After summarizing the tortuous history of the infusion of Western discourse on rights in the Chinese psyche, Chan proposes that, "we now have a new opportunity for a more accurate appreciation of the strengths and limits of human rights and of the need to reform and renew traditional Chinese culture."

Joseph Chan is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard- Yenching Institute. He has published articles and chapters on Western and Chinese political philosophy and is working on a book project on Confucian political philosophy. This article is adapted from a speech presented at the Forum 2000 Conference, held under the auspices of Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, and Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, at Prague Castle, Czech Republic, 1997.

Today we are asked to reflect upon the world that we have inherited—the values that our civilizations have bestowed upon us, the burdens that have fallen upon us, and the visions that sustain our hopes. My talk today focuses upon Chinese civilization: its past, its values, its problems, and its relation with the values of the modern world, particularly human rights.

China has the oldest uninterrupted civilization in recorded history. She has been the center of a major civilization that has a glorious past of more than two thousand years. This civilization has nurtured important philosophers and sages, developed a rich and sophisticated system of moral and social order based primarily on the Confucian philosophy of humanity, created what was perhaps the most developed meritocratic civil service in the pre-modern world, and produced substantial achievements in science and technology. All of this led to the Chinese self-perception that China was the center of the world and her civilization was the most superior on earth. Indeed, believing that this civilization had little to learn from the outside world, Chinese rulers in the past practiced isolationism. As a result, a strong sense of complacency gradually developed within China, while self-criticism and the courage to challenge tradition and orthodoxy were seldom encouraged.

The great nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill insightfully suggested that the Chinese obsession with her cultural achievements, stability, and tradition was the chief obstacle to her progress. He even said that "[the Chinese] have become stationary, … and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.’" How sarcastic this remark was, but also, and most sadly, how true. Mill’s remark was penned in 1859—when the great classic of liberalism, On Liberty, was published—exactly twenty years after the Sino-British Opium War (1839-41). Of course, it is clear that European aggression toward China and the resulting occupation of Chinese territory by colonial powers was never the result of efforts to improve, but rather exploit.

The Chinese did learn a great lesson, however. Defeat and humiliation had fundamentally weakened the Chinese sense of cultural superiority. Pride gave way to despair, and a sense of cultural identity became nationalism. For the first time the Chinese people realized that they had to adapt their civilization and advance their technology to meet the challenges of and dangers from the industrialized West. Initially, the government believed such an adaptation to be easily realized: the hope was that the core of Chinese civilization—its ethical-political basis—could remain unchanged. Rather, science and technology became the necessary ingredients for modernization, captured in the phrase: ‘Chinese learning as base, Western learning as application.’ But very soon some intellectuals realized that this attitude had under-estimated both the inherent problems of Chinese civilization and the various achievements of the West. European civilization had invented not only science and technology, but also a new conception of human dignity (freedom and equality) and a new social-political structure to protect such dignity (human rights regimes and democratic institutions). Some Chinese came to see that it was this latter set which truly formed the core of European values, and that they were precisely the principles that were missing in Chinese civilization.

At the risk of oversimplification, one could say that in the last century and a half, the Chinese people have engaged in doubt, reflection, and debate over whether and how human rights and democracy should be incorporated into their civilization. Some advocated the complete Westernization of Chinese culture while others resisted this through a rejection of Western culture. It is unfortunate that today human rights and democracy still appear difficult to realize in mainland China. The task we face today is the same one we faced one hundred and fifty years ago; namely, to establish conditions conducive to the strengthening of human rights and democratization. These conditions include not only political and legal institutions, but also a fresh vision of how the values of Chinese and Western civilizations can be fused into a long-term, coherent vision of human rights norms and political morality that does justice to China’s historical background and cultural traditions.

I believe we are in a better position to do this than we have been in the past. For one, human rights have been in upheld in many Western countries for several decades. We now have a better understanding of the nature of human rights—its achievements as well as its limitations. Also, Chinese societies such as Taiwan and Hong Kong are beginning to develop institutions to protect human rights, and we can now observe how human rights norms are fleshed out in Chinese societies, how they might influence Chinese culture, and vice versa. These two Chinese societies would certainly serve as examples for mainland China, whose modernization, marketization, and integration with the global economy will increasingly demand further legal and political reforms that respect basic human rights.

Most important of all, however, many Chinese people—politicians, academic scholars, publishers, teachers—are beginning to re-emphasize the value of traditional Chinese ethics, especially Confucianism. Economic progress has reinvigorated Chinese confidence in their culture. The decline of Marxist ideology has created a moral vacuum, and traditional Chinese values seem a logical aid to help build a contemporary Chinese ethos. In addition, the Chinese are beginning to realize that there exist as many ills in Western cultures as in their own. Industrialization and capitalism often bring with them materialism, competition, consumerism, and excessive individualism. China, like other industrializing Asian countries, is moving along this very path, and hence a conscious effort to revitalize cultural and spiritual values to counteract these challenges is both necessary and desirable. Without such an effort, these values may slowly disappear, leaving a moral vacuum to be filled only by the currently available norms of rights, with their accompanying narrow and limited vocabulary.

On the other hand, some authoritarian leaders in Asia have blamed human rights and democracy for the ills of industrialized societies mentioned above. They argue that the solution is a strong authoritarian government or a police state that can tightly control its citizens. This view is doubly wrong. First, the causes of those ills are not human rights and democracy but the erosive forces of marketization and industrialization, combined with a lack of strong cultural values and ethical norms to counteract them. Second, authoritarian rule induces egoism, cynicism, distrust, alienation, and opportunism. The real solution to the ills of marketization and industrialization, as Korean democratic leader Kim Dae Jung has said, ‘is not to impose the terror of a police state but to emphasize ethical education, give high regard to spiritual values, and promote high standards in culture and arts.’

In short, we now have a new opportunity for a more accurate appreciation of the strengths and limits of human rights and of the need to reform and renew traditional Chinese culture. These two opportunities need not be antagonistic—indeed, my belief is that Confucianism would benefit much from human rights. Confucianism does not focus on human rights, but rather, it places great emphasis on duties arising from social roles, especially in what are considered the five basic human relationships (father-son, husband-wife, elder brother–younger brother, ruler-ruled, and friend-friend), on the virtues of respect for the elderly and filial piety, and on mutual trust and care between family members. These tenets might easily be made to serve authoritarian purposes if they are embedded in a culture that does not recognize human rights or basic human equality. Let us take the family as an example. In the past, Confucian filial piety was used to support a patriarchal society in which the father held enormous power over the family. Individual freedom and welfare of the wife and children could easily be sacrificed to satisfy the father’s unreasonable wants. In this situation, the Confucian ideal of ren (humanity), and the mutual concern and reciprocity between family members, would surely be difficult to realize.

Moreover, people can fail to act in accordance with the moral norms of humanity. When personal relationships break down, as when one party in a relationship fails to abide by the relevant norms and virtues, rights can be an important fallback mechanism to protect the vulnerable party against exploitation and harm. Consider the example of the breakdown of a marriage. If a husband's love for his wife has ended and he acts in a way that harms her interests, it is highly desirable and even necessary for the wife to have formal rights that can protect her.

While Confucianism is in need of transformation in order to accommodate human rights, it has much to contribute to modern discourse on human rights and to the ongoing process of the development of human rights norms. A transformed Confucianism would insist on limiting the role of rights in human relationships to a minimum fallback mechanism. In a close relationship, parties would do well to ignore rights and focus instead on the norms of mutual caring and love. A damaged relationship is best repaired through renewal of the partners’ commitment to the ideal of mutual caring rather than through the assertion of rights.

Limiting the role of rights to that of a fallback mechanism helps avoid the overemphasis on rights that is now emerging in the West. "Rights talk" tends to emphasize interests of the right-holders rather than issues of mutual concern, encouraging people to view the interests of others as limitations and claims on themselves rather than as joint interests to promote. Even some Western scholars are now warning of the tendency of contemporary political and ethical discourse in the West, especially in the United States, to become overly obsessed with rights. For example, discussion of the family has become increasingly permeated by the vocabulary of rights—marriage is now understood more as a contract of individual sovereigns than as a permanent union, and the parent-child relationship is now regulated by laws that are based more on rights than on welfare. If traditional ethical codes were seriously weakened by the forces of modernization, rights would become the leading instrument that people would use to resolve conflicts within the family. Indeed, a theory of rights is not capable of standing on its own. It needs to be complemented by a theory of virtues to guide the conduct of right-holders in the exercise of their rights. It is here that we may discover the importance of Confucian ethics for a modern Chinese society. A vibrant and transformed Confucianism could supply rich ethical norms and virtues that would supplement human rights to guide people’s behavior, thereby tempering a rights-based culture and preventing abuses of rights. A culture based on Confucianism instills in people such virtues as filial piety, fraternal love, loyalty, and sincerity, and reminds them that rights are only a last resort for protecting their interests.

It is important to note that the danger of excessive individualism, materialism and abuses of rights may come from the consequences of communism as well as from industrialization and capitalism. As the experiences of some post-communist European countries demonstrate, these problems may be reactions against tight state control over people’s lives and excessive demands on individuals to sacrifice their personal interests in the name of the community. When these countries became liberalized and democratized, people’s long-suppressed wants for security and possession were unleashed. In fact, a Czech writer noted in 1993 that there was a danger in the former Czechoslovakia that ‘everyone lays claim to human rights, but no one wants to fulfill human responsibilities.’ She suggested that ‘perhaps it might be time to write a charter of the responsibilities and duties of every person and to place it -- equal but not separate -- beside the charter of rights.’ We are already witnessing similar phenomena in China. Of course, the main problem in China is the lack of rights rather than their abuses. But marketization has already unleashed people’s desires for comfort and gain, desires which have long been suppressed by the practice of communism. Without a strong ethics, even if there were human rights and democracy, they would easily be misused and turned into something destructive.

To conclude, the future of China depends not only on continuing economic growth but, more importantly, on a strong commitment both to human rights and democracy and to the revitalization of traditional Chinese values. The two sets of values complement each other and are equally important. Revitalizing Confucian ethics will help avoid the ills experienced by a communist society undergoing marketization, prevent the culture of human rights from fostering excessive "rights talk," provide clues to developing proper human rights norms and political moralities, and ultimately define the Chinese identity. At the same time, Confucianism itself must be transformed in light of the spirit of human rights. Such a transformed, vibrant culture can be developed and maintained only in a democratic society in which citizens can freely discuss and debate political and cultural issues. Both the affirmation of human rights and democracy and the revitalization of traditional cultures form integral parts of a single vision. Ignoring either of them would be a mistake that China cannot afford to make.

What role can Western countries play in helping to improve the human rights situation in China, or for this matter, in other Asian countries? I believe that occasional condemnation of serious violations of human rights is appropriate and even necessary. But in the long run, the most effective strategy is dialogue rather than confrontation, engagement rather than isolation. Most important of all is the willingness of all parties in the dialogue to seek to understand each other. Social scientists recognize that for any social system where there is a center and a periphery, people in the center tend to lack an interest in understanding and respecting the people in the periphery, rendering it difficult to sustain genuine, equal dialogue between them. While China committed this mistake when she was still a great power many centuries ago, today the United States, occupying the center position in world affairs, seems to be repeating the same mistake. The U.S. seems much more interested in exporting her values and visions to other peoples than in seeking to understand them. Many people in the States still seem to see the Chinese culture as something mysterious, anti-modern, and essentially authoritarian, and they treat China as a dangerous evil power like the ex-Soviet Union. This attitude is surely not conducive to genuine dialogue. The problem of China today is not that she has a clear set of values that go against that of the rest of the world. Rather, the problem is that she has no clear vision that guides her own political, economic, and cultural development. The strategy of isolation will only push China towards self-defensive nationalism; engagement will help China move forward on the path of human rights and democracy.

References

1. J.S. Mill, On Liberty, in H.B. Action (ed.) J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, On liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972), p.129.
2. Both of these views are extreme and unwarranted, however. They are unwarranted because underlying their views lies the same mistake—that human rights is an antithesis to the core of Chinese civilization, namely, Confucianism, and so either one has to go if the other is to stay. I have argued elsewhere for the compatibility of human rights and Confucianism. See Joseph Chan, "A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China" (paper presented at the second workshop of the Carnegie Council's project on "The Growth of East Asia and Its Impact on Human Rights," Bangkok, 24–27 March 1996). The paper is published in Joanne Bauer and Daniel Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. There is, of course, a danger that state officials might use traditional Chinese ethos such as Confucianism to reject human rights. If this is so, it is all the more important to have open and public discussion on Confucianism to prevent misinterpretation.
4. For a classic statement of this view, see J.S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in H.B. Acton, ed., J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972). For a contemporary discussion of the problems of Singapore along similar lines, see Daniel A. Bell, "A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore," Political Theory 25 (February 1997): 6–32.
5. Kim Dae Jung, "Is Culture Destiny?" Foreign Affairs 73 (November–December 1994): 191. For a defence of the view that it may be legitimate for states to promote virtues, culture, and arts, see Joseph Chan, "Legitimacy, Unanimity, and Perfectionism," Philosophy & Public Affairs (forthcoming), Vol.29 (2000), No.1.
6. The arguments in the next few paragraphs are adapted from Joseph Chan, "Hong Kong, Singapore, and ‘Asian Values’: An Alternative View," Journal of Democracy Vol. 8, No. 2 (1997): 35-48, and are used with the permission of that journal and the John Hopkins University Press.
7. For the idea of rights as a fallback mechanism, see Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 374.
8. . See, for example, Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), and Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
9. See Glendon, Rights Talk, 121–30, and John Eekelaar, "Families and Children: From Welfarism to Rights," in Christopher McCrudden and Gerald Chambers, eds., Individual Rights and the Law in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 10.
10. See Jeremy Waldron, Nonsense Upon Stilts (London: Methuen, 1987), 194.
11. Eda Kriseova, Valcav Havel:The Authorized Biography (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1993), 270.