Human Rights Must Be Part of New China

The cry for human rights in China has been growing stronger recently. Calls for freedom of scholarly exchange, for independent publications, for the release of political prisoners and for freedom of religion, among others, have followed one upon another. Two or three years ago, the phrase human rights was seldom heard in Chinese political discourse. Today everyone--not only supporters of human rights but also those who regard them as a headache--has to admit that the question of human rights has become an intrinsic part of Chinese political life.

The reason why human rights have begun to receive such widespread public concern in China has much to do with the current reform program. The reforms have allowed people to begin to appreciate the true value of human rights, but more and more people also are recognizing that an improvement in human rights is an indispensable condition for the overall success of the reforms.

One characteristic of the decades of Chinese socialism has been that the vast majority of people have led lives subject to the control of “central planning.” Not only has political thinking been tightly controlled, but people seldom have been allowed much freedom of choice, even in daily-life matters such as food, clothing and shelter. It has been emphasized only that the individual should be the tool of the Communist Party; it has not been acceptable to raise the questions of what personal opportunities the state might owe to the individual, or what rights in society an individual should have. In short, the very concept of human rights has been barred from social and political life.

But when the reforms began to erode the apparatus of central planning, people began to recognize the importance of human rights. Concern for the condition of human rights in China no longer seemed an isolated political demand; in time it became inextricably involved with the whole reform program.

Today, economic, political and cultural reform cannot succeed without commensurate progress in human rights. This fact appears all the more clearly because of the grim situation that China now faces: a stubborn and menacing inflation, rampant, uncontrollable corruption, declining social morality, a lack of ideals and convictions, signs of social turbulence and across-the-board stalling in the progress of the reforms. Such conditions only sharpen people’s recognition of the importance of human rights and of the vitality of human rights to the success of reform. For example:

--Serious corruption has already shown that China’s system of political privilege brings tremendous harm to economic development. If political inequalities are not eradicated, it will be impossible to guarantee the fair competition that a market economy requires. But without a guarantee of free speech, there is no way that political inequalities, and hence corruption, can be effectively checked. Free speech is necessary to a healthy environment for economic reform.

--The reform program will require a stable social environment. China’s various political campaigns, especially the Cultural Revolution, have clearly shown that the periods of greatest upheaval are also precisely the ones in which human rights are most severely abused. Suppression of freedom of thought, freedom of belief and freedom of speech often is an underlying cause of social turmoil. Only respect for human rights can truly ensure social harmony and relaxation.

--Guaranteeing human rights is necessary in maintaining a nation’s peaceful international environment. It would be difficult for others to imagine that a government that lacks respect for human rights in its internal affairs can strictly observe principles of peace and conciliation in handling foreign affairs.

Respect for human rights has an even more obvious connection to the development of education and the improvement of social morality. In sum, improvement in the situation of human rights is an indispensable key to releasing China from its current predicament of stalled reform. The changes should begin with respect for freedom of thought and belief, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.

Conversely, if there is no real improvement in these matters, or if, even worse, we witness a turn toward even more autocratic and dictatorial “new authoritarianism” of the kind some people are currently advocating, then the modernization of China cannot possibly succeed.