Political Rights in Post-Mao China, and: Civil Liberties in China (review)

Here are two books with substantial overlap in subject matter: one whose author who is the doyenne of expertise in dissident intellectual activity in contemporary China, and another that is a survey by a specialist in geography. Both efforts are scrupulously fair minded, with neither written as a challenge or an encomium to China’s current rulers. Their purposes are somewhat different. Goldman’s volume grows out of her career-long quest to understand the political role of Chinese intellectuals and their relationship to political authority. Here she updates the contemporary discourse on political rights in post-Mao China. Xiaobing Li sets out to frame the discussion on civil liberties in China as a major source of friction and misunderstanding between Chinese and Americans. His effort seems aimed at tracing the issues under contention and providing historical context and a factual checklist.

Merle Goldman provides an excellent tour d’horizon of the state of popular political participation in contemporary China with all its contradictions. Unlike previous periods in the life of the People’s Republic, or even Chinese history overall, contemporary China exhibits considerable freedom of thought. Essayists are free to embrace liberalism, traditionalism, Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, or almost any other ism that can be thought of, and these debates are published, printed, and posted on the World Wide Web. Side by side with this philosophic openness is the systematic repression of any specific challenge to the ruling authorities as well as any challenge that seeks to call the system, or even individual leaders, to account, as well as any organized effort to mobilize on behalf of institutionalized accountability or a loyal opposition. One might conclude on that survey, as I do, that civil liberties, as such, are absent in today’s China (Paltiel 2006), even though there is much space for freedom of thought, and even limited tolerance for civic action, so long as it does not encroach on the prerogatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to set the political agenda and license all forms of political expression.

Xiaobing Li seeks to provide a primer for the issues that divide China and the West, principally the United States, in the area of civil liberties. He offers “an analytical approach to many unanswered questions through new interpretations and different perspectives by using a cross-cultural methodology to show that China acts according to a consistent inner logic in its judicial affairs” (Li, p. xiv). From the outset, this mission statement reveals a troublesome assumption that the source of conflict over civil liberties between China and the West (United States) lies in cultural differences and a tendency to personify China as a unitary actor in this regard. In so doing, he accepts at face value the discursive construction of the CCP regime since 1989, and while adopting a fair-minded and critical stance toward the regime’s achievements, fails to challenge the rhetorical premises of its policy. The deterministic role of culture in Chinese rights discourse has been challenged, not least by the author of this review (Paltiel 1997, pp. 25–74; 1998, pp. 270–296). The author betrays a fuzzy understanding of the fundamentals of rights culture and a startling lack of appreciation of the relationship between civil liberties and individual rights that arises from a tradition rooted in law and contract. He recognizes the blurry outlines of the Western jurisprudential tradition only to be able to contrast it with the constructed notion of a Chinese tradition that privileges the collective over the individual. We find none of the nuance provided by Pitman Potter (2001) or Randall Peerenboom (2002), despite their contrasting sympathies, on the trends and developments in Chinese jurisprudence and constitutionalism. The trouble with Xiaobing Li’s book...