IT IS OFTEN DIFFICULT to identify beginnings.

Ask when rights discourse began in Europe, and you can receive answers that differ by centuries, depending on which stage of the ongoing evolution of concepts and practices related to “rights” - and to its correlates and predecessors in a half-dozen languages - one counts as the beginning.

In addition, I need to be very careful when I say that the discussions initiated by these texts are about rights. Since my discussion of these matters will depend on some of the conclusions from Chapter 2, let me briefly review the relevant issues. I argued there that conceptual content depends on the inferential commitments we take on when we use lan­guage, and I further contended that the norms governing these infer­ences are instituted by the practices of the groups to which we belong. In other words, what someone means by his or her words depends on what the person and his or her community take to follow from what is said. Since the commitments of each of us differ in large or small ways from those of anyone else, our meanings will differ from one another. We regularly take one another to be talking about the same things, though, and seek to hold others to the propriety of certain infer­ences. If I say that autumn directly follows spring, it would be appropri­ate for you to correct me; if I insist, then you will conclude that I mean something different by “autumn” (or perhaps “spring,” or even both) than you do.

With this in mind, we can see that comparison of concepts across cul­tures will rarely be an all-or-nothing affair. Starting from the premise that there is no concept of rights in pre-nineteenth-century China, I will be looking for ways in which language comes to be used to express com­mitments similar to those I connect with “rights.” No one in nineteenth­century China uses words that exactly entail what I believe to follow from “rights,” but the same is true even of my contemporaries in the United States today. There is certainly a difference of degree, but more important is the difference of community. My fellow Americans and I take ourselves to be sharing a concept, and thus to be committed to the same norms for its use, even if our disparate commitments mean that some of the things which follow from these norms will differ.¹ When I interpret the language of a nineteenth-century Chinese thinker, on the other hand, I need to look at the commitments that he and his commu­nity will take to follow from what he has said. Some of the time we will find significant overlap with what I take to follow from “rights,” but insofar as the norms guiding his discourse emerge from a context very different from mine, I am on shakier ground saying that he is using a concept of rights than when I say the same thing of someone today.

Let me try to flesh all this out with some examples. A contemporary scholar studying the nineteenth-century Japanese thinker Katb Hiroyuki - who will be an important figure later in this chapter - recognizes the danger of thinking that everyone shares a single stock of concepts. Despite a Confucian education, in the 1870s Kato adopted Western lib­eralism and constitutionalism. The scholar writes that

At first glance, these Western ideas appear incompatible with Con­fucianism.... Yet the liberalism, natural rights, [and] constitution­alism... that Kato adopted cannot be explained satisfactorily as ready made concepts, concepts that he imported from abroad and adopted or discarded as circumstances dictated....

Call this the danger of “ready-made concepts.” Concepts do not fall from the sky - or from Europe - with their meanings already clear; they are what a community makes of them. Even if Katd and his colleagues used a word that we translate as “liberalism,” the meaning of this word must come from the ways in which Katd and his community used it, or more accurately, from the ways in which Kato's community took it to be appro­priately used.

I will try to avoid similar problems with thinking of “rights” as a ready­made concept, both for Chinese thinkers and for Japanese like Katd. This same scholar who rejects ready-made concepts, though, falls prey to a second danger. This comes out most clearly when he seeks to explain why Katd might have construed “liberalism” or “natural rights” differ­ently from the European sources on which he drew. The scholar writes that

When Katd and other mid-century Japanese thinkers translated Western philosophical concepts, they used character-compounds found in Chinese classical texts or else devised neologisms based on classical Chinese diction. In this way, Japanese thinkers might unwit­tingly carry over tacit assumptions and mental associations from the Confucian tradition. Then Japanese conceptions diverged from Western concept. [1984, p. 491]

The problem with this attitude is that it makes Japanese (and Chinese) speakers into passive victims of their language and their tradition. To the contrary, I believe they said what they wanted to say. In Lydia Liu's recent study of what she calls “translingual practice”^[79] in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, she talks of translation from a “guest language” into a “host language” - rather than the more conventional “source lan­guage” and “target language” - in order to stress the active role played by Chinese and Chinese speakers in the processes that she studies.

the translator or some other agent in the host language always ini­tiates the linguistic transaction by inviting, selecting, combining, and reinventing words and texts from the guest language, and, moreover,... the needs of the translator and his/her audience together deter­mine and negotiate the meaning (i.e., usefulness) of the text taken from the guest language. [Lydia Liu 1995, p. 27]

We will see precisely these dynamics in the following pages. We will observe influences from various strands of the Chinese tradition, of course, but there will be no need to characterize these pejoratively as “unwittingly [carrying] tacit assumptions.”

These various interactions between guest and host languages take place in a variety of contexts. Translations and religious writings of mis­sionaries play a role, as do arguments by Chinese officials and others about how best to develop China’s economy and reform its government. Chinese efforts to understand and then make use of international law are influential, as are Japanese political movements and theoretical tracts. The writings and translations done by Chinese who study for a time in Europe or in Japan, finally, also are important factors in the devel­opment of the discourse. My goal in this chapter is to look at what is said in each of these contexts, to see how something like rights begins to figure in each context, and to show how the overall discourse evolves from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century.