Human rights are often a contentious issue in the dialogue between East and West. In response to the human-rights-based foreign policy of the United States, the Communist authorities in mainland China have asserted that human rights are a Western concept ill-suited to the Chinese.

But are human rights really a Western "import" that doesn't mesh with "Asian values" and Confucian culture?

Harry Hsiao, a professor of Pacific and Asian studies at the University of Victoria in Canada and editor of Confucian Thought and Democratic Human Rights by the renowned Confucian scholar Hsu Fu-kuan, notes that there are four different schools of thought about the relationship between Confucianism and democratic human rights.

A dehumanizing philosophy?

The first holds that the Confucians were opposed to democracy, freedom and human rights. This school was dominant in the generation that came of age during the May 4th Movement. Lu Xun's belief that "traditional Chinese teachings destroy people's humanity" is one such example. The second school holds that democracy, freedom and human rights are poorly suited to Chinese and are Western concepts under whose banner foreigners meddle with domestic Chinese concerns. Hence, Asians must be on guard against them.

The third school is the exact reverse, stressing that Confucian thought is very much in keeping with democracy, freedom and human rights.

In an article in the Confucius and Mencius Monthly entitled "Pre-Qin-Dynasty Conceptions of Human Rights," the mainland scholar Cheng Linhui argued that such Confucian tenets as "the people are more important than the ruler" and "the people are the root of the nation" affirm the importance of respecting people's humanity. Cheng noted that both Confucius and Mozi were opposed to burying people alive to accompany important personages on their journey after death and that Mencius advocated protection of private property, which show that they wanted to protect people's rights to life and property. He also pointed out that Confucius praised Zi Chan of the state of Zheng for opposing the destruction of public forums, which shows support for freedom of speech, and that Mencius was of the opinion that bad rulers should be removed and sent into exile and that people even had the right to kill tyrants, which constitutes a sort of right to resist unjust rule.

"In traditional Chinese thinking there were human rights, there just wasn't the term for them," says Chai Sung-lin, chairman of the Chinese Human Rights Association. Apart from the support for human rights expressed in pre-Qin thought, when Liu Bang ruled at the end of the Qin, he and the elders mandated in law that those who killed would die themselves, and those who injured and robbed would be punished. "This provided a legal basis for protecting people's rights to life and property."

Two years ago Tsai Jen-hou, a professor of philosophy at Tunghai University, was invited to the 142nd anniversary celebrations of Singapore's Hainan Guan (an association for those Singaporeans who trace their ancestry to Hainan Island in China). In his speech "Human Rights from a Confucian Perspective," he noted that in traditional Western class-based society, human rights were ignored and violated. This is why, he argues, human rights movements have taken hold there so vigorously. Although Chinese didn't used to have a term for human rights, because "humaneness, human ethics and human morality" are all basic guiding principles in Chinese life, "for several thousand years, people in China actually enjoyed greater human rights than in the West."

"Western human rights are what people demand and wrest from the government; whereas Chinese benevolent rule is what the government provides the people on its own initiative. In A Comparison of Chinese and Western Conceptions of Human Rights, the legal scholar Chang Yi-ting holds that Chinese society uses the power of ethics and morality to create a harmonious society. This is an exalted ideal of Confucianism and is also a major reason why there is no record of Chinese in ancient times fighting for human rights.

The people: from roots to rulers

But one school of scholars has reservations with equating Confucian culture and human rights.

"This is wishful thinking about an idealized Confucian culture, and it doesn't fit the reality of how Confucian thought was twisted by authoritarian rule over 2,000 years of Chinese culture." In his introduction to Confucian Political Philosophy and Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights, Harry Hsiao argues that pre-Qin Confucian thought had much of the respect for human rights that characterizes modern democracies, but that after the authoritarianism of the Qin and Han dynasties Confucianists were put in a bind. Confucianism was distorted, and on many points Confucianists simply gave up. Representatives of this fourth school of thinking include such foreign scholars as William Theodore de Barry, Charlotte Furth, and Thomas Metzger, as well as Taiwan's own Hsu Fu-kuan.

Hsu Fu-kuan is of the opinion that pre-Qin Confucians had a conception of human rights, and that Mencius even formulated the principle of "the rule of the people." For instance, in the second part of Mencius' chapter about Liang Hui-wang, Mencius writes that when a ruler is making decisions about appointing or sacking ministers or putting people to death, he should ignore his advisors and "listen to the voice of the people."

Yet why didn't democratic flowers later bloom? First of all, obtaining one's rights has always been a problem involving the system, which is something that Mencius didn't think about 2,000 years ago. Secondly, Confucians in the past always looked at things from the rulers' perspective, focusing on how to convince them to rule benevolently. They rarely looked at things from the perspective of the people being ruled, considering ways to organize "pressure groups" to obtain truly benevolent government.

As a result, Hsu Fu-kuan believes that even if Confucian ideas about moral rule show some resemblance to modern concepts of human rights and freedom, Confucianism isn't very strong on these points. Unless they are put into concrete form in a democratic system, they won't be protected.

At an international conference on Confucian morality held in Beijing last summer, the American Sinologist Merle Goodman argued that Confucian thought has a serious flaw: If the ruler decides to deny human rights, there is nothing the intellectuals can do about it.

Potential for interaction

Nevertheless, even if Confucianism can't be directly equated with the modern concept of human rights, "The humanism and basic principles of Confucian thought can provoke critical thinking about Western human-rights-centered values," says Henry Rosemont, another American Sinologist.

This is also one of the issues that concerns Harvard Professor Tu Weiming. He believes that human rights are a minimum, and that they alone are not enough to build a moral system. Hence, he hopes that "between the Western conception of human rights and the Confucian spirit of civilization there is potential for interaction, that a bridge can be built between them."