In 2008, deliberately following in the footsteps of the 1977 group of Czechs and Slovaks who authored a tract opposing communism in Europe, a group of Chinese liberal intellectuals authored the document Charter 08. The foreword of the document begins as follows (translation in English, courtesy the New York Review of Books):
2008… marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of the Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.
The authors then go on to articulate their vision of the society they want, which includes most if not all of the guarantees of the American system of government: procedural democracy; separation of powers; separation of church and state; privatisation of all state-owned property and enterprise; a free-market economy – in short, a liberal, democratic nation-state. The reaction of the Chinese government to this document was immediate, and it was harsh – a number of its authors were tried and gaoled, the most (in)famous of these being Liu Xiaobo. In the wake of this charter, the term ‘universal values’ has been greeted with suspicion by most Chinese nationalists as a vehicle of Western neocolonialism.
It appears to me that the issue suffers from fundamental misframing. Seriously, who doesn’t like ‘freedom, equality and human rights’? These are values for which, once upon a time, the Chinese Communist Party also fought (and are still proud of so doing!). These are the values which inspired all the great social movements in the Third World (and in the First and Second as well) which have blunted the forces of political and economic domination time and again. But even as they are articulated, they are at once coopted by those very same forces of political and economic domination, whose vehicle for the past four centuries has almost invariably been the liberal, democratic nation-state (or something attempting to disguise itself as one, in the grand tradition of the French Revolution). Both the Indians inspired by Gandhi and Badshah Khan, and their British occupiers, lay claim to these ‘universal values’. Both the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh and their French oppressors lay claim to them. Civil rights leaders in the United States and their opponents both cited these values in their own causes in the 1960’s. How can these ‘universal values’ be at war with each other so often, even within the same communities?
The fundamental mistake of Liu Xiaobo and those like him is to see an American-style liberal nation-state, divorced from any positive concept of the common good (and from any transcendental normative end of human endeavour from which the common good must flow), as the be-all end-all solution to China’s problems. But (just as China’s current regime must trace its philosophical pedigree back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and all the problems that came with his philosophy) the liberal nation-state must trace its own back to John Locke, to Thomas Hobbes, to Niccolò Machiavelli – the apostles of greed and naked power. The liberal nation-state is designed as a kind of civilised battlefield, upon which competing, individual values vie amongst themselves in a ‘marketplace’, supervised by the watchful eye of a neutral government with a monopoly on force. All value-claims are equally valid, collapsed downward into mere material interests, and all are equally subordinate to the value-neutral brute force of the government (which constrains itself from making any kind of value-claim). All society takes place through a ‘contract’ between individuals with co-incidental (rather than co-operative, or based on common family or common locality or common vocation) value-claims; a ‘contract’ which (even in Locke’s version) inevitably collapses upwards into the nation-state. Civil society – the parish church, the university, the labour union, the town hall – all are proscribed by the central authority of the nation-state through its legal system, overriding traditional privileges and customs; whether liberal or authoritarian, the difference is a matter of degree than a matter of kind.
The ‘universal values’ advocated by Charter 08 are really neither universal, nor are they really actually values. They are code for the nonregulation through the threat of violence of very particular values, values which cannot (in the Hobbesian-Lockean perspective) be reconciled with each other. And the more universal a value-system claims to be, the less a liberal-democratic order will tolerate it, and the more violent and restrictive the action of the liberal state and its champions will take in response. One need only make reference to the incredibly violent secular nationalism of the likes of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens (as Dr Cavanaugh does here) against any form of public religious expression, the enthusiasm for ever-more-dubious American military interventions on the part of the late Václav Havel (architect of Charter 77), or indeed, the unapologetic pro-Bush neoconservatism and anti-Islamic bigotry of Liu Xiaobo, which all too many Western liberals either gloss over or wilfully ignore (but which have been duly noted by both palaeoconservatives like Daniel Larison and anti-Trotskyist leftists like Tariq Ali).
But what makes China such an intriguing case, is that it is even now searching for exactly such a concept of the common good and a transcendental normative end of its endeavours. Communism’s promises showed themselves to be empty. The promises of post-Deng crony capitalism, and the social and moral decay which accompanied them, are likewise showing themselves to be empty. The promise of economic and financial laisser-faire under a technocratic state apparatus has shown itself around the world to be empty. Many amongst China’s down-but-not-out intellectual class will not be satisfied with such a solution, and are looking for a positive moral direction – and the wiser ones amongst them are taking creative hints (knowingly or not) from Duke Dan of Zhou, from Confucius, from Mencius, from Zhu Xi. This older, humanist virtue-ethical tradition, a product of the Axial Age notable for its similarities with the traditions of Zoroaster, of Socrates and Plato, of the Hebrew prophets, and later of kerygmatic and classical Christianity, may not yet be lost as new generations of Chinese students are exposed to them. What came to be called Confucianism did indeed touch upon universal human values: the inherent dignity of human life (and its need for sustenance); the belonging of human beings to communities beyond place, blood and economic interests; the pursuit of transcendental truth rather than worldly power or gain.
What results from the political application of this tradition, if and when it is rediscovered, may indeed be a democracy – indeed, it is my hope that it retains some democratic properties, such as a radicalisation of Confucian virtue that extends to women and to the poor. But, if so, it will be a democratic model which, rather than wilfully repeating the mistakes of the late-capitalist West, might provide a peaceable, proportionally equitable and virtuous countervailing model and example by which Western culture may correct itself. Even Chinese nationalists needn’t fear the language of ‘universal values’, if they only learn to look for them in the right places.
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