Donnelly on China and Rights
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Cornell University Press, 2013)
4. Twentieth-Century Encounters with “Rights”
Let us jump now to the late nineteenth century. China, although still under imperial rule, was increasingly burdened by an increasingly oppressive and demeaning series of “unequal treaties” that restricted (but did not extinguish) Chinese sovereignty and granted punishing economic, military, political, and religious privileges to the Western powers. The state was nearing collapse. Chinese officials, intellectuals, and citizens largely across the political spectrum were grappling with the meaning of this degradation of China and a wide variety of possible remedies.
One powerful strand of reformist thought traced Chinese decline to the backward-looking rigidities of Confucianism. (Scholar-bureaucrats trained primarily in the classics still dominated the civil service.) In the eyes of these modernists, the suff erings of China were ample evidence of the shortcomings
of the doctrines and policies. Th ey thus began to look to the West—whose power could not be denied—for remedies.
Some saw science and technology as the way forward for China, posing in effect a challenge to the traditional Confucian view of nature and the relation of humans to it. For our purposes here, a more interesting challenge was posed by those who took on traditional Confucian statecraft , with its emphasis on the virtue of the emperor and the civil service and its reliance on order and progress from above. Western ideas of political rights thus became of considerable interest.
Marina Svensson, in Debating Human Rights in China (2003), tells a nuanced story of the Chinese engagement with ideas of rights. For our purposes here, I want to stress the idea of engagement. Chinese came to Western ideas of rights, rather than had them imposed upon them, and they came
to those ideas largely as a result of their dissatisfaction with the sufferings of China at the hands of Western state power and the global economy. “The concept of human rights was embraced by Chinese writers as useful in their struggle to save China” (Svensson 2003: 73) .
As Svensson emphasizes, “national survival rather than the freedom of the individual from an oppressive state was the main preoccupation” of early-twentieth-century Chinese advocates of rights (2003: 98). Ancient ways, these critics argued, had turned Chinese men and women into weak, slavish beings and brought forth foreign domination. Rights to freedom of thought, speech, and publication, which were a central concern of these critics, were to be used to make the Chinese people, and thus China, strong and dignified again. “This justification of rights was based on the premise that individuals [145] enjoying rights would promote national rights and national salvation” (Svensson
2003: 115).
The relationship between these new ideas and Confucianism, however, was complex. For example, Svensson notes the creation of the term renge to translate the Western notion of personality. The traditional notion of ren, humanness, was thus reconceptualized, creating
a semantic field in which personality and enjoyment of rights are used to characterize citizens in contrast to slaves, who have no personality or rights and are completely at the mercy of their masters. . . . The early twentieth-century discourse shows that the concept of human rights, to some extent, could build on Confucian notions of human dignity and human nature, while at the same time it was explicitly formulated as an attack on other aspects of the Confucian tradition, such as its hierarchical nature an d submission of women. (Svensson 2003: 104)
In a similar fashion, Stephen Angle argues that the neologism quanli, created to translate the Western idea of rights, “does not represent a radical break with the Confucian tradition” (2002: 175), but rather its appropriation in new circumstances and its extension in new directions in light of those circumstances. As Svensson puts it, “new words and concepts were introduced, domesticated, and contested” (2003: 82). In the process they were made Chinese—in much the same way, I would add, that rights concepts were introduced, domesticated, and contested in the West in the preceding two centuries.
Of course, ideas of rights were hardly the whole story of the Chinese reaction to Western domination. And as the history of post-imperial China indicates, in practice rights fared very poorly under both nationalists and communists. Nonetheless, in addition to Chinese embraces of rights—which
have been deep and powerful in recent decades in both Hong Kong and Taiwan—the Confucian tradition is arguably undergoing a major regeneration. For example, Feng Youlan (1895–1990) provided a new synthesis of Confucian thought (see Chan 1963: 751–62). A new generation of self-identified “New Confucians” developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s (see Liu Shu-Hsien 2003: ch. 8). An even younger generation is trying today to apply Confucian ideas to contemporary social problems (e.g., Bell and Hahm 2003; Chan 1999, 2002). In a rather different vein, the remarkable economic and political success of Singapore is attributed by its architect, Lee Kwan Yew, to a creative synthesis of Western and Chinese, especially Confucian, ideas and practices.
I have neither the expertise nor the desire to speculate on the success or likely consequences of such eff orts. I do, however, want to suggest that they suggest a very particular perspective on debates over “Asian values.”
From Marina Svensson’s book review of Confucianism and Human Rights, edited by WM. Theodore De Bary and Tu Weiming. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
“The editors and Henry Rosemont Jr. see Confucianism as a remedy, not only of the ills in China but of those in the West as well. They share their appreciation of Confucianism and dismay with contemporary Liberalism with the advocates in the Asian values debate and the Communitarians. Like them they argue that the unbridled individualism, materialism, crime, and disorder, which they observe in the West (read the U.S.) partly is due to its excessive "rights talk." Confucianism's stress on duties, social harmony, and family values would, in their opinion, alleviate these problems. Henry Rosemont Jr. goes the furthest, and argues that Confucianism is a genuine alternative to the West's rights discourse. But given China's past, it is strange that the dangers associated with an excessive "duties talk," especially in an authoritarian society, are not discussed.”
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Cornell University Press, 2013)
4. Twentieth-Century Encounters with “Rights”
Let us jump now to the late nineteenth century. China, although still under imperial rule, was increasingly burdened by an increasingly oppressive and demeaning series of “unequal treaties” that restricted (but did not extinguish) Chinese sovereignty and granted punishing economic, military, political, and religious privileges to the Western powers. The state was nearing collapse. Chinese officials, intellectuals, and citizens largely across the political spectrum were grappling with the meaning of this degradation of China and a wide variety of possible remedies.
One powerful strand of reformist thought traced Chinese decline to the backward-looking rigidities of Confucianism. (Scholar-bureaucrats trained primarily in the classics still dominated the civil service.) In the eyes of these modernists, the suff erings of China were ample evidence of the shortcomings
of the doctrines and policies. Th ey thus began to look to the West—whose power could not be denied—for remedies.
Some saw science and technology as the way forward for China, posing in effect a challenge to the traditional Confucian view of nature and the relation of humans to it. For our purposes here, a more interesting challenge was posed by those who took on traditional Confucian statecraft , with its emphasis on the virtue of the emperor and the civil service and its reliance on order and progress from above. Western ideas of political rights thus became of considerable interest.
Marina Svensson, in Debating Human Rights in China (2003), tells a nuanced story of the Chinese engagement with ideas of rights. For our purposes here, I want to stress the idea of engagement. Chinese came to Western ideas of rights, rather than had them imposed upon them, and they came
to those ideas largely as a result of their dissatisfaction with the sufferings of China at the hands of Western state power and the global economy. “The concept of human rights was embraced by Chinese writers as useful in their struggle to save China” (Svensson 2003: 73) .
As Svensson emphasizes, “national survival rather than the freedom of the individual from an oppressive state was the main preoccupation” of early-twentieth-century Chinese advocates of rights (2003: 98). Ancient ways, these critics argued, had turned Chinese men and women into weak, slavish beings and brought forth foreign domination. Rights to freedom of thought, speech, and publication, which were a central concern of these critics, were to be used to make the Chinese people, and thus China, strong and dignified again. “This justification of rights was based on the premise that individuals [145] enjoying rights would promote national rights and national salvation” (Svensson
2003: 115).
The relationship between these new ideas and Confucianism, however, was complex. For example, Svensson notes the creation of the term renge to translate the Western notion of personality. The traditional notion of ren, humanness, was thus reconceptualized, creating
a semantic field in which personality and enjoyment of rights are used to characterize citizens in contrast to slaves, who have no personality or rights and are completely at the mercy of their masters. . . . The early twentieth-century discourse shows that the concept of human rights, to some extent, could build on Confucian notions of human dignity and human nature, while at the same time it was explicitly formulated as an attack on other aspects of the Confucian tradition, such as its hierarchical nature an d submission of women. (Svensson 2003: 104)
In a similar fashion, Stephen Angle argues that the neologism quanli, created to translate the Western idea of rights, “does not represent a radical break with the Confucian tradition” (2002: 175), but rather its appropriation in new circumstances and its extension in new directions in light of those circumstances. As Svensson puts it, “new words and concepts were introduced, domesticated, and contested” (2003: 82). In the process they were made Chinese—in much the same way, I would add, that rights concepts were introduced, domesticated, and contested in the West in the preceding two centuries.
Of course, ideas of rights were hardly the whole story of the Chinese reaction to Western domination. And as the history of post-imperial China indicates, in practice rights fared very poorly under both nationalists and communists. Nonetheless, in addition to Chinese embraces of rights—which
have been deep and powerful in recent decades in both Hong Kong and Taiwan—the Confucian tradition is arguably undergoing a major regeneration. For example, Feng Youlan (1895–1990) provided a new synthesis of Confucian thought (see Chan 1963: 751–62). A new generation of self-identified “New Confucians” developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s (see Liu Shu-Hsien 2003: ch. 8). An even younger generation is trying today to apply Confucian ideas to contemporary social problems (e.g., Bell and Hahm 2003; Chan 1999, 2002). In a rather different vein, the remarkable economic and political success of Singapore is attributed by its architect, Lee Kwan Yew, to a creative synthesis of Western and Chinese, especially Confucian, ideas and practices.
I have neither the expertise nor the desire to speculate on the success or likely consequences of such eff orts. I do, however, want to suggest that they suggest a very particular perspective on debates over “Asian values.”
From Marina Svensson’s book review of Confucianism and Human Rights, edited by WM. Theodore De Bary and Tu Weiming. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
“The editors and Henry Rosemont Jr. see Confucianism as a remedy, not only of the ills in China but of those in the West as well. They share their appreciation of Confucianism and dismay with contemporary Liberalism with the advocates in the Asian values debate and the Communitarians. Like them they argue that the unbridled individualism, materialism, crime, and disorder, which they observe in the West (read the U.S.) partly is due to its excessive "rights talk." Confucianism's stress on duties, social harmony, and family values would, in their opinion, alleviate these problems. Henry Rosemont Jr. goes the furthest, and argues that Confucianism is a genuine alternative to the West's rights discourse. But given China's past, it is strange that the dangers associated with an excessive "duties talk," especially in an authoritarian society, are not discussed.”
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