Waiting for Rights: China's Human Rights and China's Constitutions, 1949-1989

Abstract

The outbreak of peaceful protest in China from April to June 1989 has served to highlight lacunae in the existing Western literature on rights in China, both in a definitional and methodological sense. In terms of the definition of human the emphasis of Western scholars on the condition of China's civil and political rights to the exclusion of its social and economic rights has led to two main consequences. First, in the decade after 1978 China had made considerable informal progress in the condition of the freedoms of thought, speech, association and assembly. Thus, in the realm of public policy, objection to the limited extension of those rights seemed grudging and inappropriate, although at the same time Amnesty International pressured China to legally protect those newfound rights and addressed the problem of capital punishment in China. Nevertheless, many observers, particularly foreign governments, took refuge in the expectation that it would just be a matter of time before the improvements in the informal situation of civil and political rights in China would penetrate the formal legal apparatus of rights, particularly in view of the leadership's pledge to institute a rule of law. Those who did criticize China's civil rights often objected to the Chinese practice on rights issues canvassed in more advanced Western nations, such as birth control, the lack of free choice of work and freedom of movement, and property