During the 1990s, the question of whether, and which, human rights are relevant to and demanded by Asian people has received a lot of attention. The underlying question is whether the understanding of human rights differs between Asians and Westerners.
Some Asian governments have expressed a profound doubt about the universality of human rights, arguing that human rights is a Western value that has been imposed indiscriminately on Asia. They instead stress the distinctiveness of Asia and the existence of so-called Asian values; but this position more reflects political expediency than cultural considerations.
In particular, the government of China argues that human rights conceptions differ among countries due to historical, cultural and economic differences; Chinese dissidents, not surprisingly, have a different view, defending the universality of human rights, as can be seen in their "open letters" and petitions to the regime.
Governments, needless to say, are hardly the best judges of human rights.
To any government, human rights talk is, and indeed should be, uncomfortable. That is why they prefer government-to-government dialogues over dialogue with their own people, and that is the reason why they see human rights NGOs as a threat.
China has recently begun to show a somewhat stronger commitment to the international human rights regime, as exemplified by its signing of the two main human rights treaties,International Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1997, and the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1998. It is of course one thing to sign human rights convenants and quite another to respect human rights at home. Despite the new commitment to human rights, human rights violations continue in China. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is hardly unique in taking such a contradictory position on human rights; such inconsistencies are common to many other nations, including in the West.
Human rights
The KMT in fact exhibited a somewhat similar contradictory position on human rights in the 1940s and 1950s and later.
In order to illustrate this point, let me begin with a very brief history of the human rights discourse in China over the past 100 years.
Around the turn of the century, China entered a period of rapid and accelerating social and political change. This period also saw the introduction of new ideas and political concepts, including the concept of human rights. According to the revolutionary Feng Ziyou (馮自由), the Chinese in the beginning of the century became intoxicated with ideas of freedom, equality and natural rights (tianfu renquan, 天賦人權).
The Western origin of this concept was openly acknowledged, but that did not hinder many Chinese from regarding it as a universal value, applicable and useful in China.
The language of human rights became a useful weapon in the hands of revolutionaries such as Tsou Jung (鄒容) and Chen Tien-hua (陳天華) in their struggle against the Manchus, whom they accused of having deprived the Chinese of their inalienable rights. To restore human rights was the rallying call of Tsou Jung's book titled The Revolutionary Army. The language of human rights was thus used by those who felt themselves deprived of their rights, whereas the power holders did not subscribe to the idea.
RSS