“Chinese have no concept of human rights”: revisiting the Universal Declaration
It was never worthwhile to talk to Chinese colleagues about human rights. They have no concept of it in the first place. That’s what I was told over a coffee with a former senior official at the United Nations, who was visiting Oxford for the year. It was a strange end to an otherwise good conversation—especially since I had been revisiting forgotten aspects to the emergence of a human rights agenda in the 1940s. Turning to origins can only explain so much about all that ensues, but it can unsettle basic assumptions: where and to whom do ideas belong?
In 1946, high school students in China’s wartime capital Chongqing took to the streets. They marched to the slogan ‘all parties must be out of the schools’ and demanded that the Nationalist government guarantee human rights. These teenagers would have heard little ‘rights talk’ in their lifetimes, given the country’s authoritarian turn under Chiang Kai-shek. The end of the world war revived old debates within China that had been forced underground. It also changed the window of discourse on the international stage.
The proximate cause of a global human rights agenda was the upheaval of war, not the diffusion of norms. When Churchill and Roosevelt made promises to uphold fundamental freedoms in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they could not anticipate how the Charter’s meanings would expand alongside the wartime alliance. At the 1945 San Francisco Conference, the Filipino general Carlos Romulo provocatively asked of the Charter: ‘Is it for one side of the world, and not for the other? […] One billion Oriental faces are turned pleadingly toward us for recognition of their human rights.’
This conference concluded with the first ‘official’ speech at an international conference in the Chinese language. The diplomat Wellington Koo chose to emphasize the UN’s mission to promote人權, human rights, and 基本自由, fundamental freedoms. To consider a ‘bill of rights’ for the world, this conference also established a Commission on Human Rights. The Commission met for the first time in New York on 27 January 1947. It had 18 members, each nominated by a member-state. The smaller drafting group included former First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt, Canadian law professor John Humphrey, and Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik. Its vice-chair was the Chinese representative, P.C. Chang.
Chang was an unlikely delegate. He was a theatre scholar, not a professional diplomat. In the 1930s, he had helped to launch Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang’s international tours. The novelty of these performances inspired one audience member Bertolt Brecht to develop the concept of Verfremdungseffekt. During the war, Chang joined the government to work on channels of cultural cooperation. He soon found himself contesting what being human had to do with a set of inalienable rights.
A photo on tour in the USSR, including P.C. Chang (top right), Mei Lanfang (bottom right), the director Sergei Eisenstein (bottom left) and playwright Sergei Tretyakov (top middle).
He found a formidable adversary in Charles Malik. In Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, Chang was a pluralist who insisted that there was more than one ultimate reality. Malik was Greek Orthodox of a Thomist orientation. Chang argued that overreliance on Christianity and ‘western civilisation’ as sources of human rights amounted to religious intolerance. He prevented the insertion of ‘the law of nature’ into the Preamble. During one drafting session in Roosevelt’s apartment, Malik gave a monologue on Thomas Aquinas. Chang muttered in frustration that the whole group might spend a few months studying Chinese philosophy. In fairness, Humphrey recalled that Chang was also known for long speeches.
Chang and Malik remained warm friends. Perhaps that was unsurprising. They both insisted on debating the conceptual basis of human rights for a global age. In that sense, neither was pragmatic in the non-philosophical sense of the word. Neither was a lawyer and neither thought primarily in legal terms. This was a significant point they had in common, given the many influential lawyers on the Commission like the French jurist René Cassin.
Chang fused an unorthodox interpretation of Confucian ethics with American pragmatism, which he had studied with the philosopher John Dewey. He argued for a non-metaphysical justification of human rights. As an alternative to the Christian language of endowed rights, which he opposed, he brought up the Confucian concept of 仁 (ren), which he introduced as ‘two-man-mindedness’. In this view, rights were universal not from an image of God in which we are created, but because they flowed from our capacity to sympathise with others. Ren was eventually translated as conscience in the Preamble. The term diverged from Chang’s proposed concept, an early example of how translation took on a more active role in international organisations amid the postwar profusion of recognised languages. Over time, the translated concept generated unexpected meanings in postwar movements towards decolonisation.
There was a political context that enabled Chang’s interpretations to shape the Universal Declaration. Chang was not a ‘party man’. He and other Chinese participants working abroad—like Lin Mousheng, a senior official in the UN’s Human Rights Section—were remote from national politics and relatively free to speak their mind. Even when they directly represented the country, their communication became sparse with a government that was absorbed in a renewed civil war. The main opposition party at home, the Chinese communists, also frequently invoked human rights to criticize the Nationalist government. The idea of human rights was central to the Communist Party from the beginning. It became increasingly useful to build support at home and through Third World solidarities.
P.C. Chang at the United Nations
Political contingencies intersected with a moment in the broader sweep of Chinese thought. The political scientist Arthur Holcombe observed in 1948 that the Chinese articulation of human rights was ‘peculiar’, in contrast to the ideological binary of the Soviet-American stalemate. He referred to a free play between western concepts and indigenous ideas, and a focus on social units such as the family beyond the individual and the state. Chang and Lin, among others, shared a conceptual horizon in which concepts in traditional Chinese thought seemed compatible with radically new notions of selfhood that accompanied the talk of human rights. This horizon soon became marginal.
Scholars such as Susan Waltz and Mary Ann Glendon have retrieved forgotten voices that shaped the Universal Declaration. The diverse influences on the document never troubled Chang, nor did the supposed contradiction between relativism and universalism. In his view, the Declaration was more universal because it was a transcultural project. A monistic justification would have been easy to relativize as “merely” western. Chang’s opposition to endowed rights was not just a negative reaction about terminology. It stemmed from a vision of human rights as a pedagogical project to socialise humanity. The rights at stake, and the global culture to support them, were temporal—and they were downstream rather than upstream of the Declaration.
Chang’s view suggests that we need to follow the Universal Declaration as it flew the nest of the UN headquarters and entered wider histories. Drawing on earlier Chinese experiments in rural development, the newly established UNESCO developed programmes to push for education as a human right. It is difficult to identify linear trajectories. France’s promotion of human rights did not stop its attempt to block the Caribbean Commission’s regional bill of rights in 1946, nor its escalating use of state violence in Algeria and Vietnam. Nor did Chinese involvement with drafting international treaties have any short-term impact on curbing repressive violence in either Taiwan or mainland China. Governments were uncomfortable from the start about what the Declaration meant for state sovereignty. For much of the 1950s, the Cold War froze attempts to connect human rights and self-determination. The archives are open for us to figure out when ideas and institutions came together and when they came apart.
Looking back 80 years after the end of the Second World War, it is notable nonetheless that the Declaration was the last major instance of political and moral agreement among the allied nations that founded the UN. Revisiting the ideas behind the Declaration counterbalances stereotypes about ‘Chinese’, ‘Asian’ or ‘western’ values. It reminds us that living together requires not just navigating multilateralism and multipolarity, but also grappling with multiple modes of thought.
Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
