Human Rights in China: Rethinking the Debate 

Thanks to a variety of factors - ranging from the Hong Kong handover to the release of longtime prisoner of conscience Wei Jingsheng to the recent Hollywood fascination with the Dalai Lama and Tibet - the Beijing regime's human rights record has recently received a lot of media attention. This is a good time, therefore, to assess how scholarship on human rights, which has of late become increasingly concerned with historical issues, might help us sort through the issues in the debate on China.

For two reasons, the debate on China provides an excellent test case for assessing the value of looking backward when thinking about human rights. Firstly, it is a debate where new approaches are needed. People staking out opposing positions seem to agree on nothing. Has the human rights situation in China been improving, or is it foolish to point to incremental changes in specific areas when many disturbing abuses still occur? Does the concept of human rights embrace 'social' and 'economic' protections as well as 'civil' and 'religious' liberties? Are there universal standards or is it necessary to apply separate criteria when judging Asian, as opposed to Western or liberal, as opposed to Marxist regimes?

The debate on China is a good test case also because references to history already fill the polemics. Defenders of the Beijing regime refer to Western imperialist actions of the past as 'abuses' of human rights that make hypocritical contemporary foreign denunciations of China's record. Others, who stress Asian values, claim that historical traditions can be used to explain, if not necessarily justify, the tendency of Chinese leaders to place a higher premium than their Western counterparts on social order. Critics of the Chinese regime, for their part, remind us that the current Chinese leaders head the same Communist Party responsible for the massive repression of the 1960s and the Beijing massacre of 1989. A few even liken contemporary China to Nazi Germany. Harry Wu has said the prisons of the laogai  (gulag) system are essentially the same as Hitler's concentration camps.

Such scattershot uses of history tend to do more harm than good. By contrast, careful use of the new historically minded scholarship on human rights can clarify rather than muddy the waters.

In 1994, Princeton published historical sociologist Daniel Chirot's Modern Tyrants , which analyses the common traits shared by the figures responsible for the worst abuses of rights. In 1995, Basic Books published Historical Change and Human Rights , a collection based on the 1994 Oxford Amnesty Lectures - all given by historians or historical sociologists - with an 'Introduction' by the prominent historian Olwen Hufton. In 1996, St. Martin's Press brought out The French Revolution and Human Rights , edited and introduced by the historian Lynn Hunt, and Marina Svensson of Lund University completed her dissertation, 'The Chinese Conception of Human Rights: The Debate on Human Rights in China, 1898-1949'. In 1997, human rights was the theme of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. None of these works provides a magic tool for sorting out all the confusions of the China debate. Each, however, has something to offer.

Take, for example, the matter of distinctions between Chinese and Western and Marxist and liberal rights traditions. It is often assumed that there is a clear split in each case relating to tensions between collective security and individual freedom, as well as between social protections and civil liberties. Now, it is certainly true that one can find these tensions handled differently in the writings of Confucius as opposed to those of Locke, Marx as opposed to Mill, and so forth. Nevertheless, several of these works suggest that the distinctions between traditions are seldom clear-cut.

Svensson, for example, shows that, long before the founding of the People's Republic, there was a well-developed literature in Chinese on human rights to which many prominent intellectuals, representing all points on the political spectrum, had contributed. The same figures who helped integrate into the Chinese tradition concepts associated with imported ideologies such as Marxism, Social Darwinism and liberalism had their say on human rights. To claim that China lacks a rich 'historical tradition' of valuing rights and thinking about them in ways comparable to those found in the West only makes sense, therefore, if we ignore an important period. In short, there are plenty of modern Chinese canonical thinkers for defenders of individual liberties to cite.

One matter puts in a different light the claim that Chinese emphasise collective order, Westerners individual liberties: the exclusionary policies that, until 1928, banned most Chinese (servants were exempted) from entering certain public parks in those parts of Shanghai under foreign control. Apologists for the Beijing regime cite these policies as examples of the kinds of human abuses that were common in China when Shanghai was a 'semi-colonial' treaty port. The point here is that, in the debates over exclusionary policies in Shanghai in this period, it was Westerners who tended to stress the need to prioritise 'order' (keep the natives out or chaos would result) and the Chinese who wanted 'rights' extended. At the American Historical Association meeting, Linda Kerber described a current misconception about social and civil rights: that only in Marxist and Third World traditions does one find economic protection taken seriously as human rights. She reminded her audience that, in the USA, attempts to work into the liberal tradition just such a notion have been made periodically since at least Franklin Roosevelt's day.

Switching from the 'rights' to the 'human' side of the term, Hufton argues convincingly that, as interesting as it is to compare definitions of 'right' and what kinds of 'rights' are treasured, we need to ask another question: 'Who . . . at any one time, is considered human?' Chirot's book illustrates the importance of the converse question: Who is considered subhuman? One thing modern tyrants have in common, he claims, is a tendency to dehumanise whole groups. The worst kinds of abuses occur when regimes place people in subhuman categories not because of what they have done, but because of who they are. Hunt notes that the issuing of the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen' did not end the debate about rights in France. Instead, it 'opened it up in new ways', since it specified what the valued rights were but was unclear about who was entitled to them. Revolutionaries had to ask how broadly the category 'man and citizen' should be interpreted. This brought onto the table the notion that groups routinely denied rights -- the 'poor, the propertyless, religious minorities, blacks . . . even women' -- might properly deserve many things.

Exclusion questions remain with us, as Hunt points out, though they have been re-phrased: 'human' typically stands in for 'man', while 'citizen' is left out. The first change is a positive development, but the latter is problematic. After all, some of the so-called 'human rights' specified in UN declarations are really meant to apply to 'citizens', sometimes 'adult citizens' - few would argue, for example, that children have the same 'right to work' as others - so the nature of citizenship is still important to debate.

Freedoms are still not adequately protected in China: see, for example, the harsh new sentence handed down in 1996 to Wang Dan, a veteran of the 1989 protests who has continued to criticise the regime. Nevertheless, focusing on definitions of 'human', and on dehumanising categories, provides a better method for comparing past and present states of human rights in China than does concentrating on specific individuals or creating lists of specific rights and abuses.

Is the regime using the same kinds of criteria to place people in dehumanising categories as were employed in the past? The answer is simple: No. This suggests that, as serious as the Chinese human rights situation remains, important changes for the better have taken place. The worst horrors of the Cultural Revolution took place when large segments of the population were classified as feirenmin  (literally: non-people), counter-revolutionaries, or bad elements, and when these labels were routinely applied to people on the basis of parentage. This no longer happens. When members of religious groups are persecuted, it is because of things they do or profess; the same is true of those such as Wei Jingsheng (who continue to be classified as 'counter-revolutionaries' or bad elements). In the laogai  system, in contrast to the Nazi concentration camps, dehumanising terms are not linked to blood.

However, it is crucial to stress that historical works also remind us of the need to be wary of any blanket statement that matters are getting better or worse in a country as a whole. Revolutionary changes (like the radical economic restructuring currently underway in China) can have differing, even opposite, effects on members of contrasting social groups.

For example, in the same period that has seen the move away in China from categorical political dehumanisation, human rights abuses with gendered dimensions (such as the kidnapping and sale of women) have been on the rise. More generally, and ironically - given the fact that the Beijing regime still claims to be working to introduce 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' - many of the material protections that Marxist governments have considered important 'human rights' have been disappearing at an alarming rate in the People's Republic. Indeed, China is a country where cities in many respects perhaps better exemplify 'Capitalism with Dickensian Characteristics'.

The debate on China needs to be reformulated. This article has tried to suggest some useful ways of doing so, not least by focusing on the historical turn in human rights studies and on the promise it holds for those interested in making sense of the present as well as understanding the past.

Dr Jeffrey Wasserstrom is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. In October 1997 he gave a talk to the CSD Seminar on the 1919 and 1989 student revolts in China entitled 'Legitimation and Its Discontents'. He is co-editor (with Lynn Hunt and Marilyn Young) of Human Rights and Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 1999).