To many contemporary observers, Confucianism and human rights would seem to be an unlikely combination, if not a completely incompatible couple. As far away as Africa, the New York Times reports, authoritarian regimes restrictive of human rights are looking to an Asian model of development based on Confucianism rather than to a Western one.1 The presumption is that Confucianism spells authority and discipline, limiting individual freedom and strengthening the state. How, then, could it be reconciled to a view of human rights fundamentally premised on the dignity and autonomy of the individual? Moreover, anyone familiar with the Confucians’ reservations about law as an inherently defective instrument for dealing with conflicting human interests would wonder how they could make room for a Western conception of human rights so bound up with legal guarantees and dependent on constitutional protections.
The negative view of Confucianism on these scores owes much to critics of the Chinese tradition earlier in the twentieth century, as we can see from these words by one of the prime Chinese advocates of liberation from Confucianism:
The pulse of modern life is economic and the fundamental principle of economic production is individual independence. Its effect has penetrated ethics. Consequently the independence of the individual in the ethical field and the independence of property in the economic field bear witness to each other, thus reaffirming the theory [of such interaction]. Because of this [interaction], social mores and material culture have taken a great step forward.
In China, the Confucians have based their teachings on their ethical norms. Sons and wives possess neither personal individuality nor personal property. Fathers and elder brothers bring up their sons and younger brothers and are in turn supported by them. It is said in chapter thirty of the Record of Rites that “While parents are living, the son dares not regard his person or property as his own” [27:14]. This is absolutely not the way to personal independence.… In all modern constitutional states, whether monarchies or republics, there are political parties. Those who engage in party activities all express their spirit of independent conviction. They go their own way and need not agree with their fathers or husbands. When people are bound by the Confucian teachings of filial piety and obedience to the point of the son not deviating from the father’s way even three years after his death and the woman not only obeying her father and husband but also her son, how can they form their own political party and make their own choice?…
Confucius lived in a feudal age. The ethics he promoted are the ethics of the feudal age. The social mores he taught and even his own mode of living were teachings and modes of a feudal age. The objectives, ethics, social norms, mode of living and political institutions did not go beyond the privilege and prestige of a few rulers and aristocrats and had nothing to do with the happiness of the great masses.
These words were written in December 1916 by Chen Duxiu, who subsequently became a founder of the Chinese Communist Party—though he was later disowned by the party and thus, for all of his efforts on behalf of individualism, became a nonperson.
Now consider what was said even earlier by a leading feminist who championed a blend of anarchism and communism for the liberation of women:
Almost all of the writings since the Qin and Han dynasties have followed Confucianism, and Confucian learning is marked by its devotion to honoring men and denigrating women.…
Later generations of Confucians respected what the founders had to say and followed their example in venerating men like gods while condemning women to the hells. They felt that as long as it was of benefit to men, then it was fine to twist the truth around in any way to gain advantage.…
The learning of Confucianism has tended to be oppressive and to promote male selfishness. Therefore, Confucianism marks the beginning of justifications for polygamy [for men] and chastity [for women]. Confucians, representing the ancestral learning of the Han dynasty, felt free to twist the meaning of the ancient writings as they pertained to women in order to extend their own views.…
Just as men loyal to a fallen dynasty went into hiding, women should die faithful to their deceased husbands like a loyalist giving his life to his country.… Thus are women driven to their deaths with this empty talk of virtue. We can see that the Confucian emphasis on propriety is nothing more than a tool for murdering women.…
This proves that women have duties but no rights. Household responsibilities cannot be assumed by men but all the tasks of managing the household are given to women. Out of fear that women might interfere with their concerns, men said women had no business outside of the home. This deprived women of their natural rights.2
Clearly, these writers saw Confucianism as an obstacle to the adoption of Western standards of individual freedom, with which they had become acquainted through the new Western-style education in China and the so-called New Culture of the early decades of the twentieth century. But even a scholar like Kang Youwei, widely recognized in his time as a leading modern exponent of Confucianism, believed that China (and even Confucianism itself) had to be liberated from a Chinese family system intrinsically repressive of the individual. Hard though it is to conceive of Confucianism stripped of its family system, this is what Kang had to say about it:
We desire that men’s natures shall all become perfect, that men’s characters shall all become equal, that men’s bodies shall all be nurtured. [That state in which] men’s characters are all developed, men’s bodies are all hale, men’s dispositions are all pacific and tolerant, and customs and morals are all beautiful, is what is called Complete Peace-and-Equality. But there is no means by which to bring this about this way without abolishing the family.… To have the family and yet to wish to reach Complete Peace-and-Equality is to be afloat on a blocked-up stream, in a sealed-off harbor, and yet to wish to reach the open waterway. To wish to attain Complete Peace-and-Equality and yet keep the family is like carrying earth to dredge a stream or adding wood to put out a fire; the more done, the more the hindrance. Thus, if we wish to attain the beauty of complete equality, independence and the perfection of [human] nature, it can [be done] only by abolishing the state, only by abolishing the family.3
Kang Youwei envisaged a universal order, the Grand Commonality, in which the traditional Confucian value of public mindedness would be fulfilled by the dissolution of virtually all traditional forms of particularistic loyalty and obligation. The state (if it existed at all) would have few functions, and in the absence of any significant social infrastructure regulating human activity, there would be almost no limit on individual freedom.
If, however, Kang was ready to go this far in modernizing Confucianism, it is hardly surprising that the authors of our first two quotations above should have gone further to promote violent revolution, aiming at total liberation, rather than to rely on a shaky parliamentary democracy as the vehicle for achieving individual rights. Nor, given this powerful liberationist impulse (later enshrined in the official declaration of the year 1949 as marking China’s “Liberation”), is it surprising that Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the late sixties should have urged young Red Guards to press on to final “liberation”—only revolutionary zeal and one last campaign of unrelenting class struggle were needed to make it a complete reality.
As is well known, the outcome of this new revolutionary struggle was not the anarchist utopia dreamed of earlier but a kind of disorderly freedom that Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues found necessary to suppress, first by putting down the Cultural Revolution and later by cracking down at Tiananmen Square. Yet we can understand this as a not unexpected consequence of the revolutionary élan generated earlier and the violence it would work on China. Moreover, if Confucianism, seen all along as essentially conservative, had been a main target of such attacks, early and late, we can understand too how the more moderate or conservative elements under Deng, having put a stop to these revolutionary excesses, would have taken a second look at Chinese tradition and found a conservative version of Confucianism to their liking—not only a potential force for stability but also a work ethic that could be supportive of Deng’s modernization program.
Although the views of Confucianism cited above have swung sharply from contra to pro in the protracted revolutionary process, a key line of continuity persists through it all: the promise of total liberation bore within it the need to accept total revolutionary mobilization, and in the end, total political control by the revolutionary party has survived the demise of liberation and individual rights. Success in unifying the country itself now suffices to justify the party’s long-term monopolization of power, and in this light even anarchy—or rather the threat of it—has become a pretext for withholding many of the human rights that the anarchist ideal had once been meant to foster and serve.
Which of the alternatives outlined above speaks for the Chinese people—the rejection of Confucianism in the name of human rights, or the denial of human rights in the name of a conservative Confucian tradition—remains an open question. Either view is open to challenge; both are still held and propagated. Among the poster writers of the Democracy Wall movement in the early eighties and the activists in the Tiananmen demonstrations, there were (and still are among the survivors) heirs to the May Fourth Movement and Cultural Revolution who, even though long cut off from any informed contact with Confucian teachings, distrust Confucianism, as it is now associated in their minds with the repressions of the current regime. And among the current spokesmen for a Confucian revival there is enough involvement of officialdom to warrant the suspicion that the government as sponsor has its own vested interests and illiberal ends in mind.
Meanwhile, we do well to note that the alternatives so characterized by no means exhaust the available approaches to human rights in China. Alongside the more extreme liberationists quoted above, there were more moderate advocates of liberal reforms, “people’s rights,” and “human rights,” who saw these as lacking in China but did not see Confucianism as necessarily, or in all ways, an obstacle to their adoption. Among these perhaps the most influential spokesmen were Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Hu Shi (1891–1962). Others, including some who continued to identify themselves as determined defenders of Confucianism, supported liberal democratic reforms, most often in diaspora or exile. Indeed, enough of these later spoke for China in concert with representatives of other Confucian-influenced cultures, so that when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, Chinese delegates saw to it that Confucian sentiments found expression therein, in support of human rights. This makes it awkward now, if not actually specious, for opponents of human rights in Asia today to dismiss these as merely culture-bound “Western” concepts incompatible with “Asian communitarian” values.
The purpose of the present chapter is neither to endorse nor to discount any of the views characterized above but to take them all into account and especially to consider what has been said on the subject in China—not just in agonizing moments of extreme national travail and cultural disorientation but in the larger perspectives of past, present, and future.
For these purposes, we take as our working definition of human rights the abovementioned Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948—which is not to adopt it as the final or definitive statement on the subject but only to accept it as the going one—universal to the extent that it was ratified formally by representatives of many world regions and cultures and not thereafter repudiated by any official body but only confirmed and added to in subsequent protocols. Thus it represents a growing consensus on an expanding body of human rights concepts.
Moreover, many of these “rights” have been incorporated in the constitutions of nations the world around. This suggests that there is less disagreement on the concepts themselves than one might suppose, which belies the notion that irreconcilable cultural values or cleavages are the basic issue. Rather, the problem is, as it has been all along, what material and political resources are available for their implementation, how effective are the processes of enforcement, whether or not there is a supporting cultural environment, and whether there may not lie in Confucianism other resources, as yet not fully developed, for the further enhancement of human rights. Hence this chapter attempts to deal with both concepts and practices, seen in historical, institutional, and evolutionary perspectives.
It is obvious enough that Confucianism itself did not generate human rights concepts and practices equivalent to those now embodied in the Universal Declaration; it is not obvious that Confucianism was headed in an altogether different authoritarian or “communitarian” direction, one incompatible with the rights affirmed in the Declaration. Our aim has not been to find twentieth-century human rights in Confucianism but to recognize therein certain central human values—historically embedded in, but at the same time restive with, repressive institutions in China—that in the emerging modern world could be supportive of those rights. In this our concern is not so much to render judgment on the past record as to clarify the bases on which past judgments have been made—those that could inform our understanding of human rights as still in the process of formation.
In accepting as our working definition of human rights the Universal Declaration adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and amended in the mid-1970s by a covenant on Civil and Political Rights and another on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, we conform with the general practice in human rights studies today, i.e., we refer to a consensus statement ratified by an international body and to a public document widely available.
Apart from this, definitions and understandings of human rights vary greatly. Indeed, such disagreement is apparent in the essay of Sumner B. Twiss (“A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism and Human Rights”) and Henry Rosemont Jr. (“Human Rights: A Bill of Worries”).4 The latter considers that human rights, as commonly known, are based on a belief in the radical autonomy of the individual, which Rosemont takes to be a false and unrealistic premise. Thus in Rosemont’s eyes the whole human rights project is misbegotten. Whether in fact the original signatories to the Universal Declaration or human rights advocates championing it have made the same assumption regarding individual autonomy is, for Twiss, questionable but not a crucial point. No matter how long debated, such philosophical issues are unlikely to be resolved. Meanwhile, it is better to leave such questions open to diverse and even revisionist interpretations rather than predicate the human rights program on any one set of philosophical assumptions. Indeed, for just such reasons, Twiss argues that a pragmatic approach is called for, starting with the initial consensus of the Universal Declaration and amending it as new understandings are arrived at.
Here we might note that if Rosemont believes that liberal democratic notions of individual autonomy were unduly influential in the formulation of human rights concepts, in the history of Western liberalism itself one may observe an evolution from the early emphasis on individual liberty in the nineteenth century to a greater concern for social and communitarian values in twentieth-century liberal movements. It was precisely on this account—their socialist leanings—that liberals were often characterized as “leftist” or “pinko” in midcentury America.5 Thus the evolution of liberal thought in the United States provides a parallel to that of the Universal Declaration and its protocols, with their increasing emphasis on social, economic, and environmental rights.
Twiss believes that in this process it is possible for new understandings of human rights to develop out of different moral and cultural traditions and for these to help in identifying both common grounds among these traditions and different appropriations of rights concepts among them. An early example of this is seen in the very process leading up to the formulation of the original Declaration itself. Since this occurred just after World War II, in what might be thought the heyday of Western liberalism and internationalism, it could easily be suspected that concepts of radical individual autonomy might have dominated the framing and terms of the Declaration, yet in fact Confucian and Mencian concepts of humanity and humaneness (ren/jen) were accepted, at the insistence of the Chinese delegation, as keynotes to the Declaration, to be enshrined in its preamble in the family-centered language of the Confucian Analects, e.g., the saying “All men are brothers.”6 Curiously, it was only after admission of the People’s Republic of China in place of the Nationalist delegation that objection was raised to these Confucian sentiments by PRC spokesmen on Marxist-Leninist grounds (i.e., arguing from doctrines of European provenance), that Confucian universalistic humanism, as expressed in the quotation from the Analects, was obsolete if not wholly reactionary. Having been superseded in Communist China by an ideology of continuing class struggle that left no room for a classless humanism, the offending Confucian sentiments, it was argued, should be stricken from the document.
A further irony in the course of this continuing evolution is that a member of the earlier Chinese delegation, instrumental in the framing of the original preamble, later became head of the institute that sponsored the Confucian revival in Singapore during the 1980s and subsequently promoted the same revival in Beijing after the eclipse of Mao’s anti-Confucian movement in the People’s Republic.
A central point of Twiss’s argument is that a moral consensus was arrived at pragmatically in the original Declaration—“a common vision of central moral and social values compatible with a variety of cultural anthropologies.” Even if the latter had not conceived of these rights in the same way, as living traditions they could find the internal moral resources to recognize the validity of these rights and generally abide by them, each culture interpreting them in ways most congenial to it, which others who do not necessarily share in them could still respect. Rights so recognized do not depend on any one epistemological position or philosophical theory but can draw support from many.
Twiss offers a variety of evidence from Confucian tradition supportive of human rights, even if not couched in the current idiom of human rights. One such example is a passage from the text of Mencius that is often cited (as it is by several writers in this volume) as expressing “the people’s right of revolution.” The passage reads:
King Xuan of Qi asked, “Is it true that Tang banished Jie and King Wu marched against Zhou?”
“It is so recorded,” answered Mencius.
“Is regicide permissible?”
A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples rightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an “outcast.” I have indeed heard of the punishment of the “outcast Zhou,” but I have not heard of any regicide.7
When considered in its own terms and in the larger context of Mencius, the passage does not support the popular modern interpretation of a “people’s right of revolution” but does, I believe, confirm Twiss’s main line of argument. First, one should note Mencius’s central point: the proper exercise of kingly power and the likely consequence of its abuse—that a ruler forfeits his claim to kingship and exposes himself to being overthrown. Nothing at all is said about “the people” or “revolution,” much less a people’s “right” to revolt. As a matter of fact, elsewhere Mencius makes it clear that, while the people’s welfare should be a prime concern of the ruler, he does not expect, over the normal course of things, that the people should take an active part in the political process. The common people, engaged in heavy labor, are in no position to do so—lacking the education, training, or time necessary to become well informed about governmental matters (Mencius 3A4). Instead, Mencius lays this responsibility on scholar-officials who serve the ruler. If the ruler misbehaves, it is the duty of his ministers to remonstrate with him. Then, if repeated remonstrances fail, they are to leave his service in silent protest (4B4). Should enough of them leave, it is a signal that the king has lost legitimacy and is due to be removed.
Does this, then, call for revolt? No. For Mencius, the next move is to have the responsible members of the ruling house depose the errant ruler (5B9). Failing that, it is understandable that some other leader will overthrow him, punish his misuse of power, and replace the defaulting dynasty. While recognizing that unchecked misrule may well provoke rebellion, Mencius recommends a process entirely consistent with his—and the general Confucian—view that violence is to be avoided at all reasonable costs. Revolt is only a last desperate recourse for an exasperated people, one that is understandable but not to be commended. Mencius is well aware that violence often prevails, but the point of his teachings is to replace the use of force with a well-considered civil process and above all with due process (what is right, fitting, and orderly in the circumstances). It is in this sense, then—that the observance of human rights is dependent on civility and due process—that Mencius and the Confucians can be said to offer what Twiss calls informed moral resources in support of human rights.
Twiss’s paper, characterizing the human rights movement as an evolving one that potentially draws on the resources of diverse cultural traditions, is followed by that of Henry Rosemont Jr., who presents a sweeping critique of the whole Western human rights concept. He argues that the purposes of the movement would be better served by disassociating it from a rights-based conceptual framework and from notions of individual autonomy; better, instead, to turn to a Confucian conceptual framework for the expression of moral sentiments, preferably one defining people in terms of kinship relations and community.
In Rosemont’s view, the rise of human rights concepts in the West, as well as of views of individual autonomy and liberal democracy with which it has been closely associated, was concomitant with the rise of industrial capitalism and a legal system protective above all of individual property rights. He believes further that a rights-based approach is incapable of dealing with the conflicting claims and contradictions generated within the liberal capitalist West. Thus his title, “Human Rights: A Bill of Worries.”
One can share his concerns and most of his Bill of Worries, including the increasing inadequacy, if not bankruptcy, of policies based on individual autonomy and property rights, to deal with the social dilemmas and ecological challenges of the contemporary world (whether Western or Eastern, it makes no difference today), yet still believe that human rights concerns are among the legitimate “worries” of us all.
As one who from the 1940s was “worried” like Rosemont over the effects of industrialization in both America and East Asia and convinced that Confucian personalism (with the self and society seen in an indivisible, balanced relation to each other) had much to recommend it over the “rugged individualism” of the American West, I can see the human rights movement as embodying humane concerns that would be shared even by great Confucian reformers like Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) in the Song period, who said that the Confucian noble person (junzi) should be “first in worrying about the world’s worries and last in enjoying its pleasures.” Confucian personalism, family ideals, and social conscience do have much to offer the contemporary world and in key respects may provide a better grounding for both human rights and environmental rights. Yet it is also true that Confucianism had its own problems adapting in later times to the complexities of a society and state that had grown beyond (but not necessarily “outgrown”) the homely truths of Confucius and Mencius. Increasingly, the concerns we refer to as “communitarian” were overshadowed by a dynastic state that proved far more intractable than the rulers of the relatively decentralized late Zhou city-states. And, as I argue in my discussion of “constitutionalism” in Waiting for the Dawn,8 Confucian noblemen like Huang Zongxi were already “worrying” about the dynastic Leviathan, while others were worried about the state of the community, in an age when their counterparts in the West were just beginning to worry about laws and constitutions that would restrain despotic power.
I shall pursue this question of socially and culturally diverse, but in some respects convergent, evolutions later. Here, having made a case earlier for a Confucian “rites-based” approach as compared to a “rights-based” one,9 I would like simply to register the increasing awareness among Confucians themselves that “rites” alone had proved insufficient to cope with the realities of power in late imperial China, and when informed Confucians of the late nineteenth and twentieth century in China became aware of constitutional law and “people’s rights” in the West, some recognized it immediately as having relevance to the “worries” of earlier Confucians.
As do Twiss and Rosemont, other contributors to the same symposium, depending on how they define human rights or interpret Chinese tradition, come up with somewhat ambivalent responses to the question: “Are human rights concepts alien to China and Confucianism?” Julia Ching concedes immediately that human rights as expressed in the Universal Declaration are largely a modern Western creation, but she sees them as products of earlier developments in the West for which rough counterparts existed in traditional China (“Human Rights: A Valid Chinese Concept?”), hence it was not difficult for cultured Chinese to recognize, appreciate, and accept these values as they did when the Universal Declaration was ratified. Not only have several East Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—claimed and made these their own, finding them not incompatible with their own Confucian values, but they have demonstrated by their economic success and rising standard of living that there is no necessary conflict between individual rights and economic/social/communitarian rights. Rather, these are seen as in many respects complementary. To assert otherwise—that in underdeveloped countries individual rights must be subordinated or even sacrificed to so-called group rights—may well be specious, serving not the advancement of society but some one party’s monopolization of power.
Daniel W. Y. Kwok (“On the Rites and Rights of Being Human”)10 poses a similar question for himself—whether human rights existed in traditional China—and he comes up with a similarly qualified answer, but in rather different terms from Julia Ching. To him, individual rights of the modern type could not exist because there was no room for a free-standing, completely autonomous individual. Rather, the self was always seen, and acted, within a network of socially differentiated human relations governed by rites, wherein rights and duties were always interconnected and similarly differentiated. “Being human,” which was for Kwok the aim of Confucian self-cultivation through the rites, always subordinated personal rights to the duties and responsibilities of the person within the network of social relations.
In this context, something like rights as legitimate expectations did exist, but not for the isolated individual as an anonymous cipher but only in a form that subserved the interdependence and harmony of the social group. Too often, according to Kwok, this meant subordination to the interests of the stronger party in the relationship, especially parents, husbands, and rulers. Given the fact of unequal power relationships, even today, after almost a century of revolutionary change, one hears, as Kwok says, amid protests against despotic rule, “Cries for laws and rights that safeguard human decency.”
In contrast to Kwok’s emphasis on the socially differentiated aspects of Confucian ethics, Irene Bloom (“Mencius and Human Rights”) places herself squarely on the side of Mencius’s belief in the moral equality of a common humanity (whether understood as the human species or the human potential). This common humanity, she argues vigorously and with impressive evidence from Mencius, is “the single most important connecting link between traditional philosophical and religious ideas and contemporary human rights documents.” Indeed, the thrust of Bloom’s argument is to call into fundamental question whether, in Mencius or the influential Mencian tradition in East Asia, it is true, as Kwok avers, that human equality is always subordinated to the unequal relations embedded in the rites.
This view of natural equality by virtue of a common human nature, though rooted in shared human sentiments of sympathy, shame, and respect and less exclusively identified than in the Western Enlightenment with the human capacity for reason, bears marked resemblances to the views of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers whose natural law philosophies were influential in the rise of human rights thinking in the West. The principal difference between the West and China lay in the rapid assimilation of these sentiments into public declarations and legal enactments in Western Europe and America—especially in such formulations as “equality before the law” and “equal protection of the law.”
Mencius’s view of natural equality, Bloom argues, is closely allied to his view of the inherent natural dignity of all human beings, which for Mencius is primary as compared to all social distinctions, including “aristocratic dignity.” One can even affirm, she says, this natural equality as fundamental to all of the distinctions and differentiations associated with ritual relations and social roles. Whatever the status distinctions to be observed, all human beings are entitled to an irreducible measure of respect. Thus Bloom emphasizes that “there is a consistent sense in the Mencius that the claim to receive respect from others and the disposition to behave respectfully toward them, are both psychologically and morally correlative. This is as true of ordinary people, including wayfarers and beggars, as it is of ministers and kings.” The reference to “wayfarers” and “beggars” in the Mencius is especially pointed and poignant; even the most transient and least substantial of human lives manifest something of this dignity.
These two basic elements in Mencian thought, human moral equality and natural dignity, did not, for reasons having to do with other factors in the evolving Chinese tradition, directly generate democratic ideas or human rights thinking of the modern Western variety, as Bloom readily concedes, but they “are consistent with, and morally and spiritually supportive of, the consensus documents [on human rights] that figure importantly in our emerging modern civilization.”
Wejen Chang’s essay, entitled “The Confucian Theory of Norms and Human Rights,”11 includes an extensive examination of many of the same Confucian moral relations, or norms, referred to by Daniel Kwok, analyzing in some detail the references to them in key Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius, Xunzi, and Record of Rites (Liji). He finds that most of those having a bearing on political matters, especially the ruler/people and ruler/minister relationships, emphasize reciprocal obligations, mutual respect, and the repayment of boons or benefits received. He stresses that if anything—if indeed there is any imbalance in these mutual obligations—the heavier burden lies on the side of the ruler’s obligations to the people and his responsibilities for their welfare.
The closest thing to the Western notion of human rights according to Chang is the Chinese concept of fen, “share.” Whereas “human rights” are grounded in the natural order and seen as innate (in the way that Mencius and the Mean see the moral nature as an innate endowment from Heaven), shares (fen, understood variously as “role,” “function,” or “duty”) are defined in some proportion to the role or function performed—a connection of “shares” with “duties” that corresponds to some extent with Western views of rights as going together with duties and responsibilities.
Chang believes that these two different approaches to the problem, “rights” and “shares,” each has its advantages and limitations. The particular virtue of “rights” is the confidence they give to the individual in claiming, and even struggling for, his own entitlements before state and society. On the other hand, this can lead to contentiousness and conflict. The virtue of “shares” is precisely in the sense of sharing, based on mutual respect and reciprocity. Where the latter qualities are encouraged and developed, contentiousness can be reduced. Nevertheless, if genuine reciprocity does not prevail, the individual may lack the confidence to assert himself, or the people may be without the means to claim their legal rights; hence resentments deepen. For this reason, Chang believes that the two approaches, rather than being mutually exclusive, may complement the other and offset each others’ weaknesses.12
In Chung-ying Cheng’s paper on “Transforming Confucian Virtues Into Human Rights,” he argues that in Confucianism virtue and duty go together and that the duties of rulers carry the implication that they also possess the authority or right to perform these duties for the benefit of humankind. Further, in the other Confucian moral relations a similar power or right is implied for the carrying out of the duties appropriate to each. Since, however, it is only in the relationship of friend and friend that we find relations of equality, it is on this basis, and as an extension from it, that one could see the possibility for grounding the rights of the individual in a Confucian theory of correlative duties among members of a community. “The only thing lacking,” he says, “is an explicit assertion of these rights as the basis for their political recognition.”
Cheng recognizes that in the absence of such explicit recognition in the past, as well as in the modern period (especially in the May Fourth Movement of 1919), there has been a strong need for “rational liberation” to achieve a more open, more explicit, and more orderly procedure for public policy making. In his view, such a process could well be grounded in the Confucian values of equality, self-respect, and mutual respect for personal dignity, predicated on the Confucian conception of the mutual coinherence of self and society.
As a Confucian basis for the exercise of democratic political rights, Cheng cites a passage in Mencius wherein Mencius enjoins the ruler from taking any action to appoint or dismiss an official, or to execute an offender against public order, without fully consulting the people as a whole. This is a most significant claim on Mencius’s part, but a real difficulty also attaches to it: though the passage in question clearly implies that there should be a careful and deliberate process of consultation—a sense of due process in governance—the agent throughout is the ruler, and nowhere does Mencius explain how the people themselves would become active in the process. One can easily conjecture that in a relatively simple agrarian society, processes of local consensus formation could be assumed to exist and thus be taken for granted. However, the nature and extent of such participation in higher policy formulation becomes a serious question in the changed circumstances of the later imperial dynasties.
Cheng acknowledges this problem; given the failure historically to articulate individual rights and the people’s political rights, ruling dynasties have dominated the situation, asserting their own interests as in effect representing the public interest. When this domination has become too oppressive, revolution has been the inevitable consequence. This too, Cheng says, is justified by Mencius in what has become known as Mencius’s “right of revolution,” as discussed above.
In this case, Mencius, consistently with views of his expressed elsewhere in the text, favors due process and not the resort to force. At another point, he says one should not wish to take power if to do so meant committing even one unrightful act, which has always been understood as avoiding the taking of life. Moreover, it is consistent with a longstanding, widely accepted view among Confucians that force should be resorted to only after all other remedies have been exhausted, i.e., when it has been made clear that a ruler or criminal is incorrigible.
When Cheng suggests, in his conclusion that after almost eighty years of revolutionary and republican history in twentieth-century China, that resistance to oppressive rulers may still have to take the form of revolution, it is doubtful whether he would have Mencius on his side. Revolutions may be understandable when all else fails, but they have come and gone in modern times without solving the problem. No one was more conscious of this than Mencius, i.e., that violence breeds violence and in the long run proves counterproductive. The power organized to lead revolutions, which mobilizes the force to prosecute them, remains thereafter to fill the power vacuum with its own, now entrenched and coercive, methods.
For the most part, the papers discussed above address human rights questions as they relate to classical Confucian conceptions, based on evidence in the prime early Confucian texts. Yet most of our contributors acknowledge that the subsequent Chinese tradition hardly bespeaks, or well exemplifies, these classical values. Thus even while one might grant that these Confucian values are compatible with certain modern human rights ideas, there remains a question as to why Confucianism did not develop along these lines in later times. A common answer to this question is that China’s subsequent historical development, especially in the political sphere so crucial to Confucian concerns, was dominated by an imperial dynastic system in many ways at odds with Confucianism. This does not, in itself, suffice to answer our question, however, since, while other systemic and ideological factors could be held accountable for the actual result, Confucians too were involved in the process. Hence, to assess the respective roles and relative weights of these factors in the developing Chinese tradition, we must consider the contending elements and alternatives to Confucianism that may have affected the outcome.
Yu Feng does this for the so-called Yellow Emperor tradition (“The Yellow Emperor Tradition as Compared to Confucianism”),13 based on a recently discovered document known as The Four Texts, which represents a distinctive mix of Daoist and Legalist ideas known to have played a prominent role in the earlier period of Chinese dynastic history. Feng believes that this tradition, known as the “Way of Might” (rather than “Right,” as with the Confucians), upheld certain universalist conceptions of law and political practice that contrast with the particularism inherent in the Confucian rites. Hence if one considers that the rites may serve as a plausible Confucian ground for human rights, one must also consider those ways in which the Yellow Emperor tradition offered viable alternatives to, and pointed to certain limitations of, the Confucian approach.
Where Yellow Emperor theorists agreed with the Confucians was in the principle of providing for the people’s livelihood as fundamental to rulership. They also shared the idea that the ruler’s power should be limited, in the Yellow Emperor’s case by subordination of the ruler to the law as truly universal and applicable to all. For this purpose, the latter tradition advocated Daoist nonaction or “doing nothing” (wuwei), with the ruler restraining himself as much as possible from interfering in the people’s conduct of their own affairs. In this view, the people’s pursuit of their own interests would eventually redound to the material advantage of the ruler himself. Feng goes further to assert that this laissez-faire political policy also implies that people, managing their own affairs, would be entitled to their own opinions and even to express them as a way of informing the judgments made by the ruler who, holding to no preconceived opinion of his own, would be completely open to them.
This approach to rulership, characterized by Feng as “covert” because the ruler conceals his own inclinations, is nevertheless supposed to yield a more “public” process of policy formulation inasmuch as it would “objectively” reflect people’s opinions. It remains unclear, however, as to just how these opinions are to find expression and how influential they could be when, in the end, the ruler, as the unquestioned locus of all power and authority, makes the sole decision.
Feng believes the influence of this school of thought was beneficial in the early years of the Han, as manifested in its laissez-faire policies, and in the early Tang, as embodied in a process whereby the emperor instituted several stages of policy review before making his decisions. This Feng calls “mild autocracy,” in contrast to the strong autocracy that prevailed in the Song and after. Feng does not, however, speculate as to why, in the continuity of dynastic rule, the milder form, if so successful, should have given way to even stronger autocracies.
In the end, Feng credits the Yellow Emperor tradition with promoting the idea of the people’s right to subsistence and also the idea of universal law as, ideally, limiting the ruler’s exercise of his power. He concedes, however, that it is deficient in respect to other human rights that would be better served by Confucianism.
Unfortunately, while this gives us a fuller picture of the conceptual resources available in Chinese tradition, it does not get us far in explaining an outcome, in the later dynasties, acknowledged by almost all to be deficient in political and legal rights of the Western variety. That outcome has to be considered, however, in the perspective of the continuing contest between laws and rites and the further development of Confucian thinking in regard to both.
The nearest equivalent to constitutional law in China is found in the great law codes of the Tang and Ming, widely emulated throughout East Asia. Parallel to this, however, was a continuing development of Confucian thinking about rites, which often at the Chinese court involved a serious contestation between imperial authority and Confucians at court who saw the rites as an important means of challenging that authority.
Ronguey Chu calls attention to four episodes, of which two are particularly dramatic, at the court of the Ming-dynasty founder, Taizu (r. 1368–1398), which illustrate how Confucians contested imperial power by invoking the superior authority of the Confucian classics.14 In the first of the instances to be cited here, Taizu, overriding a centuries-old tradition, decreed that the performance of the sacrificial services to Confucius should be reserved only to the emperor himself and Confucius’s own family in Qufu; they should not be allowed to Confucian officials and schools elsewhere in the empire. Ritually speaking, the implication was that the emperor stood above all others in speaking for Heaven and the Confucian Way. Despite the harshness with which Taizu was known to deal with his critics, prominent Confucian ministers remonstrated with the emperor against this, and eventually he rescinded the edict.
The second incident has to do with Taizu’s expurgating of passages in Mencius he considered contumacious of rulers and Taizu’s banishing of Mencius from the Confucian temple. Again courageous ministers protested, and after Taizu threatened death to anyone who opposed these actions, one minister brought his coffin with him to court saying, “It would be an honor to die for Mencius.” Again Taizu, as powerful and cruel a despot as any China has seen, backed off in the face of this heroic defense of Confucian tradition.
Incidents such as these demonstrate that there was indeed a moral culture in traditional China that could stand up in certain spectacular cases to abuses of power—a moral culture that served, in its own day, some of the same function as the moral culture, or “constitutional culture,” spoken of by Louis Henkin, who attributed the fall of Richard Nixon to the moral pressure exerted on him by a constitutional culture that constrained even a supreme commander of the armed forces and head of law enforcement agencies.
Individually impressive as were these heroics of Confucian ministers, they were more the exception than the rule, and while they testify to a moral culture compatible with human rights sentiments, something more was needed. That “something more” as perceived by Huang Zongxi in the seventeenth century was what might be called a civil society protective of political freedom and of public discussion at the Chinese court. Huang’s father had died a martyr to the cause of outspoken criticism at the Ming court, and Huang believed that a truly humane government should not depend for its workings on such extreme self-sacrifice of honest, conscientious Confucian ministers. Whereas the keynote of the great Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi’s political doctrine—widely accepted in Neo-Confucian East Asia—had been the self-disciplined, dedicated service of the Confucian noble man, who was totally at the service of the public good and defiant of all despots, Huang discounted the idea that the heroics of such noble men could accomplish much without strong constitutional supports of a structural, institutional character. The Confucians had the moral culture; what they lacked was a legal structure that would do more for the Confucian than the rituals of the imperial court. The systemic details of Huang’s constitutional plan for a balancing of powers, so as to make the people (min) masters in their own house, are given in my Waiting for the Dawn. True, this was only one man’s plan, but before one dismisses it as no more than that, one should recognize that other leading scholars in the seventeenth century (Ku Yanwu, Lu Liuliang, Tang Jian, and Wang Fuzhi) were thinking along the same lines, and although Huang’s ideas could not circulate freely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they became an inspiration to reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing them with an indigenous resource to be invoked in support of the constitutional movement. Moreover, as further evidence that Confucian culture at large might be compatible with constitutionalism, we should note that at the founding of the Yi dynasty in Korea, a leading Neo-Confucian statesman, Chŏng Tojŏn (1342–1398), drew up a monumental constitutional plan including many features similar to Huang’s, but almost three hundred years earlier!
By this point it should be obvious that the implementation of Confucian principles in imperial China was greatly conditioned by the structure and processes of bureaucratic administration, and this was true both early and late, from the Han down to the Qing. It is also true that the administrative system, which combined both executive and judicial functions, for the most part recognized levels and areas of social activity in which the Confucian rites were respected by the state and thought to be the most effective means of maintaining social order in localities beyond the effective reach of the mandarinate. Likewise, on levels and in areas of governance where Legalist-type laws rather than Confucian rites were thought to be more applicable (i.e., beyond the normal reach of family or village control), it was still Confucian-educated officials who administered legal procedures. Thus Confucian values and Legalist systems were inseparably involved with each other, while, as we see with Huang Zongxi, they coexisted in some degree of tension with one another.
One consequence of this was a judicial system oriented more toward upholding of administrative law and order than to defending the interests of the individual, as Alison W. Conner’s article (“Confucianism and Due Process”) confirms, but it was at the same time influenced both in its stated procedures and actual practice by Confucian humane concerns.15 Thus, in regard to the use of torture, which is universally condemned in theory (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), though it was legally allowed down into the Qing period, its practice was clearly circumscribed by explicit due process, as Conner argues. Thus the Qing system of confession by the use of torture was one, as she says, “based on detailed rules, even if bureaucratic ones; it was neither arbitrary nor unregulated, and it embodied a clear conception of what constituted a fair trial.” The best of this system, she is inclined to think, reflects Confucian influences, and in the present situation it could well be in order to review and reappropriate “the best of that tradition.”
Although by the seventeenth century important Confucian thinkers like Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, Lu Liuliang, Tang Jian, and others had made progress in their critique of dynastic rule, the success of the Manchu conquest and the preoccupation of most scholars with relatively nonpolitical (e.g., philological, text-critical, and bibliographical) projects directed attention away from ideological issues. Not until the later years of the dynasty, especially under pressure from the West and Japan, did both reformers and revolutionaries take renewed interest in broad constitutional issues of the kind that Huang, Gu, Lu, and others had addressed.
When they did, it was in an atmosphere of increasing crisis and soul searching. Radical alternatives were being considered, including some from the West transmitted through Japan (and these somewhat transmuted into Chinese terms). In both Japan and China there was a tendency to interpret the Western conception of natural rights in Neo-Confucian terms as “Heaven’s endowment” (tianfu), which is Zhu Xi’s explanation of “Heaven’s imperative” (tianming) in the first sentence of the Mean (Zhongyong): “Heaven’s imperative” is called the moral nature (xing).16 Here, “Heaven’s imperative” (commonly rendered politically as Heaven’s Mandate) has the broader meaning of “what Heaven has ordained.” “Heaven” had always had a sense of the “natural,” but this included a moral aspect, i.e., not an amoral, “objective” view of nature but one that included the subjective element revealed in the human moral sentiments associated with xing. “Natural law” so interpreted was thus, for Confucians, grounded in human moral sentiments more than in some abstract universal construct.
A related problem was the tendency for Confucians to think of human relations in terms of mutual obligations or duties. In this conception, rights and duties necessarily went together, but if “rights” were grounded in the inborn moral nature and understood in this sense as an inalienable endowment from Heaven, they would achieve a certain dignity and priority over duties, i.e., not contingent on recognition by the state or the performance of duties incurred in society. This was a question of serious concern for those who believed, as a practical matter, that the most urgent priority of the day was the building of an effective, functional state, without which no individual rights could be guaranteed.
Joan Judge’s “The Concept of People’s Rights (minquan) in the Late Qing: Classical and Contemporary Sources of Authority”17 illustrates the process of adaptation by constitutional reformers in the late Qing who sought to incorporate “people’s rights” in a movement that asserted the “people’s powers” without directly challenging the monarchy. In these circumstances, it was natural for Chinese writers to reformulate new political ideas in the vocabulary of earlier Chinese discourse—as the Japanese themselves had done and were continuing to do. And while evocations of the past sometimes led to revisionist misconstructions and to some misconstruing of Western ideas as well, one cannot discount the importance of this effort to deal with fundamental issues of the cultural encounter between East Asia and the West. Although sometimes dismissed by Western observers as sentimental effusions or nostalgic reveries of the past—essentially conservative, if not reactionary—this is to underestimate the depth and persistence of the issues at stake, to which subsequent discourse and debate have repeatedly recurred.
It should have been no surprise that, after the high tide of the twentieth-century revolutionary movement had been reached in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, in its backwash would reappear with renewed—and indeed heightened—significance several of the figures referred to in Peter Zarrow’s discussion of “Citizenship and Human Rights in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Thought.”18 In this process there are notable elements of both continuity and discontinuity. Both reformers and revolutionaries, even those powerfully moved by new currents from the West, are affected in their selection and adaptation of new elements by both cultural predispositions and indispositions, both dissatisfactions with a present seen as seriously handicapped by its past and by worries over the effects of too rapid and abrupt an intrusion of new ideas and practices from the West.
Zarrow focuses on two leading thinkers of the early twentieth century, Liu Shipei, the leader of a significant anarchist movement who anticipated many of the revolutionary changes to come, and Liang Qichao, probably the most influential intellectual figure of the first three decades. Both Liu and Liang represent a scholarly capability for bridging past and present that became increasingly rare after the major shift to Western-style education post-1905 rendered it difficult for Chinese to acquire the command of the classical tradition that still stood Liu and Liang in good stead (and the virulent antitraditionalism that prevailed from the New Culture and May Fourth movements down through Mao’s Cultural Revolution only added to this difficulty).
Liu’s anarchist ideas were marked by a basic commitment to the value of equality—a prime value in Chinese tradition as well, but one historically held in some balance with the need for expertise and structured authority as the meritocratic bureaucracy attempted to reconcile them. In Liu, however, equality was pushed to the limit, circumscribed only by a totalistic, cosmic/human holism that, paradoxically, gave little attention to the definition of individual human rights. It is understandable that this unstructured utopian idealism should lend itself eventually to communism, wherein the egalitarian ideal, governed only by emphatic political authority, would eventually prove inimical to individual rights.
Liang Qichao, by contrast, was far more concerned with both structure and due process. Initially, an advocate of constitutional monarchy during the late Qing, after 1911 he accepted republicanism but held firmly to constitutionalism and to the promotion of “people’s rights.” The latter he conceived, however, not so much as “individual” rights but as rights necessary to the exercise of citizenship in a nation-state.
Liang’s strong adherence to constitutionalism could be seen as consistent with his early admiration for Huang Zongxi as a kind of Confucian constitutionalist; moreover, his concern for developing the kind of civil infrastructure associated by him with the people’s participation in citizenship, while it set a certain limit on the interpretation of people’s rights as individual rights, was not inconsistent with a Confucian view akin to Huang’s. Where Liang decidedly departed from tradition was in his acceptance, under Western and Japanese influence, of the nation-state (rather than the professedly universalist or cosmopolitan dynastic state) as the primary form of political organization and in his reformulation of Confucian self-cultivation to serve the roles and duties of citizenship. In this respect, he could be said to have advanced beyond both Zhu Xi’s concept of the self-cultivation of the leadership elite and Huang Zongxi’s conception of a constitutional infrastructure still largely in the hands of Confucian scholar-officials.
If several of our writers believe it possible to ground the practice of human rights in the Confucian concept of rites, Randall Peerenboom, who both practices law in Beijing and has written on ancient Chinese legal philosophy, seriously questions this. For him, Confucian rites may have a value in establishing a moral consensus and promoting beneficial customs within a community, but this does not protect the individual or the minority from the tyranny of the dictator or the majority.19 Moreover, since rites place a premium on the ideal of social and political harmonization, they, and rites-based views of sound order, lend themselves to authoritarian rule and to conformity, rather than freedom, of thought. Thus in his opinion, a revival of Confucianism in a conservative form emphasizing “harmony” as the supreme value (as currently is the case among its sponsors in the PRC) would be prejudicial to the protection of individual human rights and to the freedom of thought essential to political democracy.
Generally, Peerenboom believes that the Confucian rites and Western conceptions of rights serve different purposes but may be, to some extent, complementary. “In most instances rites can complement rights, providing a moral dimension to interpersonal actions, suggesting possibilities above and beyond the legal relations defined by rights.… The rites may remind us of our moral obligations, our duties to others.” Nevertheless, he also sees a danger in it: “to the extent that rites represent the moral consensus of the community, they exert pressure to conform one’s thinking to others.” Then, too, according to him the emphasis in rites’ thinking on social solidarity has contributed to “the enduring appeal of the utopian myth of harmony, thereby blinding rulers and reformers alike to the realities of disharmony.”
Peerenboom is on strong factual ground when he says that historically Confucianism did not produce liberal democracy, popular sovereignty, democratic elections, civil liberties, and the like. Nonetheless, his argument leans heavily on a theoretical model of Confucianism and may not take into account the developing historical awareness of later Confucian thinkers that moral cultivation and ritual norms were insufficient, in themselves, to cope with the excesses of authoritarian rule, as for instance Huang Zongxi and Liang Qichao correctly perceived the matter, or even as an orthodox Neo-Confucian like Lu Liuliang (a prime exponent of Zhu Xi in the seventeenth century) came up with a radical critique of Chinese despotism, in the context of the rites.
No doubt Peerenboom is correct theoretically and to some extent practically when he sees the ruler as cast by Confucianism in a supreme leadership role, harmonizing divergent views and interests in the society; there are, indeed, abundant examples of courtly, if not utterly sycophantic, officials who credited emperors with such sagelike authority. This is not, however, the whole story. There is evidence also, as early as the Mencius, the Zuo Commentary (Zuozhuan), and Discourses of the States (Guoyu), that contests the legitimacy of rulers who do not listen to criticism and remonstration. And if Peerenboom sees the ruler as the unique interpreter of, and authority on the Way, this was not undisputed; there was the alternative tradition, abundantly recorded in Neo-Confucian literature, that saw the custody of the Way as divided, from the Zhou on down, between the ruler who held power and the wise Confucian mentors, without whose advice and the ruler’s acceptance of it, the latter lost authority and legitimacy.
Among prominent twentieth-century spokesmen for Confucianism, such as Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Carsun Chang, and Xu Fuguan, one finds a readiness to acknowledge that this dissenting Confucian tradition, unable historically to prevail over the politically more dominant dynastic tradition, has welcomed Western constitutional democracy as a support for the more liberal Confucian tradition as they espouse it.20
Our final two papers present different views among Chinese intellectuals with regard to the continuing influence of Confucianism. Merle Goldman21 sees a considerable residue of that influence among leading intellectuals down into recent years, but it is a Confucianism having mostly to do with how intellectuals perceive their role in relation to the state, which bears many resemblances to the role of the traditional literati, especially in their sense of obligation to serve in government out of a responsible concern for the welfare of the people.
The efforts of Wu Han, a scholar and writer as well as vice mayor of Beijing under Mao, is illustrative of this idealistic strain of Confucian-inspired resistance to despotism. What aroused Mao’s ire and resulted in Wu’s martyrdom as a target of the Cultural Revolution was Wu’s play, Hai-Jui Dismissed, in which a sixteenth-century Confucian minister paid with his life for criticizing the emperor. It dramatized the Confucian concept of true loyalty consisting in honest remonstrance to the ruler, i.e., in true dedication to the public interest. Besides making thinly veiled references to Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao, it prefigured Wu’s own martyrdom for challenging Mao.
The historical case and Wu’s play illustrate some key features of how the Confucian legacy has operated in the post-Confucian setting. First of all, history has uses in serving as indirect political criticism when circumstances preclude more direct reference. This has not only been a traditional Confucian use of the past for very present purposes, but it also shows in what way Confucian values may live in popular art (here the drama) long after they have ceased to be taught in doctrinal form—which is as much as to say that, no longer being taught, Confucianism does not survive in its traditional form, as an articulated doctrine, but now lives on in forms more subtle yet still palpable in the popular imagination—in poetry, song, and drama, as the moral grounding and tone of a whole culture rather than as the philosophy of the elite. In such circumstances, the influence of Confucianism may be inchoate and almost impossible to estimate, but it is there, exerting an immeasurable power of attraction.
It may indeed be true, as Jeremy T. Paltiel reiterates, that younger generations in post-Mao China know little about and think less of Confucianism.22 Rather, they perceive it either as a “feudal” remnant being revived and reimposed by an oppressive regime or else as an idealistic, even romantic evocation of the past, mainly by foreigners, that is being adroitly manipulated by the current regime for its own conservative purposes. To some degree, this view may hold for a supposedly “liberated” generation, long since cut off from any knowledge of Confucianism except for the vague, negative impressions they formed of it from the repeated anti-Confucian campaigns of the twentieth century. It must be admitted too that recent advocates of human rights and liberal democracy see little relevance of Confucianism to their own cause. Meanwhile, writers like Wu Han, rare in their own time, are still rarer today. Wu was the product of an education and scholarship under the Guomindang that was at least liberal enough for Wu Han, as a scholar, to learn something of Chinese history and become aware of its traditional moral and political resources. This has been far more difficult since 1949, and thus far less typical of the present generation—many of them unschooled Red Guards—whose political activism in the 1980s and 1990s is more informed by the libertarian May Fourth Movement and by China’s belated opening to the West as part of Deng’s modernization program than it is by anything Confucian. The same is largely true of the developing Chinese legal community in recent years, as is evident from the debates over human rights in legal journals, of which Paltiel gives a most revealing account.
For all this, the exposure of the more recent generation to intellectual trends outside China will make them aware of the importance increasingly being attached to Confucianism abroad, both as a newly recognized—or at least imputed—factor in the successful modernization of other East Asian states and as a serious object of scholarly study outside China. If the new generation expects to live in this larger world, it will have to reckon with these currents abroad, and with more of an understanding of them than May Fourth allowed for. Moreover, if Jeremy Paltiel is right that problems of “national identity” persist in all East Asian countries historically under Confucian influence, and there is ample evidence pointing in that direction, it is unlikely that these can be resolved without the Chinese becoming better informed than they are now of the contents, historical development, and wide cultural extension of Confucianism. If no people can ignore its own past or fail in some way to come to terms with it, it is no less true that Chinese, like other East Asians, will have to deal with such problems in a better educated and thoughtful way, lest this cultural battle be lost by default to those busily appropriating Confucianism for their own regressive—and sometimes repressive—purposes.
In arranging this symposium, I wished to open up a dialogue, as wide ranging as possible, between China and the West—a dialogue that would go beyond the immediate political confrontation over human rights demands and accusations, in order to get at some of the deeper cultural issues that underlie the claims and counterclaims now being made in the political arena. This dialogue was meant to be open and open ended, exposing issues without necessarily settling them. In clarifying them, however, one could, I believe, say that a rough consensus emerged on some points that may serve to advance future dialogue:
1. Confucian values and Confucian discourse over the centuries have been involved with many of the same issues that have concerned Western human rights thinkers, though in somewhat different language.
2. Thinking about human rights, in the form recognized by the Universal Declaration of 1948, is a relatively recent development in the West, which, however, emerges from a long historical development of humanitarian concerns expressed in different religious, ethical, social, and legal traditions. Human rights as currently understood have deep and diverse roots in the West, are hybrid in cultural character, and are still evolving in practice.
3. The same is true with regard to Confucian values in China, and more broadly in East Asia as a whole, to the extent that East Asian countries otherwise culturally diverse have shared in certain common Confucian values and in the modern period have faced a similar challenge from Western ideas and practices. It is significant, however, that several East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) have not found their Confucian past an obstacle to the acceptance of Western-style constitutions and guarantees of human rights. Cultural diversity did not prevent Chinese representatives from actively participating in the formulation of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, as they found no incompatibility between the essential humanistic values of Confucianism and these new human rights initiatives.
4. Although some contrast may be drawn between a greater emphasis on individual autonomy in modern Western conceptions of human rights and a greater emphasis on social and communitarian values in Confucianism, the contrast is often overdrawn at the expense of shared concerns and understandings. Social and communitarian values have by no means been lacking in traditions that have contributed to human rights thinking in the West, while respect for the dignity of the self and person have been central to Confucianism from its inception.
5. Key to these questions is the linking in Confucianism between the primacy of the morally responsible self and the social norms embodied in Confucian ritual decorum, as compared to the “Western” coupling of individual rights and legal protections. To some extent, the Confucian reliance on ritual norms was at the expense of legal protections for the individual, but in the long-term evolution of Confucian thinking there was an increasing consciousness of the need for law in a constitutional sense and in the sense of due process. This rendered it possible for at least some prominent Chinese thinkers in the early twentieth century to view the advent of Western constitutionalism and human rights legislation as quite congenial to their own sense of need in this respect. At the same time, some Westerners concerned with social and communitarian values have been ready to find in Confucianism a remedy to what they see as an excessive individualism and libertarianism in the West.
6. One could look, as some scholars do, for a reconciliation of the two in a complementary relationship, but the picture is complicated by the legacy of anti-Confucianism in the successive liberationist, revolutionary movements in China from the early twentieth century down to recent times. Thus there are cleavages today, cutting across China, East Asia, and the West, as between divergent understandings of both Confucianism and human rights and whether priority is to be given to individual rights, social duties, or communitarian needs. Should these indeed be seen as anything but mutually implicated and equally necessary? Is it not specious to assert that subsistence needs and economic progress in underdeveloped countries should come before political freedoms? Can either be achieved without the other? What gauge could there be for a satisfactory level of subsistence as a precondition for the granting of civil rights or for the level of economic progress to be achieved before human rights are recognized?
7. The foregoing are all questions that bear further investigation and discussion, but at least two others have a major bearing on the outcome of human rights issues. One is the question of civil society: Could any kind of human rights program, whether conceived in individual/social or legal/ritual terms, be effective in the absence of both a civil-political infrastructure and a moral culture supportive of them? The other question is whether the urgent industrial, technological, environmental, and ecological problems that confront us today—and China in some respects more urgently even than most others—do not demand new human rights conceptions and practices, with a humane concern extending beyond the human to the earth and all forms of life. These cannot but concern us all, East and West, in equal measure today. Thus the dialogue must go on.
