse in China; throughout its history, in fact, Chinese rights discourse should be understood as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions. Only by looking at key moments in this history can we decide what to make of claims about the distinctiveness of Chinese concepts of human rights.
In the end, I do more than just assess Liu’s twin claims. I am not a disinterested spectator in these matters; none of us are. I seek to act on my conclusions by engaging with contemporary Chinese rights theorists. Human rights discourses both East and West are dynamic and contested processes.
By making more explicit both similarities and differences, and by judging which concepts to embrace based on the best standards I canRecent History
find, I aim to cooperate in the development of a broader, transnational consensus.
Some of these matters, both philosophical and sinological, may seem rather distant from the issue of contemporary human rights practice. I firmly believe in their interconnection and have tried to write a book that makes these relationships clear. Many philosophers have studied little about China; many sinologists have had little contact with philosophy. I have not assumed my audience to be learned in either field, therefore, but have written about philosophy and about China in ways that should be accessible to educated readers who know little about either.
This chapter’s goal is to help orient these various readers in three different ways. I begin with a historical sketch that clarifies the scope of Chinese rights discourse. I then turn to a discussion of themes from recent scholarship related to human rights in China. I am building on what I take to be the strengths of current research by other scholars, and reacting to what I see as the weaknesses; this review thus explains why the book takes the precise shape that it does. The last part of this Introduction summarizes the rest of the book and gives an initial formulation of my conclusions.