Chapter 22 5. Human rights debate in Geneva

The Human Rights International Film Festival & Human Rights Forum was held in Geneva in March 2010. The organizer contacted me if I could participate in the debate on human rights in China.I know that this film festival and forum has been held many times and has always been critical of human rights in China, but I still accepted the invitation because I do have something to say.On human rights issues, the West has become accustomed to being the judge of the world and likes to teach others.In fact, there are a lot of problems in the western view of human rights, both in theory and in practice, which are worth debating.The debate was held at 7:30 p.m. on March 9. Everyone first watched a French documentary "Nanjing Girl".It should be said that this film is generally considered objective, and hardly mentions human rights issues positively. Instead, it uses a realistic method to record the daily life of a group of female college students at Nanjing Normal University, from gymnastics training to French classes, from party classes to Falling in love, from singing in karaoke to long-distance travel in Tibet, is full of life.I told the audience that from this movie, you can see that Chinese society has never been as open as it is today.

However, this movie is just a starter, and the debate on human rights in China is the main course.Most of the people who participated in this event were Western NGOs who claimed to care about human rights in China and some local people who were interested in China. There were also many diplomats. Looking from the rostrum, it was dark and full of seats. There are always more than 300 people, raising their hands and asking questions without interruption.It should be said that we argued quite fiercely. Although we had different views, we still maintained the necessary restraint and politeness.After the debate ended, part of the audience surrounded me and continued the discussion for nearly an hour.I can't say that I convinced all the audience, but many people admitted that they had some new understanding of human rights in China.Some people who like to criticize Human Rights in China also admit that they have encountered a strong opponent.The following is the main content of my speech:

Everyone raised some questions about human rights in China, and I will also share my views.The host just mentioned "the challenge of China's rise to international human rights", but my opinion is just the opposite. I think China's rise would be impossible without China's great progress in human rights and human freedom.It is impossible for a nation whose human rights are constantly violated to rise so quickly.You may wish to ask the Chinese people you meet in China or anywhere in the world: Is human rights in China good or bad?I think the answer from most Chinese people is that it is better now.

China is the country with the largest and fastest changes in the world. What happened in Europe for three hundred years has been reduced to thirty or forty years in China. Various contradictions will naturally arise in this process, including many human rights issues that need to be gradually resolved. The direction of the country's development is satisfactory. The Pew Research Center of the United States conducted a cross-border poll on this. In 2008, the satisfaction rate of Chinese people was 86%, while that of Americans was 23%.Therefore, when discussing human rights in China, we should first ask the Chinese, not the Americans and Europeans.

The strange thing is that the West always thinks that it knows Africa better than Africans, Russia better than Russians, and China better than Chinese. There must be something wrong with that.Take Africa as an example. The West always thinks that democratization in Africa must override everything else, but you should at least ask Africans how they think about it.I have traveled to many African countries, and I can say that the human rights issues that Africans most want to solve are first food, then disease, employment, and public security. How many African countries are plunged into turmoil and famine?

No country in the world can realize all human rights at the same time, so there must be priorities.The Chinese did not follow the logic of the West. We took poverty eradication as a core human right and lifted nearly 400 million people out of poverty.If it is done according to Western standards, eradicating poverty is not a human right at all. The United States has not even recognized economic, social, and cultural rights, so we have not waited for the West to wake up. We have already done so, and the effect is good. Just now someone asked why China did not participate in the Western sanctions against some African dictatorships.There is another huge difference in philosophy involved here.From the perspective of the Chinese people, helping African countries get rid of poverty is a core human right, and no country can find an excuse to violate this human right.This is a bit like the humanitarian rescue activities of the International Red Cross. It does not distinguish between friend and foe, and it is carried out from a humanitarian perspective.If a country is to be sanctioned, it needs to be jointly authorized by the United Nations, not just a few Western countries.The West acts according to its own standards in everything in Africa, which has become political blackmail. How can the recipient countries develop?Western countries also have many human rights issues. For example, most Western countries have not achieved equal pay for equal work between men and women. This is undoubtedly a violation of human rights. Should the United Nations impose sanctions on the West?

Democracy is a universal value, but Western democratic systems are not universal values, and the two cannot be confused.The core of democracy is to reflect the will of the people and achieve good political governance.Whether it is a one-party system, a multi-party system, or a non-party system, a system that can achieve good governance is a good system, and a system that cannot achieve good governance is a bad system.Looking around the world, I can't find a single example where a non-western country can become a developed country by adopting a western political system. The West itself should also reflect on its own political system.How did the financial crisis in the United States happen?How did the "Four Stupid Countries" in Southern Europe come into being?What do these crises have to do with Western democracy?How many human rights are violated by these crises?Why can the separation of powers in the United States neither predict the financial crisis nor effectively deal with it?I think the key is that the separation of powers within the political system alone cannot solve the problem. Modern countries need the balance of the entire society, especially the balance between political power, social power, and capital power.China's ability to avoid the financial crisis is related to this characteristic of the Chinese model.If the American democratic system fails to balance the power of capital, there will be new crises.

As for the death penalty, I think the majority of Chinese people do not agree to abolish the death penalty. This kind of public opinion must be respected, which is the premise of democracy.I'm thinking about a related question: if the West respects life so much, including the life of murderers, why can't you go one step further and directly declare that peace is a universal value, and unless the United Nations authorizes it, any country will Can't start a war?The Iraq war launched by the United States killed more than 100,000 civilians, right?Isn't this equivalent to the execution of hundreds of thousands of innocent people?Isn't this a massive violation of human rights?

Human rights are important, but so are many traditional values. The sound operation of a society requires the organic combination of various elements.Like all countries, China also has corrupt officials, villains, and troublemakers, but we have generally maintained a simple and honest folk custom, which has benefited from the traditional culture that has been formed for thousands of years in China.There was widespread looting after the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, but not with the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008, even though we suffered ten times as many people as Chile.Why?I think Chinese traditional culture played a role.This is a human-centered culture. If people want to show their hearts to each other and save people in distress, they will be punished by God if they cannot take advantage of the fire to rob people.

A few years ago, there was a popular song in China called "Go Home and Have a Look". It was very popular, but it caused some controversy.Because the lyrics sang: Lead the children to go home often, bring a smile and blessings, accompany the lover to go home often, the mother prepares some nagging, the father prepares a good meal, and the troubles of life tell the mother Said, talk to Dad about work.Some feminists think the song discriminates against women, but most Chinese don't think so.They believe that the modernization process has led to an overly busy life, but no matter how busy we are, we should not forget our parents.This song sings about the cultural heritage of the Chinese people, which is a warm humanistic tradition.Every society has its own cultural traditions.Chinese cultural traditions appeared much earlier than the concept of human rights in the West.Human rights standards formed in the West cannot be applied to everything in the world.The future direction of the world's human rights cause should be to accommodate more different cultures and wisdoms, thereby enriching the concept of human rights.In the final analysis, what we need to guard against is not the so-called cultural relativism mentioned by the host just now, but cultural absolutism, the kind of people who describe their own culture as a universal value and other people's culture as a backward custom, and then The practice of imposing one's own things on others.

I used to learn English, and my English teacher told me that "I" is capitalized in English, which shows the important position of an individual in society.There is no capitalization in Chinese, but if there is, I think Chinese will also capitalize "you", "you", "we", etc.People have different social roles: you are a son, a husband, a father, and a colleague of others.The rights and obligations of "I" in Chinese culture are linked together.I really think that China's humanistic culture can enrich the Western concept of human rights based on individual freedom.I also think that China's ancient civilization is actually very post-modern, which is good for solving various problems in Western society today and for solving the difficult problems of global governance. As for the issue of Chinese dissidents, frankly speaking, these people seem to have been expecting a "color revolution" in China.But what did the "color revolution" bring to Ukraine?disaster.What did it bring to Georgia?disaster.What did it bring to Kyrgyzstan?disaster.Examples of such people are the Czech "Charter 77" and the Polish Solidarity trade union.In fact, these demands of theirs have been fully realized in the Republic of Haiti, but Haiti is a country that has completely failed.The world has entered the 21st century, and the world has experienced the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the failure of the "color revolution" one after another, but these people are still talking about abstract democracy and copying Western models. How can they be convincing?These people can also ask themselves: Why do the vast majority of overseas Chinese who have lived in the West for a long time not support them? When I visited Poland four years ago, I checked the polls conducted by the Pew Center in the United States. That year, the Chinese rate of satisfaction with their own country was 72%, while that of Poland was 13%. Who do you think should learn from whom?I suggest you visit Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, Warsaw, and Shanghai, and you will know which country the future of the world lies in.China used to be ahead of the West for thousands of years in history, but later we became proud and complacent, closed ourselves off, and fell behind as a result.China has been earnestly learning all the strengths of others, including the beneficial experience of the West in protecting human rights, but it does not give up its own advantages, so China has made rapid progress, one year is equal to ten years in the West, and the Chinese people today have surpassed the Western model .If the West is still self-centered, only knows how to teach others, but does not know how to learn from others, it will regret it one day. The Western human rights discourse system seems to be sound, but in fact there are some basic flaws.The first flaw is the inability to strike a balance between political and civil rights and economic, social and cultural rights.For example, there are no economic, social and cultural rights in the concept of human rights in the United States.If the United States can reflect on its own medical insurance issues from the perspective of human rights, then the problem of its more than 40 million American citizens without medical insurance can be solved more easily. The second flaw is the problem of legalism.The West basically regards human rights issues as legal issues, and believes that only human rights issues that can be accepted by the courts can be considered human rights issues. This is difficult and expensive to operate in countries with weak legal systems and insufficient lawyers.For example, the Indian government's solution to the housing rights of slum dwellers is to only compensate those who have property rights in the slums. This seems to be a rule of law, but in fact the vast majority of people in the slums are "tenants" without property rights. Instead of blaming everyone, the slum problem in India is getting worse.I personally think that in non-Western countries, a better way is to promote the rule of law while promoting human rights through political means. This is more likely to achieve results. This is an important experience in promoting human rights in China.Legalism also leads to expensive litigation costs, which are often a disguised form of corruption, a legalized corruption that leads to unfair justice: the rich can always hire better lawyers, causing the legal system to lose impartiality.Legalism emphasizes correct procedures. As a result, ordinary criminal cases have been dragged on for many years, causing a large number of cases to accumulate. A third flaw is the dilemma of individual rights overtaking collective rights.The West emphasizes that human rights are individual rights, and there is some reason for this, because they worry that collective rights will be abused and become an excuse to damage individual rights. damage.For example, a single Danish cartoonist's right to freedom of speech can compromise the right to religious freedom of a billion Muslims.An ideal human rights protection system should be able to balance individual and collective rights, freedom and responsibility.In this regard, I think the Chinese people's philosophical thinking will be more in line with the trend of human rights development in the era of globalization. A fourth flaw is the lack of a concept of priority in the human rights system.In fact, no country can realize all human rights at the same time.The way the West promotes human rights in developing countries is either that political power overwhelms everything else, or it treats the head when it hurts, and treats the foot when it hurts.Under the guidance of the West, so many developing countries tried to give priority to political rights instead of poverty eradication, and the results were terrible.In a country full of poverty, to engage in Western-style democracy, the result is a rotten democracy like Haiti: hunger leads to riots, riots lead to anarchy, and anarchy makes the so-called elected government useless. United Nations peacekeeping police to maintain basic order.The wrong priorities, the results are often not good.China has grasped the fundamentals. This fundamental is economic development. With economic development and social changes, the improvement of other rights will have a strong driving force and material basis.We must seek truth from facts on human rights issues. For a developing country, limited resources determine that it must weigh the pros and cons and determine the priority of resource use.For countries like Congo and Afghanistan, the first thing is to restore public order and develop the economy. If the international community can help Congo and Afghanistan do this well within three to five years, it will already be a remarkable human rights achievement. Of course, when discussing human rights, we must also point out that some human rights are core human rights and universal values, and they are also the common bottom line that all human civilizations must accept.These rights cannot be violated at any time and under any circumstances, such as the prohibition of torture, the prohibition of slavery, the freedom of thought, and the inability to be arrested arbitrarily.On these issues, we have no differences with the mainstream views in the West.The United States has tortured some prisoners in Guantanamo Prison, which aroused the disgust of the whole world, because its practice violated the common bottom line of human civilization.But there are also differences between us and the West. One of them is that the West defines universal values ​​too broadly, and defines them according to the wishes of the West.The West believes that what is universal value is universal value, and the whole world should follow it. This is unreasonable. In dealing with human rights issues, it will be commendable if countries can sincerely exchange experiences, learn from each other's strengths and make progress hand in hand.Our world is rich and colorful, and the concept of human rights in each country has its own characteristics.Within the Western world, there are great differences in the concept of human rights.For example, Sweden's economic system is based on high taxes, which in the United States would be considered a violation of private property rights.Britain still has the state religion, and it is a compulsory subject in schools, which is unimaginable in France, which has experienced the French Revolution.But the French government's monopoly on TV stations lasted until 1982, which is unimaginable in the United States.Likewise, France bans Muslim girls from wearing hijabs in classrooms, something unimaginable in China. I talked about such a point of view in the book "China Touches the World": globalization has brought many challenges to the whole world, and such challenges require full cooperation among countries to deal with.The per capita resources consumed by developed countries are 32 times that of developing countries, and the per capita resources consumed by the United States are 11 times that of China. However, the Western concept of human rights has determined: what is mine is mine, and nothing should be less, because this It is the so-called "natural human rights", that is, the "right to pursue happiness" endowed by the Creator, and if you want to enjoy the same rights and use the corresponding resources, he will compete with you and even surround you.Western democratic systems are only responsible to some voters in their own countries, and not to the people of other countries. How can such a self-centered Western concept of human rights and democracy solve global problems including climate warming, trade protectionism, and eradicating extreme poverty?No one can monopolize the development of human rights in the world.China should learn from all countries in the world all beneficial concepts and practices in protecting and promoting human rights, and at the same time make its own contribution to the cause of human rights in the world.China has a rich "people-oriented culture", which can enrich the Western concept of "human rights" based on individual freedom: human rights should be based on human nature, and human rights can be combined with the sense of responsibility to put others before oneself.China will continue to explore and innovate in the field of human rights, so as to bring China's human rights cause to a higher level, and at the same time inject more Chinese elements into the development of the world's human rights cause.