Continuing the Conversation on Chinese Human Rights

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 11, Issue , 1997, Pages 177-205

  Ames, Roger T ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84937269718     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.1997.tb00027.x     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. See, for example, Xin Chunying, “A Brief History of the Modern Human Rights Discourse in China,” in Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 4–5.
2. The titles of this body of literature are revealing: Liu Shengping and Xia Yong, eds., Human Rights and the World (Renquan yu shijie) (Peking: Renmin fayuan chubanshe, 1996)
3. Song Huichang, On Contemporary Human Rights (Xiandai renquan lun) (Peking: Renmin chubanshe, 1993)
4. Liu Nanlai, ed., Developing Nations and Human Rights (Fazhanzhong guojia yu requan) (Chengdu: Siquan renmin chubanshe, 1994).
5. For a discussion of the transcendental pretense, see Robert Solomon, The Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense 1750–1850 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).
6. Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
7. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)
8. excerpted in “America's Search for a New Public Philosophy,” Atlantic Monthly 277 (March 1996), 57–74.
9. Sandel, Atlantic Monthly, 74.
10. Václav Havel, “The Politics of Responsibility” in World Policy Journal 12 (Fall 1995), 82.
11. See Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 16–19, esp. 18n6. When he locates the essential conditions of being human in the individual, and insists that these conditions are prior to and not conditional upon social actions, he is in fact making them transcendent in the strict sense that they determine human conduct while human conduct does not determine them.
12. Jack Donnelly, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (forthcoming). This definition is carried over here from all of Donnelly's published work.
13. See Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice and, more recently, International Human Rights (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
14. Joanne Bauer points out Donnelly's inconsistency in claiming that human rights are at once “universal” and at the same time a response to the specific conditions in premouem Europe-, the development of nation-states and the market system. See Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 3. Donnelly further argues that such rights cannot be conditioned by the economic circumstances of developing nations, while at the same time asserting that they arise in response to the specific economic circumstances of Europe.
15. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 23. For the alternative definitions
16. see Tai Hung-chao, “Human Rights in Taiwan: Convergence of Two Political Cultures?” in James C. Hsiung, ed., Human Rights in an Eastern Perspective (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1985)
17. John King Fairbank, The United States and China, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)
18. Lo Chung-sho, “Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition” in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949)
19. Xie Bohua and Niu Lihua, “Review and Comments on the Issue of Human Rights,” paper presented at JUST International Conference on “Rethinking Human Rights,” (Kuala Lumpur, 1994).
20. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 23.
21. Universal Human Rights,. 27.
22. Donnelly, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” 24–25
23. “Human Rights and Asian Values,”. 27–28.
24. See Yash Ghai, “Human Rights and Governance: The Asia Debate” in Occasional Paper Series 4 (November 1994) by the Asia Foundation Center for Asian Pacific Affairs.
25. As Donald Emmerson observes: “Not all East Asian elites who worry about disorder are self-serving cynics looking for excuses to maintain the status quo…. [T]he greater incidence in Southeast Asia of spectacularly multicultural societies where the ever-present risk of ethnic and religious violence leads such officials as Lee and Mahathir to question the capacity of Western liberal democracy to ensure social discipline and order.” Japan Programs Occasional Papers 5 (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1994), 12.
26. Daniel Bell describes the anticipated consequences of other cultures to this kind of insensitivity in his “A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore,” Political Theory, 25 (February 1997), pp. 6–32.
27. Adapted from Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 1954), 24–26.
28. This is the argument of Alisdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988). On a bad day, after the manner Jeremy Bentham viewed it, human rights is even seen as “nonsense on stilts.”
29. See “Anarchical Fallacies” in Collected Papers (1843)
30. reprinted in A. I. Meldin, ed., Human Rights 32 (1970).
31. See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
32. See Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 116: “Underlying such judgments is the inherent universality of basic moral precepts, at least as we understand morality in the West. We simply do not believe that our moral precepts are for us and us alone…. For most of us, morality is inherently universalistic and egalitarian.”
33. Carol Gluck's contribution to “The Call for a new Asian Identity: An Examination of the Cultural Arguments and Their Implications” in Japan Programs Occasional Papers No. 5, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, p. 6.
34. Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 1.
35. Human Rights Dialogue.
36. Brian E. McKnight, The Quality of Mercy (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1981).
37. See Zhang Weiren's analysis of Qing dynasty legal cases in which he demonstrates that justifications generally take the form of appeals to those values transmitted in canonical philosophical literature. Qingdai fazhi yanjiu (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1983).
38. I am responding here to Jack Donnelly's remarks on the alternative traditions. See especially Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 82–83.
39. Sandel, Atlantic Monthly, 66.
40. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
41. The quotation is in Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 20.
42. Ku Hung-ming, The Discourses and Says of Confucius (1898; Taipei: Prophet Press, 1976)
43. Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Macmillan, 1938), respectively.
44. James Legge, The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong University Press, 1960).
45. For a fuller discussion of yi as “appropriateness,” see Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius.
46. “Public” or “public-spirited” (gong).
47. This way of thinking about language anticipates Ferdinand Saussure and a non-referential notion of language. It is not an enormous leap to understand how Jorge Luis Borges's “Chinese encyclopedia” is not much different from the actual encyclopedias that organize Chinese knowledge. Borges in his short story “The Language of John Wilkins” (in E. Rodriguez and A. Reid, eds., Borges: A Reader [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981]) refers to “a certain encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
48. Michel Foucault responded to this “Chinese encyclopedia” with The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
49. For an elaboration of this “art of contextualization,” see Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, and Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
50. See Ted de Bary, ed., “Confucian Harmony and Freedom of Thought: The Right to Think Versus Right Thinking,” forthcoming in a volume on Chinese attitudes toward human rights (New York: Columbia University Press).
51. “Confucian Harmony and Freedom of Thought: The Right to Think Versus Right Thinking,”., ms. 2.
52. See Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992). There is an analogy here with the legal culture of liberal democracies, where controlling the terms of discourse is an enormous source of power.
53. Donald J. Munro, “The Shape of Chinese Values in the Eye of an American Philosopher” in R. Terrill, ed., The China Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 40.
54. See R. Randle Edwards, “Civil and Social Rights: Theory and Practice in Chinese Law Today,” in R. Edwards, Louis Hetikin, and Andrew J. Nathan, eds., Human Rights in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 44.
55. This position is widely held. Compare in the same volume Louis Henkin, “The Human Rights Idea in Contemporary China: A Comparative Perspective,” 39
56. Andrew J. Nathan, “Sources of Chinese Rights Thinking,” 141–147.
57. Ann Kent, Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993).
58. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens OH: The Ohio University Press, 1927), 102.
59. John Dewey, John Dewey: Lectures in China 1919–21 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1973), 151.
60. See Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) that has fueled the liberalism debate
61. Bell's Communitarianism and Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
62. For a good beginning in this exercise, see Randy Peerenboom, “What's Wrong with Chinese Rights? Towards a Theory of Rights with Chinese-Characteristics” in Harvard Human Rights Journal 29 (1993).
63. Henry Rosemont, Jr., “Why Take Rights Seriously? A Confucian Critique” in L. Rouner, ed., Human Rights and the World's Religions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 175.
64. R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17–18.
65. Peerenboom, “Confucian Harmony and Freedom of Thought: The Right to Think Versus Right Thinking,” ms., 26.
66. Edwards, “Civil and Social Rights,” 41.
67. Carnegie Council, Human Rights Dialogue 3, p. 5; see also p. 1.
68. Yash Ghai, “Human Rights and Governance,” 8.
69. Stephen Young, “Human Rights Questions in Southeast Asian Culture: Problems for American Response,” in Paula Newberg, ed., The Politics of Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 209.