Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics

Postscript: A Note on Chinese Individualism, Human Rights, and the Asian Values Debate

131 Postscript A Note on Chinese Individualism, Human Rights, and the Asian Values Debate Heaven’s love for the people is very great. Would it then allow one man to preside over them in an arrogant and willful manner, indulging his excesses and casting aside the nature Heaven and Earth allotted them? Surely it would not! [italics mine] —Duke Xiang 14, Zuo zhuan1 What is necessary is an impartial study of the different elements and values in the Chinese tradition and in Confucianism, including those that stand in a positive, neutral, or negative relationship to liberty, autonomy, equality, democracy, rights, etc. Only then will we be in a position to think about what form of LCD [liberal constitutional democracy] will be appropriate to China, what elements and values need to coexist with one another, and what kind of creative transformation is desirable for the Chinese tradition. —Albert Chen, “Is Confucianism Compatible with Liberal Constitutional Democracy?”2 Translatingconceptsfromonecultural,historicalcontexttothe next is never an easy task. In using the term “individualism” in my analysis of intellectual developments related to the self, I show readers that certain early Chinese views can justifiably be compared with, or 132 Postscript translated as, “individualism.” By granting Chinese history its own idealistic notions of the self and analyzing such notions according to how they dignify and empower the individual, I refute the well-worn accusation that Chinese cultures lack a concept of individual prerogatives. In ancient China, indeed, an individualistic movement developed to promote the cultivation of an individual’s own idealized powers and authorities. This form of individualism was ultimately grounded in a religious concept of the self as recipient of innate, divine powers, and it was also deeply intertwined with sociopolitical changes associated with the growth of powerful, centralized states. Against the popular stereotype of Chinese culture as a culture that stresses not the individual but the effacement of the individual within the family, society, and cosmos, I argue that certain key aspects of Chinese culture are rooted in the power of the individual to cultivate himself or herself as a vital agent within a web of social and cosmic agents. The individual is not effaced; he or she is empowered and in control. To be sure, the individual stands at the heart of any transformation of the self and its surrounding environment. Though the period I examined in this book certainly cannot and should not represent Chinese tradition as a whole, or even its contemporary forms, this so-called “classical period” plays a critical role in the development of a Chinese cultural identity that shaped history in critical ways. If one were to continue my analysis of the self throughout Chinese history and up until the modern day, one would no doubt witness not the destruction of individualism in favor of an exclusively social concept of the self but the construction and reconstruction of various forms of individualism in light of the family, society, and the larger cosmos. Individualism developed in China just as it took on other forms in other societies. It developed solidly there, and it never left. The issue of individualism in China is a touchy subject that relates directly to a current, ongoing political debate between universal human rights advocates and Asian values supporters. The idea—albeit a false one— that traditional Asian values do not embrace individualism is constructed upon a particular reading of Chinese history that still exists today; namely, that there has never been an emphasis on individual prerogative and authority in the development of Chinese culture; that Chinese society has traditionally stressed one’s social role and the subservience of individual concerns to those of the group, etc. Having refuted such claims in this book, I contend that individualism has been a powerful ideal throughout Chinese history, and thus should be regarded as a crucial element of Asian values.3 While it Postscript 133 is unclear that “rights”—in the sense of inalienable claims or moral entitlements to certain political and social goods—are endorsed in early Chinese texts, the very fact that individuals, their thoughts, judgments, potentials, wills, and cosmic powers do matter and were greatly valued should be reason enough to reconsider the human rights debate in such a light. Marina Svensson has recently claimed that “since China already has had a onehundred -year-long history of human rights debates, one should think that the issue of whether human rights are compatible...