1.3 THIS BOOK

The two claims this book aims to assess are, once again: (1) Countries can have different concepts of human rights, and (2) we ought not demand that countries comply with human rights concepts different from their own.

I will begin, in Chapter 2, by developing the ideas of Robert Brandom in order to introduce a way of thinking about what concepts are, how they depend on social norms, and how they can differ from one another. Brandom’s account makes it easy to see how despite differences, we can still communicate, if we want to; his emphasis on communication as a cooperative practice meshes very nicely with the view of cross-cultural moral dialogue I develop in subsequent chapters.

In order to assess Liu Huaqiu’s second claim, I need to explore the consequences to which pluralism can lead. Chapter 3 builds on the excel­lent foundation provided by Allan Gibbard, laying out the issues and options facing those who encounter a group with seemingly different moral commitments. The conclusions of this chapter are relatively abstract, which means both that they are applicable well beyond the debate over China and human rights and also that we have to wait until later chapters to fill in concrete details before the considerations offered in this chapter can offer us advice on whether or not we can apply our standards of human rights to the Chinese.

I next turn to the more historical part of the book, starting with a look, in Chapter 4, at the neo-Confucian debate over legitimate desires. In these debates we find an important, though underappreciated, origin of Chinese rights discourse. This chapter tells the story of a robust strand of the neo-Confucian tradition as it develops through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In Chapter 5, I look at the various nineteenth-century origins of Chinese rights discourse. I focus on the early uses of terms like “quanli” and “minquan” which corresponded, at least partially, to “rights” and “people’s rights.” The story is complex, with missionaries, international diplomats, Japanese liberals, and Chinese scholars all playing roles. These origins, coupled with the role that neo­Confucianism plays in developments described in the following chapter, all help to make concrete the idea that moral discourses have messy, complicated, and contingent histories. Universal consensus is something that people have to work for, rather than something they can assume.

The longest essay on rights by a Chinese thinker until well into the twentieth century was “On Rights Consciousness” by Liang Qichao, written in 1902. Chapter 6 examines that essay as well as the important moral and political writings of Liang’s contemporary, Liu Shipei. Both Liang and Liu explicitly draw on Western thinkers - Liang on the German legal philosopher Rudolf von Jhering, Liu on the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau - and part of my goal here is to compare the roles that foreign and developing Chinese concepts of rights play in their writ­ings. While I do not believe that Liang and Liu were simply continuing neo-Confucianism, I will argue that the interest that they and others had in rights makes much more sense when we see it in the context of neo­Confucian concerns.

Chapter 7 is based on essays written in the three decades after those discussed in the previous chapter, and presents a series of perspectives on the dynamism of Chinese rights discourse. In order to illustrate one way in which Chinese and Western rights discourses can converge, I also consider in this chapter the views of the American philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas resonated well with those of many Chinese when Dewey traveled to China in 1919. The chapter concludes with a discus­sion of the range of Marxist perspectives on rights, both in abstract theory and on the ground in China.

My main goal in Chapter 8 is to discuss and then engage with the rights theories that have been developed in China in the past decade. This entails a significant detour into contemporary European and American rights theory, without which any effort at substantial engagement on my part - grounded, as I am, in contemporary European and American phi­losophy - would be shallow or disingenuous. The challenges I raise are not just for Chinese thinkers, though; I believe that there are genuine, weighty challenges to the ways that we think about rights implicit in the works of both contemporary Chinese theorists and their predecessors fifty years earlier.

I summarize my conclusions in Chapter 9. I have shown the existence in China of a distinctive discourse about rights: one with its own con­cepts, motivation, and trajectory. This is by no means to deny that Chinese rights discourse has been related in various ways to, and influ­enced at many different times by, the whole range of European and American rights discourses. I emphasize the dynamic, interactive, and internally contested nature of Chinese rights discourse, while at the same time noting the existence of recurring themes and value orientations. These continuities include a view of rights as means to valuable ends, rather than as ends in themselves; a tight relationship between rights and interests; a belief that legitimate interests can all be harmonized; and a simultaneous commitment to political and economic rights.

I therefore agree, at least to a significant degree, with Liu Huaqiu’s assertion that China’s rights discourse is conceptually distinctive. I am also sympathetic to part of his normative claim: We need to be careful of our grounds before demanding that others comply with our morali­ties. Any group that wants to deny that others can engage with their values, though, also needs an account of the basis for their denial, and I show that such reasons are difficult to produce. In the typical case - including the present issue over human rights - there is more than enough on which to base a dialogue. I argue that there is a great deal we can say to one another, sometimes as one nation to another, but more often as members of one sub-group to another. The more lines of engage­ment that can be established, the more hope there is for reaching a broader consensus. This diversity of roles and interests within all nations party to these issues must be recognized and exploited. It makes sense that the engagement I undertake in Chapter 8 is with Chinese intellec­tuals and scholars, for I am an intellectual and a scholar. The framework within which I make these efforts toward dialogue, though, is much broader: It will require the efforts not simply of scholars, but also of women and men from many walks of life if it is to succeed in meeting the challenge that China poses to us, and that we pose to China.