An important theoretical article published on June 15 evidenced once again that Xi uses “human rights” with a different meaning than the rest of the world.
by Massimo Introvigne
It took almost four months for the lecture on human rights delivered by Xi Jinping at the thirty-seventh Collective study session of the Political Bureau of the Nineteenth Central Committee to be published in the Qiushi, the official ideological magazine of the CCP. The lecture was delivered on February 25, and its text has appeared in the Qiushi on June 15. This would normally indicate that the text has been accurately polished, perhaps by Xi himself.
There is nothing new in Xi’s claim that there is no universal notion of human rights; that each country has the right to define “human rights” as it sees fit; and that the West pretends to impose under the false idea of “universal” human rights its own bourgeois notion of these rights.
What is comparatively new and interesting is the genealogy of the “excellent” Chinese notion of human rights Xi presented in the lecture. In fact, this genealogy is nothing less than extraordinary. The Chinese President mentioned six ancestors of this notion: Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Marx, and Engels. The four Chinese philosophers, although none of them ever used the expression “human rights,” are mobilized through quotes attributing to them the idea that a good government should “love the people” and be “people-oriented.”
They are presented as if they were parts of an unbroken chain, while in fact Mencius and Xunzi had fundamental disagreements about human nature, Xunzi and his disciples supported authoritarian forms of government far away from any meaningful notion of “human rights,” and Mozi was an opponent of the Confucians rather than their supporter. It is possible to keep them together only by quoting platitudes about their “love for the people,” without going deeper into their respective philosophies.
It is well-known that Xi is a reader of the Chinese classics, and its strange potpourri of irreconcilable philosophers cannot be attributed to ignorance. It is an ideological statement, insisting on Xi’s pet theory that there is a unified “Chinese traditional culture,” whose notion is based on a reconstruction of the ideas of Confucius that does not derive from academic science but from the needs of the CCP.
According to Xi, an element of “love for the people” was not absent in the early European theories of human rights elaborated by the Enlightenment philosophers and proclaimed by the governments that emerged from the bourgeois revolutions. However, “Marx and Engels affirmed the historical and progressive significance of the bourgeois human rights theory, and at the same time thoroughly criticized the social, historical and class nature of their denial of human rights.”
Marx and Engels, Xi argues, unmasked the contradiction of the European bourgeoisie, which on the one hand was capable of elaborating a progressive theory of human rights but on the other hand did not guarantee real human rights to the proletarians.
Clearly, a new theory of human rights was necessary. The Communist parties worked at it. However, Xi believes that only the Chinese Communist Party was able to build a synthesis between the Confucian “love for the people” and Marxist theory.
The theory and practice of human rights of the Western countries, according to Xi, simply continues the hypocrisy and contradictions exposed by Marx and Engels. Other Communist regimes did not really solve the problem. China did, because it was able to put together Marxism and Confucianism. “We have combined the Marxist concept of human rights with China’s concrete reality and excellent traditional Chinese culture,” Xi proclaims.
But where is the difference in practice? Xi answers that the CCP idea of human rights “makes the right to subsistence and the right to development the first priority.” The Western notion of human rights perpetuates the 19th-century bourgeois contradiction by creating a hierarchy of rights that puts at the top freedom of thought, speech, association, political participation, and religion. By doing this, argues Xi, the false Western notion of human rights protects the rich and ignores the fact that the poor need first to survive and escape poverty.
On the contrary, the CCP regards survival and freedom from poverty as the key human rights. It is prepared to deny what the West sees as other, fundamental, human rights if they become obstacles in the struggle for the eradication of poverty and the construction of a socialist society.
Xi explains that the struggle against poverty can only be won if everybody “upholds the leadership of the CCP.” “The leadership of the CCP and my country’s socialist system determine the socialist nature of the Chinese notion of human rights,” writes Xi. Obviously, the need to obey the CCP unconditionally implies that other (bourgeois) human rights may be bracketed or suspended if they are not coherent with this need.
Xi gives as an example of the superiority of the Chinese notion of human rights the struggle against COVID-19. Subsistence is the first human right, and it includes the right to be protected from the virus and not to die. As we know, Xi believes that this right can be guaranteed only through the so-called Zero COVID policy. But imposing a Zero COVID policy is impossible if one prioritizes human rights such as freedom of speech, of assembly, and of protest. As a result of its inferior notion of human rights, the West has fallen into an “out-of-control” epidemic, Xi argues—unlike China that has controlled it.
Paradoxically, Xi concludes, the West continues to mention “universal human rights” and that “human rights are higher than sovereignty,” interfering in the internal affairs of China and other countries—while in fact Xi is persuaded that the superior Chinese notion of human rights has proved its virtues in the COVID crisis.