Claremont McKenna College
Thursday, March 6 & Friday, March 7, 2008
Last week, China announced that it is ready to resume human rights dialogues with the United States, which have been interrupted for four years since 2004. These dialogues were initiated under US pressure in the aftermath of the 1989 Tian’anmen crackdown, and were something completely new for Beijing. To meet the challenge, Beijing issued its first White Book on human rights in 1991, insisting that China’s record had been excellent in all areas: political, economic, socio-cultural, labor and religious rights, rights of minorities, of women and minors, of disabled people, and rights in legal procedures. Complaining of interference of its internal affairs and of the ideological framework supposedly imposed on it, the government repeatedly emphasized how much social welfare had been improved under the CCP’s leadership. The then president Jiang Zemin’s notorious slogan, “human rights are the rights to survive,” was initially raised in this context.
A key conceptual issue in the White Book was its focus on protective conditions afforded to the populace by a government purportedly representing the collective in toto. Emphasizing its history as a Third World country, with numerous references to infringements and abuses of its sovereign rights by imperialism in the past, it argued in effect that rights accrued to individuals can never be evaluated universally and must be subsumed into collective’s overall interest in consideration.
Nowadays, the Jiang Zemin slogan is no longer propagated noisily by Beijing, but the same logic is repeated in almost all Chinese official utterances on issues relating to human rights. Viewed historically, it is undeniable that there is some truth in the argument. However, in the logical chain of this official line, an important link is missing, which is the individual’s authorization of the collective to act on her or his behalf; That is, the political legitimization of the collective entity itself. Officially, when being pressured, Beijing still invokes the revolutionary victory of 1949 as the basis of its legitimacy to rule and to deal with issues concerning the conditions of human life. It was exactly the question of humanism, however, that most effectively challenged the legitimacy of the CCP in the early eighties.
The Reform Era started in the late 1970s, as a direct response to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Intense reflections on that extraordinary decade had already been going on for some time, among Party cadres and dissidents alike. At the same time, underground literature, poetry in particular, ventured most daringly into the sphere of humanism, exploring the existential value of the individual being. By the late seventies, fictions rose to the same calling, when Dai Qing, another speaker in our afternoon program, started her writing career in the same vein. Works like Dai Houying’s “Oh, Human Being” increasingly held humanistic values and human dignity as the top criteria in critical reassessment of social practices under Mao.
Politically, exactly at the moment when the democracy Wall in central Beijing was in full spate, attracting large crowds in late 1978, the Party’s Central Committee suddenly changed course in the middle of a working session, turning its attention to redressing wrongs committed in previous political campaigns. Older Party leaders, such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, laid their stress on the Cultural Revolution, from which they themselves had suffered. However, Hu Yaobang, who was younger, pushed the drive further, to redress the half million cases of those persecuted in the anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s. Originally responsible for the anti-Rightist campaign, Deng Xiaoping could not have been pleased with this move. Hu Yaobang, without really adhering strictly to principles of justice, nevertheless appealed to humanistic values, emphasizing not only the human suffering involved in these persecutions, but also their meaningless waste of talents and creative energy. Thus, in the name of humanistic values and human dignity, the Party’s political practices were also assaulted.
Theoretical reflections soon followed, exposing the Party’s legitimacy crisis. Months after the Central Committee’s meeting, a number of reflective works inspired by humanistic perspectives hit the press, including an influential article by Mr. Gao Ertai. Cui Weiping has recently published a well-researched and well-argued article on this important intellectual development, known in China as the debate of “Marxist humanism and the question of alienation.” Attacks on the Party’s line in this wave of lively writing were sharply pointed. For example, Mr. Gao characterized the Party’s ideological operations in these blunt words: “The People in the abstract has become the God; whereas the people in the concrete have been reified as sacrifices on the altar for God.”
Faced with these external challenges and internal divisions, the Party first exploited them to its own advantage and then launched a counterattack in late 1983, when Deng Xiaoping and his ideological allies had consolidated their power at the center. As Cui Weiping has noted, the Party had by then already adopted the theoretical framework that it continues to employ today. Specifically, the Party’s ideologues separated the realm of historical explanations, where they maintained humanism had nothing to contribute; and the realm of ethical norms, where humanism was tolerable to some extent on a subordinate terrain. Wang Ruoshui, a comrade-in-arms of Mr. Gao in the debate, rebuffed this division, arguing that once humanism was compartmentalized in this way, it lost any significance as compass for social change, and that in the contrary China needed to reestablish the social purpose of seeking to realize the true essence of humanity in and for every member of the society.
In this vision the Party instantly detected a subversive danger. The campaign against “Spiritual Pollution” of humanism did not go very far in late 1983, due to Hu Yaobao’s intervention. But by 1987, Hu Yaobang was removed as the Party’s Secretary-General for permitting political dissent and student protest. Meanwhile, Wang Ruoshui was eventually kicked out of the Party. Wang, Mr. Gao, and couple of intellectual activists persisted, launching their short-lived journal New Enlightenment in early 1989. In mid-April that year, Hu Yaobang’s death triggered the massive pro-democracy movement centered at Tian’anmen Square.
=== === ===
At that time, notions of human rights – as distinct from philosophical conceptions of humanism – were still quite marginal in China, even though some veterans of the 1979 Democracy Wall period, such as Ren Wanding, had been promoting them for years. Roughly speaking, the concept of “rights” entered China’s social life in the mid eighties, when Beijing became a member of the UN Human Rights Conference. Subsequently, Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s son paralyzed in the Cultural Revolution, started an unprecedented association for the disabled. Still, upholding “human rights’ (renquan) as universal and inalienable entitlements of the individual was generally considered a weak position in this period. For most Chinese, it was not until the nineties that this idea acquired real value and dignity.
Between the suppression of the humanism debate in the early eighties and the accepted dignity of human rights in the nineties, there was a tilting period. What held greater sway in people’s imagination was the idea of civil rights, which raised more directly the issue of citizen’s power vis-à-vis the legitimacy of the existing political order. In fact, to most participants of the nation-wide 1989 pro-democracy movement, civic rights were probably not clearly distinguished yet from the idea of political power. The two words in Chinese have an identical pronunciation, quanli, and the blurring of them involved more than just vagueness. For even if a distinction between them was made, the idea of quanli as rights leaned heavily towards the exercise of political power – or, so to speak, in positive liberty rather than the negative liberty of freedom from interference. Thus, individual labor rights could easily be understood as the collective power of labor and individual citizen’s rights as citizens’ collective social power. In a sense, it was this equation between rights and popular power that alarmed the power-clutching CCP the most, stoking its fear of social movements and civic participation to the extreme.
For the protesters of 1989, the intermingled understanding worked both ways. On the one hand, as Han Dongfang’s experience at the square testifies, fellow workers in many factories hesitated to join his autonomous union, partly because they could not yet fully grasp the distinction between an official union that make them the country’s collective master on paper and an autonomous union that would reclaim their individual rights and restore dignity to them. On the other hand, the notion of rights shed fresh and critical light on the issue of political legitimization in the PRC, empowering and emboldening individual citizens in political participation. Faculty and students at the China Politics and Law University made a famous large placard. Copied on it were passages taken from the PRC’s constitution, all concerning citizens’ rights. It was cheered at wherever it was held aloft in the huge rallies of those days.
The awakening sense in terms of civic rights went hand in hand with the belief of fighting for essential human dignity. One big banner erested at Tian’anmen Square had lines taken from a poem by Bei Dao, a leading poet in the underground poetry movement since the seventies. Translated roughly, they read like the following:
Never kneel down on the ground
To prove the height of the executioners
So that they may block the breeze of freedom
In the original poem, a few lines before these words, the poet proudly proclaims:
I am not a hero
At a time when there is no more heroes
I only want to be a human being
Contrasting an antihero “human being” to the executioners who, blocking freedom’s breeze, could order at will anyone to kneel down before them, the poet best captures the political gist embedded in the perceived human dignity in the Chinese 1980s.
The democracy movement of 1989 was crushed by force. But since the mid-nineties, human rights consciousness in China has generally increased, thanks in part to persistent foreign pressures. Human rights concerns, even if compartmentalized, have helped many suffering people on a case-by-case basis, me included, and are urgently needed to help many more. By the same token, we should admit that not all Beijing’s accusations that Washington has its own record of human rights abuses are unfounded; and these cannot all easily be answered by reference to differences in legal settings, either. In China or Darfur, in the US or US-occupied Iraq, the premises of any discussion of human rights are always, if I may say, political. Without political space for civic activism, and without procedural politics to ensure renewable political legitimization of the state, a society is ill prepared to take effective actions against human rights abuses. In this sense, to improve human rights situation in China, comprehensive political reform or even a revolution will have to be on the agenda.
A key conceptual issue in the White Book was its focus on protective conditions afforded to the populace by a government purportedly representing the collective in toto. Emphasizing its history as a Third World country, with numerous references to infringements and abuses of its sovereign rights by imperialism in the past, it argued in effect that rights accrued to individuals can never be evaluated universally and must be subsumed into collective’s overall interest in consideration.
Nowadays, the Jiang Zemin slogan is no longer propagated noisily by Beijing, but the same logic is repeated in almost all Chinese official utterances on issues relating to human rights. Viewed historically, it is undeniable that there is some truth in the argument. However, in the logical chain of this official line, an important link is missing, which is the individual’s authorization of the collective to act on her or his behalf; That is, the political legitimization of the collective entity itself. Officially, when being pressured, Beijing still invokes the revolutionary victory of 1949 as the basis of its legitimacy to rule and to deal with issues concerning the conditions of human life. It was exactly the question of humanism, however, that most effectively challenged the legitimacy of the CCP in the early eighties.
The Reform Era started in the late 1970s, as a direct response to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Intense reflections on that extraordinary decade had already been going on for some time, among Party cadres and dissidents alike. At the same time, underground literature, poetry in particular, ventured most daringly into the sphere of humanism, exploring the existential value of the individual being. By the late seventies, fictions rose to the same calling, when Dai Qing, another speaker in our afternoon program, started her writing career in the same vein. Works like Dai Houying’s “Oh, Human Being” increasingly held humanistic values and human dignity as the top criteria in critical reassessment of social practices under Mao.
Politically, exactly at the moment when the democracy Wall in central Beijing was in full spate, attracting large crowds in late 1978, the Party’s Central Committee suddenly changed course in the middle of a working session, turning its attention to redressing wrongs committed in previous political campaigns. Older Party leaders, such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, laid their stress on the Cultural Revolution, from which they themselves had suffered. However, Hu Yaobang, who was younger, pushed the drive further, to redress the half million cases of those persecuted in the anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s. Originally responsible for the anti-Rightist campaign, Deng Xiaoping could not have been pleased with this move. Hu Yaobang, without really adhering strictly to principles of justice, nevertheless appealed to humanistic values, emphasizing not only the human suffering involved in these persecutions, but also their meaningless waste of talents and creative energy. Thus, in the name of humanistic values and human dignity, the Party’s political practices were also assaulted.
Theoretical reflections soon followed, exposing the Party’s legitimacy crisis. Months after the Central Committee’s meeting, a number of reflective works inspired by humanistic perspectives hit the press, including an influential article by Mr. Gao Ertai. Cui Weiping has recently published a well-researched and well-argued article on this important intellectual development, known in China as the debate of “Marxist humanism and the question of alienation.” Attacks on the Party’s line in this wave of lively writing were sharply pointed. For example, Mr. Gao characterized the Party’s ideological operations in these blunt words: “The People in the abstract has become the God; whereas the people in the concrete have been reified as sacrifices on the altar for God.”
Faced with these external challenges and internal divisions, the Party first exploited them to its own advantage and then launched a counterattack in late 1983, when Deng Xiaoping and his ideological allies had consolidated their power at the center. As Cui Weiping has noted, the Party had by then already adopted the theoretical framework that it continues to employ today. Specifically, the Party’s ideologues separated the realm of historical explanations, where they maintained humanism had nothing to contribute; and the realm of ethical norms, where humanism was tolerable to some extent on a subordinate terrain. Wang Ruoshui, a comrade-in-arms of Mr. Gao in the debate, rebuffed this division, arguing that once humanism was compartmentalized in this way, it lost any significance as compass for social change, and that in the contrary China needed to reestablish the social purpose of seeking to realize the true essence of humanity in and for every member of the society.
In this vision the Party instantly detected a subversive danger. The campaign against “Spiritual Pollution” of humanism did not go very far in late 1983, due to Hu Yaobao’s intervention. But by 1987, Hu Yaobang was removed as the Party’s Secretary-General for permitting political dissent and student protest. Meanwhile, Wang Ruoshui was eventually kicked out of the Party. Wang, Mr. Gao, and couple of intellectual activists persisted, launching their short-lived journal New Enlightenment in early 1989. In mid-April that year, Hu Yaobang’s death triggered the massive pro-democracy movement centered at Tian’anmen Square.
=== === ===
At that time, notions of human rights – as distinct from philosophical conceptions of humanism – were still quite marginal in China, even though some veterans of the 1979 Democracy Wall period, such as Ren Wanding, had been promoting them for years. Roughly speaking, the concept of “rights” entered China’s social life in the mid eighties, when Beijing became a member of the UN Human Rights Conference. Subsequently, Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s son paralyzed in the Cultural Revolution, started an unprecedented association for the disabled. Still, upholding “human rights’ (renquan) as universal and inalienable entitlements of the individual was generally considered a weak position in this period. For most Chinese, it was not until the nineties that this idea acquired real value and dignity.
Between the suppression of the humanism debate in the early eighties and the accepted dignity of human rights in the nineties, there was a tilting period. What held greater sway in people’s imagination was the idea of civil rights, which raised more directly the issue of citizen’s power vis-à-vis the legitimacy of the existing political order. In fact, to most participants of the nation-wide 1989 pro-democracy movement, civic rights were probably not clearly distinguished yet from the idea of political power. The two words in Chinese have an identical pronunciation, quanli, and the blurring of them involved more than just vagueness. For even if a distinction between them was made, the idea of quanli as rights leaned heavily towards the exercise of political power – or, so to speak, in positive liberty rather than the negative liberty of freedom from interference. Thus, individual labor rights could easily be understood as the collective power of labor and individual citizen’s rights as citizens’ collective social power. In a sense, it was this equation between rights and popular power that alarmed the power-clutching CCP the most, stoking its fear of social movements and civic participation to the extreme.
For the protesters of 1989, the intermingled understanding worked both ways. On the one hand, as Han Dongfang’s experience at the square testifies, fellow workers in many factories hesitated to join his autonomous union, partly because they could not yet fully grasp the distinction between an official union that make them the country’s collective master on paper and an autonomous union that would reclaim their individual rights and restore dignity to them. On the other hand, the notion of rights shed fresh and critical light on the issue of political legitimization in the PRC, empowering and emboldening individual citizens in political participation. Faculty and students at the China Politics and Law University made a famous large placard. Copied on it were passages taken from the PRC’s constitution, all concerning citizens’ rights. It was cheered at wherever it was held aloft in the huge rallies of those days.
The awakening sense in terms of civic rights went hand in hand with the belief of fighting for essential human dignity. One big banner erested at Tian’anmen Square had lines taken from a poem by Bei Dao, a leading poet in the underground poetry movement since the seventies. Translated roughly, they read like the following:
Never kneel down on the ground
To prove the height of the executioners
So that they may block the breeze of freedom
In the original poem, a few lines before these words, the poet proudly proclaims:
I am not a hero
At a time when there is no more heroes
I only want to be a human being
Contrasting an antihero “human being” to the executioners who, blocking freedom’s breeze, could order at will anyone to kneel down before them, the poet best captures the political gist embedded in the perceived human dignity in the Chinese 1980s.
The democracy movement of 1989 was crushed by force. But since the mid-nineties, human rights consciousness in China has generally increased, thanks in part to persistent foreign pressures. Human rights concerns, even if compartmentalized, have helped many suffering people on a case-by-case basis, me included, and are urgently needed to help many more. By the same token, we should admit that not all Beijing’s accusations that Washington has its own record of human rights abuses are unfounded; and these cannot all easily be answered by reference to differences in legal settings, either. In China or Darfur, in the US or US-occupied Iraq, the premises of any discussion of human rights are always, if I may say, political. Without political space for civic activism, and without procedural politics to ensure renewable political legitimization of the state, a society is ill prepared to take effective actions against human rights abuses. In this sense, to improve human rights situation in China, comprehensive political reform or even a revolution will have to be on the agenda.
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