Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus

3. Making a Goddess of Democracy from Loose Sand: Thoughts on Human Rights in the People's Republic of China

William P. Alford 3. Making A Goddess of Democracy from Loose Sand Thoughts on Human Rights in the People's Republic of China China has always been called a loose sheet of sand. . . . [Absent the Communist Party] China will retrogress into divisions and confusion and will then be unable to accomplish modernization. —Deng Xiaoping in 1980 The Beijing Spring1 of 1989 poses all too sharply the issue that lies at the core of this volume of essays and of the work of many of its contributors: To what extent are conceptions of human rights universal? Advocates of universality can point to those Chinese students, workers, and other citizens who at great sacrifice sought fundamental freedoms of assembly and of the press while demanding that their voices be heard. Conversely, scholars espousing the view that human rights arc culturally specific or relative can argue that the Chinese leadership's brutal crushing of the prodemocracy movement and the seeming acquiescence of the larger populace therein demonstrate how foreign the ideas of human rights expressed in major international conventions concerned with civil and political rights2 arc to Chinese civilization. This chapter suggests that just as the mid-May portrayals of the triumph of democracy in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and midJune characterizations of the inevitability of authoritarianism there were overdrawn, so too, the dichotomy between universality and culturalspecificity in the area of human rights is often overstated. The first part, "The Pro-Democracy Movement and the Universality of Human Rights," examines the rhetoric and actions of the PRC's pro-democracy movement in an effort to identify respects in which it may or may not affirm notions of universality. The second part, "The Historical Context," casts the seeming 66 William P. Alford and actual contradictions of the movement in a broader context. The final part, "Reflections on the Universalityand Relativity of Human Rights," returns to the question of universality versus specificity or relativity, offering modest suggestions as to steps toward a realization of greater civil and political rights for that quarter of humanity that is Chinese. The Pro-Democracy Movement and the Universality of Human Rights If the Chinese populace suffers from the propagandistic nature of the PRC's state-run press, the North American public is also ill-served by the superficial coverage of the PRC that most United States media provide. So it was that safari-jacket—clad American journalists equated the student leaders of the PRC's pro-democracy movement with the founders of the American revolution while solemnly intoning that the democratic genie was forever out of its bottle. The truth is a good deal more complex.3 To be sure, the PRC's pro-democracy movement has been deeply influenced by and is in several important respects seriously committed to many of the key civil and political rights recognized in international law. Throughout the 19805, PRC citizens experienced an unprecedented, if still curtailed, measure of freedom and openness to the outside world.4 Both were seen by the leadership as necessaryto engage a disenchanted intelligentsia5 and to enlist foreign technology and capital in rebuilding an economy ravaged by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and earlier times of turmoil.6 That relatively greater freedom7 made it possible for bolder souls to question the feasibility of attaining economic modernization in the absence of political reform.8 Simultaneously, the PRC's "open door" policy provided examplesof other nations, East and West, that were perceived by Chinese intellectuals as offering their citizenry much more in the way of human rights.9 Both before and after the PRC government's declaration of martial law on May 19,1989, the pro-democracy movement provided confirmation for those who espouse the universality of human rights. Individuals such as Wei Jinsheng,10 Ren Wending," and Fang Lizhi12 who, in their different ways,were to provide major inspirationfor the movement, argued that the PRC could not move forward without far greater respect for what they saw as fundamental human rights. These views were perhaps most forcefully articulated by the celebrated astrophysicist Fang, who, in essence, Thoughts on Human Rights in China 67 declared that just as worldwide there was but one physics, so, too, could there be but a single democracy encompassing the types of civil and political liberties set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.13 Although the students who formed the vanguard of the pro-democracy movement chose...