3.4 MULTIPLE STRATEGIES AND DIVIDED COMMUNITIES

At the heart of my understanding of concepts and norms is the idea that people can have different commitments, and even mean different things, without ceasing to be able to communicate nor ceasing to be parts of larger communities.

One more introductory remark: Divisions within the communities we will examine are often not as severe as one might expect. When we look at the views of Chinese activists from the 1978-9 Democracy Wall movement, for instance, we will find substantial overlap with the norms expressed by the Communist Party leadership. The activists endorsed the leadership’s “Four Modernization” aims, desiring only to add a fifth - democratization.

Turning now to my two main questions, I think it is clear that there are significant similarities between the multiple-strategies case and the divided-community case. The former imagines that a certain “us” will simultaneously adopt more than one attitude toward a particular “them.” The latter supposes that we (or they) will be internally divided, and so will have different reactions to a single strategy: Some may find a certain demand repressive, others tolerate it, and still others simply endorse it. But this is structurally similar to the multiple-strategy case, since in that instance we are considering making multiple simultaneous demands, for instance a set of three, one of which they might find repressive, one they might tolerate, and the third they might endorse.

Some combinations raise few if any complications. Accommodation and one or more varieties of engagement, for instance, go naturally together. The accommodation serves as a provisional bridge across the differences in moralities, possibly thought of as a set of thin values to which all can commit and in accord with which all can interact. Much of what passes across this bridge can be seen as non-discursive engagement: We inevitably influence one another when we cooperate on business deals, travel in one another’s lands and learn about our respective cul­tures, and so on.

Internal criticism deserves some separate discussion, in part because it is unlikely to be undertaken by many of “us” at a time. By “internal criticism,” recall, I mean our working inside their morality, based on meeting their standards for normative competence - all this without essential reference to how any of the claims we make within their moral­ity might relate to those we make in our own voices back at home. Trav­elers, expatriates, and scholars are perhaps the most likely to be able and willing to engage in such criticism. Because of the relative isolation of such people within their own communities, it is particularly easy to imagine other members of their larger community simultaneously pur­suing other strategies, including those incompatible with accommoda­tion, like repression or parochialism. Another obvious possibility is that the rest of the internal critics’ own community might be more or less happily isolated from the foreigners.

One of the options that divided communities and multiple strategies make possible is something I will call horizontal engagement between sub-communities. If we imagine all the different sub-groups of a nation­sized community piled on top of one another, facing a similar pile that corresponds to another nation, some of the individual groups may have bonds with groups horizontally across from them - in the other nation - that are as strong as or stronger than the vertical ties they have to others in their nation.^[52] Perhaps Chinese feminists share a great deal with American feminists; they may have commitments in common that others in their nations do not share.

There is no reason to assume, of course, that all the pressures that these horizontal ties bring to bear on moral discussions within their home soci­eties will push in the same direction. The question of whether the United States should grant China most-favored-nation trade status was vexed for at least two decades, with no firm consensus, and with different groups

- influenced, no doubt, by the views of their analogues in China - pushing in different directions. My account does not enable me to confidently predict that overlapping horizontal engagement will lead every time to a satisfying consensus. It does seem to be one of our best hopes, though. It turns one of the most troubling obstacles to cross-cultural communi­cation and engagement - namely, internal contestation and complexity

- into a virtue. Whether it will help us forward in a particular case cannot be known in advance. Instead of dwelling further on this matter, I turn now to Chinese rights discourse itself. The next chapters illustrate many of the attitudes I have surveyed here, from initial isolation in the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries, to repression and accommodation in the nineteenth, to increasing engagement in the twentieth. Engagement is not the only strategy relevant to the twentieth and early twenty-first cen­turies, of course; Liu Huaqiu’s argument makes clear that he is concerned about repressive impositions of other standards on China. In my con­cluding chapters, I will return to Liu’s claims and suggest some ways that Sino-Western dialogues on rights can be advanced.