Human Rights in China
By By Ralph Lynn
Dr. Ralph Lynn, retired history professor at Baylor University, is a regular contributor to Christian Ethics Today.
Our current policy with respect to China may need revision. We are demanding, as the price of admission on an equal basis with our Western industrialized trading partners, that the Chinese begin adhering to our current standards in the area of human rights.
We seem to be forgetting two crucial considerations. First, our current concept of human rights has a long history of development; it is not today what it was even thirty-five years ago. Second, to implement our current human rights policies demands a level of affluence beyond the reach of the Chinese just now. In short, human rights is, to an inescapable degree, a function of economics.
What are some of the facts upon which these statements rest?
The American concept of human rights dates neither from the Mayflower Compact nor from the Declaration of Independence. It dates from the English Magna Carta of 1215 and from the English Bill of Rights in 1689.
We seem to have forgotten that it took our Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to allow, even on paper, citizenship to African American men. And it took the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified and made operative on August 26, 1920, to allow simple voting rights to American citizens of the female gender of either Anglo Saxon or African or native American or any other origin.
Less excusably, we seem to have forgotten that it took the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, one hundred years after the Civil War, to overcome legal Jim Crowism and to begin to deliver on the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. Even then, the Southern white dominant classes, traditionally Democratic, were so offended that they huffily began to vote Republican.
Given our American advantages, we have little right then, as a European diplomat remarked of Woodrow Wilson just after World War I, to lecture mankind from a "high moral plateau where we walk alone with God."
To say that the Chinese have had no such advantages and no such history of human rights development seems unnecessary.
Yet, it must be said that until the dawn of the 20th century, China had known only inefficient, autocratic, dynastic (mostly Asian but non-Chinese) rule.
Without industrial development to speed communications and without any notion of Western efficiency, not one of these dynasties (or the warlords who presided over the anarchy of the first half of the 20th century) had established a centralized government able to defend or to govern China.
Therefore, the Western European nations were free to divide China into "spheres of influence." From these bastions, the Western invaders treated the Chinese society and Chinese individuals with contempt.
Unfortunately, the first efficient national government China has had came after World War II under Communists who were Western only in their efficiency.
If we turn to the question of the significance of economics in the human rights story, we find a similar difference in history between ourselves and our Western trading partners on the one hand and Chinese history on the other.
Perhaps we need to remind ourselves here that an agricultural society is, inescapably, a society of scarcity with a clearly defined class structure.
We, and our Western industrialized trading partners, began to adopt modern views of human rights only with the development of steam power in the late 18th century. Since then, with increasing affluence, our notions of human rights have changed.
In colonial times, our establishment people who were running county governments, normally dumped their indigent and demented citizens over the nearest county line in an attempt to escape the burden of caring for them.
From the mid-19th century until 1929, the establishment people of our new industrialized metropolises rounded up orphan children, living in filth and crime on city streets, and shipped them on "orphan trains" to small midWestern towns. There they were parceled out in these labor-scarce communities to farmers, ranchers, and storekeepers-much as slave auctions were conducted in the Old South.
We began to abandon child labor in factories, which the Wilson administration had legally outlawed, only when the Great Depression made child labor uneconomical.
In contrast, China is still largely the agricultural society of scarcity from which it really began to emerge only after World War II, a historically scant fifty years ago.
Again, unfortunately, this recent history has been dominated by Communism. Now, thankfully, China clearly has not reached our standards in human rights and does not have a chicken in every pot-but the Chinese are establishing stock markets right and left and the new motto seems to be "every Chinese Communist a capitalist."
In sum: our current American policy with respect to China is wrong-headed in that it shows little respect for the Chinese and less respect for the pertinent facts.
Perhaps we do need to consider some revision.
Let us hope George Kennan, that astute veteran student of the human tragi-comedy, was wrong when he observed that the United States can hardly have an intelligent foreign policy since foreign policy must be approved by the voters.
