Analysis Of The Idea Of Human Rights In Modern China (1885-1925)

The idea of human rights of China was originated in the later1880s, which did notescape from the stereotype of Confucian ethics. The scholars who discussed this thesis firstlyhad still used the way of moral reasoning, taking moral concepts like “God” and “Truth” as astarting point, basing on the traditional People-oriented thoughts, hovering at the edge of thetraditional Confucian discourse system. However, they could not defend their argumentseffectively facing the official criticism of the idea that everyone has the right to autonomy byZhang Zhidong. But the situation changed as the introduction of modern nationalism, it hasintrinsic relation with liberalism and the idea of democracy. It proved legitimacy to the idea ofhuman rights as the nationalism had been introduced into China and had made deep influence.The idea of human rights then expanded rapidly in Chinese ideological circle. The Chinesenationalism had quickly differentiated into so-called “large nationalism” and “smallnationalism” because of the different choices made by reformers and revolutionaries of theChinese political direction. In the process of debate, Liang Qichao introduced Bluntschli’snation-organism Theory and Wang Jingwei made a distinction between the nationalism(people) and the nationalism (citizen) which turned the traditional Nation-building route ofPeople-Nationalism-Nation change into Nationalism (people)-People-Nationalism(citizen)-Nation. Both the Nation-organism theory and the distinction between nationalism(people) and nationalism (citizen) had broken the natural link between the nationalism and theliberalism, making a significant change in the Chinese idea of human rights. It must be notedthat the Confucian ethics had not disappeared after the nationalism entering into China, the“ideological dichotomy” phenomenon appeared, in the private sphere of the ordinary people,the Confucian ethics still had a huge influence. In view of this, the masters of the NewCulture Movement firmly believed that Western culture is superior to the Oriental culture andpresented an idea of total “Westernization” hoping to get rid of the influence of Confucianethics in the private domain too, which made the idea of human rights of China rise onceagain. In the background of Chinese-Western dualism, the new culture camp had selected thewestern culture, but a number of scholars such as Du Yaquan debated with them standing thepoint of Chinese culture. The debate must have involved human rights, which will again affectthe idea of human rights of China.