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Expanding Human Rights: China and the Asian Challenge-A Review Essay by Anastasia Kapetas Confucianism and Human Rights: Wm. Theodore de Bary & Tu Weiming, eds. Columbia University Press: New York, 1998. Asian Freedoms-The Idea of Freedom in East and South East Asia: David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds. Cambridge University Press: UK, 1998. In recent years, the increasing engagement of Western governments with China has been preoccupied with the concerns of trade, security and human rights. The international human rights movement has also increasingly focused on China as a major area of concern. At the same time, the mainstream theory .and practice of human rights has come under sustained criticism on a number of fronts, specifically from discourses centered on notions of Asian values. Globalization , rapid increases in economic prosperity, and self-confidence have enabled Asian governments to re-position themselves in relation to the West, challenging old relationships. Human rights are entering a particularly testing age of uncertainty and experimentation, especially in relation to China. Although support for human rights in principle has remained high in the West, human rights advocates at all levels have had little success in changing the hostility of the Chinese government towards certain mainstream human rights discourses, especially those which emphasize civil and political rights. The two collections considered here, Confucianism and Human Rights and Asian Freedoms, set out to explore the possible connections between Westem human rights culture and traditional Asian cultural values. These texts can be seen to inhabit the discursive landscape generated by the Asian values debate : that is, the contentious appeals to the superiority of Confucian culture, and to cultural relativism, made by various Asian governments. It attempts to define a kind of pan-Asian identity as more concerned with social harmony than with individual rights. This position, formalized in the Bangkok Declaration of 1993, * I would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their useful reports. I would also like to thank Dr Peter Zarrow and Dr Patrick West for their helpful comments and suggestions. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 26, NO.1 (November, 2000): 85-102 86 Twentieth-Century China favors economic and cultural definitions of rights, the rights to development, subsistence, and cultural self determination, over civil and political rights (Chan 1995: 25). The Chinese government has been a vocal exponent of Asian values. In 1991, the State Council released a document outlining its human rights stance, in which it gave primacy to subsistence rights. At the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, China maintained this position, arguing for historically specific applications of international human rights norms. In this view, current human rights regimes are products of historical development. Developing countries such as China are at different historical stages, and therefore have different human rights needs than Western countries. Underdeveloped countries must prioritize development over democracy. (Chan 1995: 32) This position accepts a utilitarian notion of rights, rejecting Western justifications of rights as applicable to all humans everywhere, either by virtue of their common humanity or as "natural rights" endowed by a Creator. Accepting a utilitarian grounding for rights, that is, recognizing that rights can be useful tools to promote desirable social outcomes, provides for common ground for a dialogue between Asia and the West on rights. However, untethering human rights from some notion of universality also allows room for Asian governments to claim exemption from beginning the political reforms that would deliver civil and political rights, by arguing that such rights are not useful to the well-being of their nations at this moment in history. The power of the Asian values rhetoric to unsettle the West comes from its ability to tap into existing controversies over cultural relativism in the West, as well as into anxieties over the perceived failure of the Western liberal demo-cratic project, and, the loss of economic dynamism in the face of the burgeoning growth of Asian economies. The broader effects of nationalism, statism, postmodernism and globalization have also put increasing pressure on the coherence of human rights theory and practice in international forums. The challenge of Asian values as stemming from Confucian morality has driven the scholars considered here to reflect again upon the Western spectrum...

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