Power, Rights and Duties in Chinese History

Abstract

Of the three words, power, rights and duties in the title of my lecture the word rights is of central interest. I am concerned with how it relates to duties on the one hand and to power on the other at various periods of Chinese history. In particular, the question of whether the ancient Chinese only knew of duties but had no notion of rights is more than a semantic problem and deserves to be re-examined in the light of modern developments. This is relevant to the issue of how modern ideas of political, legal, civil and human rights were introduced into China and how they have influenced China's modernization. The lecture concentrates on an historical approach to the subject. By this I mean I do not start out with the fundamentalist position as found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly. This position is one that has developed very rapidly in the West during the past two hundred years and the terms human rights and civil rights are now more potent than the earlier terms legal rights or political rights. The former two are evoked beyond particular communities and states to cover the freedom of all individuals as human beings and to justify degrees of international intervention unknown in the past. Obviously, the word rights used in this sense in the Universal Declaration would not have appeared in traditional societies and it would be anachronistic to try to apply it directly to the judgment of traditional China. It is better limited to judgments on China today and for that we would need to talk primarily about contemporary moral and political philosophy. Also, by an historical approach, I mean that I do not start out with the ideological position that rights are merely functions of social class, that 1,iimn nrcr%m.c.c lc-mpec in ciirrlcciu. stacsand thant one's riahts r-0 Q -* Power, Rights and Duties in Chinese History was delivered as the Fortieth Morrison Lecture at the Australian National University on 19 September 1979.