² The Consensus government document growing out of the Asian Regional Preparatory Meeting to the World Conference on Human Rights in Bangkok, Thailand, March 1993Google Scholar.

³ See, for example, Chunying, Xin, “A Brief History of the Modem Human Rights Discourse in China,” in Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 4–5Google Scholar.

⁴ The titles of this body of literature are revealing: Shengping, Liu and Yong, Xia, eds., Human Rights and the World (Renquan yu shijie) (Peking: Renmin fayuan chubanshe, 1996)Google Scholar; Huichang, Song, On Contemporary Human Rights (Xiandai renquan lun) (Peking: Renmin chubanshe, 1993)Google Scholar; Nanlai, Liu, ed., Developing Nations and Human Rights (Fazhanzhong guojia yu requan) (Chengdu: Siquan renmin chubanshe, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁵ For a discussion of the transcendental pretense, see Solomon, Robert, The Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense 1750–1850 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993Google Scholar).

⁶ Cohen, Paul A., Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

⁷ Sandel, Michael, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, excerpted in , “America's Search for a New Public Philosophy,” Atlantic Monthly 277 (March 1996), 57–74Google Scholar.

⁸ Sandel, , Atlantic Monthly, 74Google Scholar.

⁹ Havel, Václav, “The Politics of Responsibility” in World Policy Journal 12 (Fall 1995), 82Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Donnelly's discussion of the source of human rights is not clear. On the one hand, he wants to ground it in “being human”; on the other hand, he wants to say that “human nature is a social project as much as it is a given.” But it is a social project only in the most superficial sense. He assumes without argument that “human nature…is not arbitrary…for it is limited by, among other things, the psycho-biological bounds of human potential, the formative capabilities of social institutions, and morality” (emphasis added). See Donnelly, Jack, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 16–19Google Scholar, esp. 18n6. When he locates the essential conditions of being human in the individual, and insists that these conditions are prior to and not conditional upon social actions, he is in fact making them transcendent in the strict sense that they determine human conduct while human conduct does not determine them.

¹¹ Donnelly, Jack, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” in Bauer, Joanne R. and Bell, Daniel A., eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (forthcoming)Google Scholar. This definition is carried over here from all of Donnelly's published work. See Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice and, recently, more, International Human Rights (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993Google Scholar).

¹² Joanne Bauer points out Donnelly's inconsistency in claiming that human rights are at once “uni-versal” and at the same time a response to the specific conditions in premodern Europe: the devetopmem of nation-states and the market system. See Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 3Google Scholar. Donnelly further argues that such rights cannot be conditioned by the economic circumstances of developing nations, while at the same time asserting that they arise in response to the specific economic circumstances of Europe.

¹³ Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 23. For the alternative definitions, see Hung-chao, Tai, “Human Rights in Taiwan: Convergence of Two Political Cultures?” in Hsiung, James C., ed., Human Rights in an Eastern Perspective (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1985)Google Scholar; King Fairbank, John, The United States and China, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Chung-sho, Lo, “Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition” UNESCO, in, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949)Google Scholar; and Bohua, Xie and Lihua, Niu, “Review and Comments on the Issue of Human Rights,” paper presented at JUST International Conference on “Rethinking Human Rights,” (Kuala Lumpur, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Donnelly, , Universal Human Rights, 23Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Ibid., 27Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Donnelly, , “Human Rights and Asian Values,” 24–25Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid. 27–28Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See Ghai, Yash, “Human Rights and Governance: The Asia Debate” in Occasional Paper Series 4 (November 1994)Google Scholar by the Asia Foundation Center for Asian Pacific Affairs.

¹⁹ Even what we might take to be repressive regimes might have their own legitimate concerns. As Donald Emmerson observes: “Not all East Asian elites who worry about disorder are self-serving cynics looking for excuses to maintain the status quo…. [T]he greater incidence in Southeast Asia of spectacularly multicultural societies where the ever-present risk of ethnic and religious violence leads such officials as Lee and Mahathir to question the capacity of Western liberal democracy to ensure social discipline and order.” Japan Programs Occasional Papers 5 (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1994), 12Google Scholar.

²⁰ Daniel Bell describes the anticipated consequences of other cultures to this kind of insensitivity in his “A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore,” Political Theory, 25 (February 1997), pp. 6–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Adapted from Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Tredennick, Hugh (London: Penguin, 1954), 24–26Google Scholar.

²² Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Boston: St. Paul's Books & Media, 1991), 64Google Scholar.

²³ This is the argument of Alisdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. On a bad day, after the manner Jeremy Bentham viewed it, human rights is even seen as “nonsense on stilts.” See “Anarchical Fallacies” in Collected Papers (1843), reprinted in A. I. Meldin, ed., Human Rights 32 (1970).

²⁴ See Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977Google Scholar).

²⁵ See Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 116: “Underlying such judgments is the inherent universality of basic moral precepts, at least as we understand morality in the West. We simply do not believe that our moral precepts are for us and us alone…. For most of us, morality is inherently universalistic and egalitarian.”Google Scholar

²⁶ This is Norani Othman's point when she argues: “Yet what is done in the name of Islam is not Islam itself, certainly not normative Islam at the level of central ideas and animating principles.”“Grounding Human Rights Arguments in Non-Western Cultural Terms: Shari'a and the Citizenship Rights of Women in a Modern Nation-State,” in Bauer and Bell, eds. The East Asian Challenge for Human RightsGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Carol Gluck's contribution to “The Call for a new Asian Identity: An Examination of the Cultural Arguments and Their Implications” in Japan Programs Occasional Papers No. 5, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, p. 6Google Scholar.

²⁸ When Mike Oksenberg succeeded Victor Li as president of the East-West Center, an institution that has done more to foster understanding between Asia and America than perhaps any other to date, he asked Victor what he had learned in his decade as president. Victor replied that he had learned to say to himself, “Its culture, stupid.”Google Scholar

²⁹ Susan Sontag, in a recent New York Review of Books article, expresses sincere concern over that “decline of universalist moral and political standards” evident in the human rights debate. Her point is that her understanding of the Wei Jingsheng case represents the single issue that should be considered in talking with China about human rights. According to Sontag: There is an increasing reluctance to apply a single standard of political justice, of freedom, and of individual rights and of democracy. The usual justifications for this reluctance are that it is “colonialist” (the label used by people on the left) or “Eurocentric” (the label used both by multiculturalist academics and by businessmen, who talk admiringly of authoritarian “Confucian culture”) to expect or to want non-European peoples to have “our” values. My own view is that it is precisely the reluctance to apply these standards…that is colonialist and condescending” (42). The voices of dissidents can sometimes be important, and sometimes less so, but they are no alternative for cultural understandingGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Human Rights Dialogue 3 (December 1995), 1Google Scholar.

³¹ IbidGoogle Scholar.

³² McKnight, Brian E., The Quality of Mercy (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

³³ See Zhang Weiren's analysis of Qing dynasty legal cases in which he demonstrates that justifications generally take the form of appeals to those values transmitted in canonical philosophical literature. Qingdai fazhi yanjiu (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1983)Google Scholar.

³⁴ I am responding here to Jack Donnelly's remarks on the alternative traditions. See Donnelly, especially, The Concept of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 82–83Google Scholar.

³⁵ Sandel, , Atlantic Monthly, 66Google Scholar.

³⁶ Hall, David L. and Ames, Roger T., Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Analects 2/3. This passage, properly understood, can be an argument for what “government by the people” would mean in a Chinese-style democracy. “Government”(zheng) is made the property of the people through “propriety”(li)—“proper conduct”(zheng) that makes order one's ownGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ The quotation is in Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 20Google Scholar.

³⁹ I personally believe that they were indeed philosophical cousins, but the “Plato” I here refer to is the “Plato” that has been given to us by the Church Fathers and Enlightenment-inspired commentatorsGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Analects 4/10. See also 18/8Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Hung-ming, Ku, The Discourses and Says of Confucius (1898; Taipei: Prophet Press, 1976)Google Scholar, and Waley, Arthur, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Macmillan, 1938)Google Scholar, respectively.

⁴² Legge, James, The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

⁴³ For a fuller discussion of yi as “appropriateness,” see Hall, and Ames, , Thinking Through Confucius.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ “Public” or “public-spirited”(gong)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See Analects 4/25: “Excellent persons do not live alone; they are sure to have neighbors.”Google Scholar

⁴⁶ See Analects 12/3.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ This way of thinking about language anticipates Ferdinand Saussure and a non-referential notion of language. It is not an enormous leap to understand how Jorge Luis Borges's “Chinese encyclopedia” is not much different from the actual encyclopedias that organize Chinese knowledge. Borges in his short story “The Language of John Wilkins” (in Rodriguez, E. and Reid, A., eds., Borges: A Reader [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981]Google Scholar) refers to “a certain encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (I) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that had just broken the flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.” It is also not surprising that Michel Foucault responded to this “Chinese encyclopedia” with The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ For an elaboration of this “art of contextualization,” see Hall, and Ames, , Thinking Through Confucius, and Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Analects 1/12Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See de Bary, Ted, ed., “Confucian Harmony and Freedom of Thought: The Right to Think Versus Right Thinking,” forthcoming in a volume on Chinese attitudes toward human rights (New York: Columbia University Press)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., ms. 2Google Scholar.

⁵² See Schoenhals, Michael, Doing Things with Words (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992)Google Scholar. There is an analogy here with the legal culture of liberal democracies, where controlling the terms of discourse is an enormous source of power.

⁵³ An appreciation of the enormous power of rhetoric is rather natural in a tradition that never did subscribe to a philosophy/rhetoric dualismGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Munro, Donald J., “The Shape of Chinese Values in the Eye of an American Philosopher”Google Scholar in Terrill, R., ed., The China Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 40Google Scholar. See Randle Edwards, R., “Civil and Social Rights: Theory and Practice in Chinese Law Today,” in Edwards, R., Henkin, Louis, and Nathan, Andrew J., eds., Human Rights in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 44Google Scholar. This position is widely held. Compare in the same volume Louis Henkin, “The Human Rights Idea in Contemporary China: A Comparative Perspective,” 39, and Andrew J. Nathan, “Sources of Chinese Rights Thinking,” 141–47. Kent, Ann, Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar).

⁵⁵ Analects 1/2Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: The Ohio University Press, 1927), 102Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Dewey, John, John Dewey: Lectures in China 1919–21 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1973), 151Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar that has fueled the liberalism debate, and Bell's, Communitarianism and Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ For a good beginning in this exercise, see Peerenboom, Randy, “What's Wrong with Chinese Rights? Towards a Theory of Rights with Chinese-Characteristics” in Harvard Human Rights Journal 29 (1993)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Rosemont, Henry Jr., “Why Take Rights Seriously? A Confucian Critique” in Rouner, L., ed., Human Rights and the World's Religions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 175Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Vincent, R. J., Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17–18Google Scholar.

⁶² Peerenboom, “Confucian Harmony and Freedom of Thought: The Right to Think Versus Right Thinking,” ms., 26.

⁶³ Edwards, , “Civil and Social Rights,” 41Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Carnegie Council, Human Rights Dialogue 3, p. 5Google Scholar; see also p. 1.

⁶⁵ Ghai, Yash, “Human Rights and Governance,” 8Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Young, Stephen, “Human Rights Questions in Southeast Asian Culture: Problems for American Response,” in Newberg, Paula, ed., The Politics of Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 209Google Scholar.