Asian values.

AuthorMoody, Peter R., Jr.
PositionAnd international relations

In his 1995 speech to the United Nations, China's state chairman Jiang Zemin asserted:

The sacred nature of state sovereignty is inviolable. No state has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another or force its own will on others. Some large countries frequently use the pretext of "freedom," "democracy" or "human rights" to encroach upon the sovereignty of other states, interfering in their internal affairs, damaging the unity of other countries or the solidarity of their nationalities. This is a major factor behind the lack of peace in the world today.(1)

This sentiment seems to be shared by the governments of other Asian states. In 1993, a caucus of Asian countries meeting in Bangkok prior to a major international human rights conference in Geneva proclaimed that human rights are, in practice, contingent upon culture, history, the level of economic development and the like, and that the "West" has no business imposing its views on others.(2) While this relativist view of human rights was pushed most vigorously by the delegations from China and Myanmar, the position was accepted by all "Asian" countries except Japan and the Philippines.

During the early 1990s, the enlargement of the scope of democracy and the promotion of human rights were major themes in United States foreign policy. They had been themes in the Cold War era as well, although they were often obscured by the demands of power politics. With the collapse of communism, however, the economically dynamic and increasingly self-assertive Asian regimes began to see universalistic American claims about human rights as an ideological complement to U.S. military supremacy -- both being instruments for asserting American domination. Prominent political figures, notably Singapore's elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's prime minister Dr. Mohamad Mahatir, find in "Asian values" visions of personal and social life alternative, and perhaps superior, to the western norm.

From the Chinese and, perhaps, a more general Asian perspective, American post-Cold War triumphalism can be summed up in the two famous works by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington. Fukuyama argued that, with the decline of communism, history had come to an end. He did not mean that nothing was ever going to happen again; rather, the great conflict of human ideas and movements had culminated in a rather tepid technocratic secular liberalism, and that there were no presuasive competitors to this vision.(3) Huntington, for his part, argued that with the fall of communism conflict would henceforth take place along cultural or civilizational lines. Impressed, apparently, with China's propensity to sell weapons to disreputable Middle Eastern regimes and its help to Pakistan's weapons program, he speculated on the emergence of an alliance of "Confucian" and "Islamic" civilizations directed against the powerful "western" culture.(4)

On one level, Fukuyama and Huntington contradict each other: If only one culture is left, there is no clash of civilizations. Their theories can, however, be reconciled. Fukuyama notes that religion and nationalism persist as alternatives to the liberal paradigm, although presumably they are reactive to it and do not represent serious intellectual alternatives. Huntington's thesis can be construed to mean that those left out of the dominant western paradigm will attempt to resist and even weaken it. Thus, those who care about western civilization must be prepared to fight for it. On the one hand, Fukuyama can be interpreted to claim that the norm of secular liberalism in the West is the only respectable social theory left, while, for the non-westerner, Huntington's talk of a "clash" can be taken as a call for the West to arm itself to fight those who do not share its norms. As a Chinese commentator put it, "In fact, the difference between them is deceptive. The `clash of civilizations' is built upon the hypothesis of the end of history."(5) The combined themes form an ideological justification for continued western, or American, domination of the world, with human rights serving as one component of this ideology.

Though receiving increasing approbation among governments in Asia, "Asian values" is an artificial construct.(6) Asia, after all, is merely a geographical expression, and a poorly defined one at that.(7) There is a multiplicity of cultures in Asia and their values may differ as much among themselves as they do with any western value system. The general reference of the term, however, seems to be to the "traditional" cultural values of the region, to values inherent in the local cultures prior to the western intrusion. Since the Asian states, by and large, all want to be rich and powerful, the Asian values issue raises the question of the opposition of tradition to modernity: The Asian response would seem to be that the traditional value systems provide at least as good a foundation for modernity as do those derived from the West.

This essay focuses upon a specific Asian tradition, Confucianism, particularly its contemporary Chinese version, and the relationship, as defined mainly by mainland Chinese publicists, between a generalized Confucianism and human rights. If there is such a thing as human rights, these must be rights common to all human beings by virtue of their humanity, and so cannot in themselves be contingent on culture, history or anything else (although their particular applications well may be). From the other side, if Confucianism is taken seriously, whatever values it identifies are also common to all human beings. At least in its older form Confucianism defined what it meant to be human and to be civilized; it was not intended as an ethnographic eccentricity of China or East Asia.

The Discourse on Human Rights in China

At least until the 1990s, in China the more common criticism of the western concept of human rights was Marxist rather than Asian or traditional, supplemented by old-fashioned, although not necessarily obsolete, versions of international law.(8) The older Chinese Marxian interpretation was that the concept of human rights originated in particular historical conditions and served specific class interests. Mao Zedong, anxious to discredit and delegitimize the generally liberal orientation of non-communist educated public opinion, pointed out that in class society there is no such thing as an abstract humanity or abstract human rights: If exploiters enjoy freedom, the exploited do not.(9) Human rights may have served historical progress in the fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, but became regressive once the bourgeoisie had become the dominant class.(10) In the Maoist-Marxist tradition, the rule of law, which must be part of the foundation for any system of human rights, represents the attempt by a ruling class to consolidate its dominant role in society. This conception of law, as it happens, coincides fairly well with the traditional Chinese interpretation, which treated law as in effect a means for advancing the interests of the state.(11) The targets of the attacks on rights and law, however, were less foreigners criticizing China's internal affairs than liberals inside China itself, who had criticized their own rulers during the 1957 Hundred Flowers movement or the 1978 to 1979 Democracy Wall movement.(12) Whatever the validity of any argument to the effect that human rights rests on cultural assumptions foreign to China, the idea has had an evident appeal to large numbers of Chinese.

In the post-Mao period, the regime came to appreciate if not the rule of law (in which, in the traditional western vision, it is law itself which is sovereign, with all human authority subject to it), at least rule by law -- by set, codified rules, rather than by manipulated mass movements or the caprice of the tyrant. There was still no recognition of human rights, but, in principle, the people enjoyed civil rights, rights created and guaranteed by the state and its laws.(13) In the official view, human rights remained an ideological construct serving the interests of foreign enemies or domestic subversives. Appeals to human rights and to the general humanism from which such rights might be derived were instances of "spiritual pollution."(14)

The Chinese regime began giving more systematic attention to human rights after the 1989 tragedy and the international criticism it occasioned.(15) In 1991, the State Council's Information Office published an extensive White Paper on human rights in China.(16) In 1993, the regime sponsored a "China Society for the Study of Human Rights," headed by Zhu Muzhi, an ideological hardliner formerly in charge of the Party's Propaganda Department.(17)

Foreign observers have interpreted these moves as signs that China is at least admitting the legitimacy of an international concern for human rights. A more overt message, however, is that other countries have no business preaching to China about human rights. The analysis moves along two major themes. The first is that China does a better job of protecting real human rights than does the United States. The White Paper centers on the theme that China protects the most basic of all human rights, the "right to subsistence."(18) This implies attention to social and economic rights (often promoted in public statements on these matters by other third world countries) rather than the political and personal liberties stressed in the western tradition.(19)

The other line of reasoning deals with the status of human rights in international law. One might think that to the extent China has signed on to the various international conventions on human rights, or tacitly acquiesced in them by virtue of its membership in the United Nations, China is properly subject to international scrutiny on human rights. Regardless of culture or history, a deal is a deal; pacta sunt servanda. The official Chinese interpretation admits that human...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT