No one has an opinion on it? Really?
Well, I have enough opinions for all of us, so here goes.
One of the things I learned while in China is that they (in general) have a much deeper sense of personal responsibility than we do in the US. I think we Americans used to have it, but it's somehow gotten lost.
Another difference in cultures is that we tend to put the rights of one person above the rights of many. In China, the rights of the collective are put above the rights of the individual.
I'm going to comment on some specifics of the article.
Human rights are acquired by people instead of being given by God. Human rights are a product of social and historical situations. They are the rights society gives to its members.
This is a bit different than how we think, as we do tend to ascribe rights as being "Given by God". But, when you really think about it, the rights we have are the rights our society has deemed we should have. We don't have the right to scream FIRE in a movie theatre if it's not on fire. And we don't have the right to kill someone else and take their kidney if we need one. Society has created rules defining our rights, not God.
Western human rights ideas uphold the idea that people are born equal. We think that people should be born equal. But no such equality is found in class society. As a matter of fact, inequality exists even before birth. The embryo in the womb of a rich mother enjoys better nutrition than that in a poor mother. Equality among people can only be acquired in the course of social progress.
I remember thinking about this as a child. That we don't all have the same rights, it seems to be the luck of the draw, who you happened to be born to (or adopted by). If you are rich and you are sick then there is a lot more open to you than if you are poor and you are sick. True, you have the right to emergency healthcare in this country, and a certain amount of indigent care if it's approved - but if you happen to own your home and make minimum wage and barely get by, then a long hospital stay could make you lose your home if you don't have insurance. The truly indigent can get hospital care, but the working poor often cannot without risking what they've worked all of their lives to have. Also, a child who is born to rich parents gets lots of toys, lots of vacations. A child born to poor parents does not. So, again, the Director makes a lot of sense. And I find it ironic that my thoughts as a child were that children of poor parents didn't get as many toys, but the director says they don't get the same nutrition. Goes back to Maslow's hierarchy about what is important.
Human rights not only involve political rights but also economic and social rights, being the combination of all of these.
So far I have agreed with him about the lack of "sameness" for economic and social rights, and I've even agreed that rights are not necessarily God given. I'm not so sure I'll agree on the political stuff. I know a Tibetan Monk who barely escaped Tibet with his life, and who personally witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Tibetans. China has done some absolutely horrid things in the very recent past. And they continue to do things that truly amount to genocide in Tibet.
Human rights first find expression in the rights to survival and development, which constitute the basis for all other rights. This is especially true of developing countries. For a starving man, which should he choose bread or ballot, if he is supposed to choose only one? The ballot is of course important. But he must feed himself with the bread before he can cast a ballot.
This is something many American's don't get. In some countries, people are more worried about surviving than anything else. If they don't get a good harvest, they may not survive the winter. Their whole lives revolve around making sure they can live through another year. They aren't worried about some of the stuff we worry so much about, because it is so unimportant to them. Again, Maslow's hierarchy: basic survival trumps everything else.
In addition, there are human rights enjoyed by the collective in addition to individuals' human rights. The individuals' interests are upheld via the realization of collective interests. So, China attaches importance to collective human rights as well as to individuals' human rights. This is in contrast to Western countries where much emphasis is put on individuals' human rights while collective human rights areneglected.
This was a big thing that I came away with when we left China. That the rights of the many trump the rights of the individual. And really, there are just so many people in China, I'm not sure that any other philosophy would really work.
On the one hand, human rights are universal in nature and their basic principles ought to be abided by in all countries. But on the other hand, human rights have specified connotations in different countries taking into account different levels of economic development, different social systems, varying cultural traditions and values and different religiousfaiths.
I will also agree with this. What we would find an essential right, for instance, the the right to free emergency room care, might not matter in the rural areas of China where the nearest hospital is a five hour train ride away.
The other big difference I found within China is that we may think of the Chinese people as being oppressed by a communist government, they actually enjoy much more freedom and much less government oversight in their daily lives than we do. There don't appear to be traffic cops who will pull you over for breaking a traffic law - the status quo seems to be to do what you want as long as you don't cause an accident, if you cause an accident and you were breaking a traffic law then you will get a ticket, but otherwise, it's pretty much anything goes. Drive on whatever side of the road you want, drive as fast as you want, swing up on the sidewalk to go around cars that aren't going fast enough for you - whatever, as long as you don't cause an accident then go for it. There are no seatbelt laws, no one will pull you over and harass you for not wearing a seatbelt. There are no DUI checkpoints. And there are certainly no camera's at intersections that will mail you a ticket.
In view of this, human rights are the unity of the universal and the particular. The specifics of human rights vary from one country to another. The ways of realizing human rights also differ from each other in different countries. For example, in overpopulated countries, family planning programmes are in the interests of the vast majority of the people and, therefore, are in accord with human rights principles. In sparsely populated nations, however, encouragement of fertility can also be seen as a human right.
While most Chinese people are unhappy with the restrictions on number of children, the ones I've spoken with about this understand the reason for it and defend it as necessary. They know that people starved to death not so long ago. Many people. Imagine having from 2 to 4 out of every ten people you know die of starvation. It was that bad in many areas. And they know that if the population is allowed to grow unchecked that people will probably be starving to death again within a generation or two or three. The don't want that for their kids or grandkids, either. Better that babies not be born than that they be born and then starve to death... better to have less babies and have them live. So, they understand it, and wouldn't want to change it unless there could be assurances that everyone can continue to be fed.
So, yes, in China's view, the one child policy (which is now the two child policy in many provinces), isn't a human rights violation, but it is there to protect human rights.. to make sure everyone has enough food to eat.
Some countries one-sidedly emphasize the universality of human rights whilst ignoring the particular nature of human rights, advocating the introduction of a unified human rights model in the world. This means imposing Western human rights ideas on the rest of the world.
And one thing that China hates is to have us impose our belief systems on them.
Human rights contain two integral parts rights and obligations. Or in other words, human rights are the unity of people's rights and their obligations. Each person should safeguard his or her own rights and respect others'. At the same time, each person ought to fulfil his or her obligations to society and other people. There are no rights that carry no obligationsin this world, and vice versa.
Remember what I said about how important personal responsibility is in China? It's huge. It's probably one of the most important parts of their culture, their mindset. It's part of what makes China what it is. And this paragraph speaks to that - that there is no right without an obligation attached to it.
Many people in Western countries emphasize exclusively the rights one should enjoy but neglect obligations, separating people's rights from obligations or setting these concepts against each other.
Exactly. People demand a right to free health care, but don't think about what kind of obligation they might have in order to make that happen. Someone has to pay the doctors, someone has to pay the builder's who build the hospital building, someone has to pay for the x-ray machines and the other equipment. China is fresh off of a grand experiment that did not work - Communism. They are now so far from communist it's not even funny. I'd say they are a Totalitarian Capitalist society now. Nothing is free anymore, you want it, you pay for it. However, in the US, we are rapidly headed toward Socialism, which is pretty close to the economic (but not the political) model of Communism.
Also, human rights are something covered by the sovereignty of a country. A country's sovereignty is the foremost collective human right. Human rights are the ultimate goal sovereignty tries to achieve. Andsovereignty is the guarantor of human rights.
Right, Tibet was sovereign without being a military power, and then China went in and slaughtered them, and Tibet is not sovereign anymore. What I think China is really saying is that if a country is strong enough economically and militarily then they can protect the rights of their citizens from other countries who may want to come in and rape and pillage the country. This has happened to China several times in the past couple of hundred years, and they don't intend for it to happen again.
In the humiliating old days, China was bullied by foreign powers. Its sovereignty was trampled on, and also the Chinese people's human rights. So the Chinese people know very well that sovereignty is a pre-condition to their enjoying human rights. In sum, there would be nohuman rights to speak of in the absence of sovereignty.
Which is why the Chinese have ramped up their military, they are now at a point where they will no longer be told what to do. If you haven't read of the opium wars, of the pillaging of the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace and other royal places, then you need to. China is still
smarting from it. It may be way long ago history to us, but it's pretty recent history to them.
They are also still horribly angry at the Japanese. I spoke with one gentlemen who was in his late 20's or early 30's who could not have possibly remembered the war, and the venomous hatred in his face as he discussed the Japanese people was pretty scary. They remember WWII like it happened five years ago. He pointed to places that had been damaged and said "This happened during The War of Japanese Aggression".
I remember being shown a tree. The tree was over 800 years old. They knew the name of the person who planted it, and the month, day, and year it was planted. Compare that tree to the age of our country. They think of terms of millenia while we think in decades.
The human rights outlook of China has been formed in the practice of promoting human rights over a long time. This human rights outlook, in return, will help promote human rights practice in the country. With the development of the human rights cause, China's human rights outlookwill continue to develop and take on richer content.
As they continue to develop, continue down a path where people can worry about things other than survival, then their human rights philosophies will change. I get that.
I do think that China has made great strides in the past decade. But they still have a long ways to go.
And, while I agree with much of what was said in this statement/essay/report, I think they have purposefully skirted around many issues. Tibet is one that is close to my heart, but there are also
many other issues that China needs to work on. Issues like freedom of the press, and religious freedoms.
While things may not have changed as quickly as the students of the Tiananmen Uprising wanted, things have changed.
I have great respect for the people of China, and for their culture and customs. I have hope that their government can find its way through the surge in technology, and the economic boom that has begun, and can grow in a way that most helps the country. And I hope that the Chinese people continue to gain rights and privileges as their government makes it's way into the future.
