Abstract: The controversy between Karl Marx’s concept of human rights and the Western liberal concept of human rights has been a focus of the contest between Eastern and Western values for a long time. Based on historical materialism, Marxism exposes the incompleteness of the Western liberal concept of human rights in terms of human rights subjects, human rights objects and epistemology of human rights, and promotes gradual integration of norms of international human rights discourse, with international human rights instruments as a carrier, into pluralistic cultural perspectives. A review of such controversy and its influence on development of norms of international human rights discourse will be in the interest of China’s objective response to Western export of human rights (democracy) discourse for the time being, and expanding space for discourse on human rights practice with Chinese characteristics.

 

Key Words: Human Rights, Marxism, Liberalism

 

The controversy between Marx’s concept of human rights and the Western liberal concept of human rights has long been a focus of the contest between Eastern and Western values. R.J. Vincent even said that in a very important sense, the history of East-West relations in the modern sense is the history of human rights debate between the socialist countries and the Western liberal democratic countries.¹ Through debates, Marx’s concept of human rights reveals the inherent incompleteness of the Western liberal concept of human rights in terms of human rights subjects, human rights objects and epistemology of human rights, and influences and promotes gradual integration of norms of international human rights discourse, with international human rights instruments as a carrier, into pluralistic cultural perspectives.. A review of such debate and its influence on development of norms of international human rights discourse will provide significant enlightenment to China’s active response to Western export of human rights (democracy) discourse for the time being, and expansion of space for discourse on human rights practice in China.

 

 

Objects of human rights refer to whatever rights that people can claim.² According to the liberal concept of human rights, born in the enlightenment of modern Western capitalism, objects of human rights mainly refer to a series of civil and political rights, such as the right to life, liberty, personal security, privacy and property; the right to freedom of thought, speech, conscience and religion; the right to freedom of assembly and association, as well as the right to vote in elections and general elections, and to take part in public affairs. The concept of human rights in this period is also known as “the first generation of human rights”, which is mainly characterized by the right to freedom as its basis.³

 

Marx had originally affirmed and praised the Western liberal concept of human rights, but with the formation of his position on communism, he initiated the theoretical disenchantment of the modern Western liberal concept of human rights with a theoretical vision going beyond his time, trying to eliminate the myth of “universal human rights” attached to it.

In Marx's view, as a product of the modern bourgeois political liberation, the Western liberal concept of human rights gets rid of the feudal autocracy and class privileges, but it is marked by the imprint of dichotomy of capitalist countries and societies. Therefore, it enables people to get rights and freedoms only in the political form, but cannot free people from the slavery of various oppression forces in real life. Taking North America as an example, Marx performed an analysis thereof: Although many states in North America removed the restrictions on the qualifications for the right to elect and to be elected, and the country also announced that regardless of differences in origin, property, education and occupation, everyone enjoyed equal rights and freedoms, this only eliminated these differences politically, and these differences were still at work in the real political life. He said, “The country is far from eliminating all the real differences. On the contrary, only in the presence of these differences, can it exist; only when it is in opposition to these factors, will it feel itself a political state.”⁴ Marx believed that in the actual life of civil society, human rights are just the “unstoppable movement” of the spiritual elements and the material elements of civil society.⁵ Therefore, “any kind of so-called human rights does not go beyond the egoistic man, nor does it go beyond the man as a member of civil society, that is, the man as an individual locked in themselves, their own private interests and private waywardness, and at the same time is cut off from the society as a whole.”⁶ Obviously, Marx believed that the essence of the modern Western liberal concept of human rights was in confirmation of atomic individuals of the capitalist society and their living state in the form of legal rights. 

 

Along with his shift of criticism of capitalism in political economics, Marx further revealed the economic basis of the modern Western liberal concept of human rights, and pointed out that the capitalist commodity economy was the “true paradise of man’s natural rights”.⁷ Marx pointed out that for the sake of free production, free exploitation of labor and free accumulation of capital, the modern Western bourgeoisie must break away from the bondage of feudal class privileges and divine rights, and thus prompt their thinkers to initiate the claim of “human rights” and issue the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", which meant “forced recognition and approval in the form of human rights the modern bourgeois society, namely the society which is industrial, which is shrouded in general competition, which is intended for free pursuit of  private interests, which is anarchic, and which is filled with self-alienated natural and spiritual personality”.⁸ It should be noted that although such a point of view that “takes competition as part of ‘human rights’” meets the requirement for the development of the capitalist commodity economy, as it is bound to lead to social power monopoly, force plays a decisive role among equal rights”.⁹ Although class origin and identity are no longer barriers to the people’s entitlement to equal power or rights, and feudal privileges and the right of descent have given way to equal rights, the status of property (characterized by money in real life) in the people’s possession is a crucial factor in determining whether and to what extent they can really enjoy human rights. Marx said, "The power of the bourgeoisie depends entirely on money", so the bourgeoisie “must synthesize all the feudal privileges and political monopoly power of the past dynasties into one big privilege and monopoly power of money”.¹⁰ In this way, human rights have become a kind of privilege not linked to class origin and identity, but in relation to the status of property. In Frederick Engels’s words, this is a kind of “freedom of money instead of human freedom”.¹¹ Similarly, in the capitalist society, “the principle of equality is wiped out because it is limited only to ‘legal equality’, which is equality under the premise of the inequality between the rich and the poor”.¹²

Based on the aforesaid understanding of the modern Western liberal concept of human rights, Marx and Engels paid more attention to the political, economic and social relations concerning the realization of individuals’ rights. They not only emphasized the need to promote the political liberation of capitalism to the emancipation of mankind, but also, in light of the requirement of the bourgeoisie for human rights in the political form, pointed out that rights “should not only be superficial and carried out in the domain of the State, but should also be practical and implemented in the social and economic fields.”¹³ Vladimir Lenin inherited the value objective of Marx’s and Engels's thought of human rights, pointing out that “with full freedom, the entire officialdom including the head of state is generated through election, which will neither eliminate the rule of capital, nor put an end to the phenomenon of affluence of a minority of people and poverty of the general public.¹⁴ He believed that real equality and democracy are “equality and democracy reached in real life rather than those on paper, and are equality and democracy in economic reality rather than those in the empty political talk.”¹⁵ These thoughts of classical writers of Marxism have provided important ideological resources for promoting extension of objects of human rights protection from the scope of civil and political rights onto the scope of economic, social and cultural rights.¹⁶

 

Under the influence and promotion of the Marxist concept of human rights, people have realized that the liberal concept of human rights was insufficient due to its limitation to civil and political rights, and have been inspired and prompted to pay attention to and advocate economic, social and cultural rights. Thus, European countries embarked on the path of development of a welfare society in the 20th century, and the United States also began to emphasize the protection of citizens’ economic and social rights in this period. International human rights norms also gradually broke away from the centralism of the right to freedom, and the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, adopted at the 1948 World Conference on Human Rights, explicitly declares that civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights are indivisible. In 1966, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights promulgated the "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" and the "International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights" at the same time. Due to the contribution of the Marxist concept of human rights to the promotion of economic, social and cultural rights, the French scholar Karel Vasak regarded the October Revolution in Russia as a symbol of the emergence of the “second generation of human rights”, namely, economic, social and cultural rights. International human rights theorist Stephen P. Marks also pointed out that Marxism played a very significant role in promoting the social revolution against the exploitation in the 19th century caused by the abuse of civil and political rights, leading to the emergence of economic, social and cultural rights.¹⁷ 

 

 

According to the modern Western liberal concept of human rights, human rights referred to the inalienable rights endowed in the individual independent of society and especially independent of the Statenamely, the “rights of man as man”, and subjects of human rights could only be individuals, which was determined by the specific purpose of the bourgeois political revolution at that time. As spokesmen for the interests of the bourgeoisie, the 17th and 18th century liberals’ main concern was to overthrow the feudal autocratic rule of the Middle Ages in Europe. Therefore, with regard to the Middle Ages practices of attributing people to God and defining people from a collective perspective, they proposed the concept of human personality according to the universal human nature, and with regard to the feudal theocracy and privileges, they initiated the claim of individual human rights.¹⁸ 

 

However, human rights are an objective historical category, and its connotation develops naturally along with political and social changes, which is also the reason why the concept of human rights can keep promoting human dignity. Since individuals are those living in families, groups (communities) and countries, personal identity is largely determined by the identity of members of such collectives. For such individuals, their meaningful and dignified life -- where the purpose of human rights lies -- will be closely related to the collective in which they live, and “the relationship between the individual’s human rights and the rights of society and other social collectives is far from being confrontational as people tend to assume”.¹⁹ To a certain extent, protection of collective rights is a prerequisite for realization of the individual’s human rights. So, in order to protect the human rights of individuals, we must pay close attention to their collective rights. Historically, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a philosopher who proposed at a relatively early time promotion of the collective rights to a level equal to or higher than the status of the individual’s rights.²⁰

 

The Marxist concept of human rights advocates interdependence between individual rights and collective rights. Marx believed that the human nature was no abstraction inherent in each single individual, but summation of all social relations. Lenin also believed that in the class society, individual activities would eventually be attributed to the activities of various classes.²¹ Marx criticized the abstract individual concept of modern Western liberal human rights, believing that the “individual” here was an egoistic individual “separated from other individuals and society”. Correspondingly, what the liberal concept of human rights protects are rights of secession  as “isolated units” that are independent of others. Contrary to the “abstract individual” concept, “man is not a thing existing outside of the world abstractly; and man is man’s world, namely the State and society”.²² In Marx's view, the modern western liberal concept of human rights turns real man into an abstract symbol through the abstract individual: When subjects of human rights are stripped of specific social characteristics such as class, gender and ethnicity, the entire real man will fall victim to the abstract individual losing the context, whereby the bourgeoisie has idealized the capitalist social order, and has maintained the rule of the bourgeoisie. Marxism’s criticism of the abstract individual of the western liberal concept of human rights provides a philosophical basis for the appearance of collective rights. In the vision of Marxism, individual human rights do not necessarily have the absolute priority, and individual rights and collective rights are interdependent on each other.

 

In Marxist interpretation of the collective rights, the right of national self-determination is typical. The concept of national self-determination originated in Europe was initially advocated in the French Revolution in 1789. Later, it was combined with the nation state principle. Lenin believed that proceeding from the requirement for the development of the capitalist commodity economy, the bourgeoisie proposed the concept of national self-determination, with a view to establishing nation states adaptable to the capitalist commodity economy. However, along with the development of capitalism from the phase of free competition to the phase of monopoly, there formed an imperialist colonial system under which a handful of imperialist countries ruled over a majority of countries and nations around the world, with the nations of the world divided into the oppressor nations and the oppressed nations. Therefore, the establishment of the bourgeois national states has only realized the national self-determination of the bourgeoisie, leaving other nations in ethnic oppression and exploitation. Only by achieving the national self-determination of every nation so that each nation can decide their own fate, can genuine national freedom and equality be realized.²³ Influenced by the aforesaid ideology of the right of national self-determination, after the Second World War, the national liberation movement in the world was in an upsurge, and the colonial system was gradually disintegrated. At the same time, the principle of national self-determination has been widely recognized in the international community, so that not only this principle was written into the Charter of the United Nations, but the Seventh Session of the General Assembly in 1952 also adopted the Right to Self-Determination of Nations/Peoples. The resolution pointed out that people and nations should enjoy the right of self-determination so as to ensure full enjoyment of all fundamental human rights.²⁴

 

The right to development is another collective right advocated by Marxism. For both the first generation of human rights with civil and political rights as the core, and the second generation of human rights with economic, social and cultural rights as the core, their realization and protection will depend on the overall economic and social development of a country. In particular, for the majority of developing countries, their economic development and people's living standards are still relatively low, restricting the people's enjoyment of these rights in all respects fundamentally. Taking China as an example, Deng Xiaoping said: “Our people's living standards and cultural level are not yet high, which cannot be solved merely by talking about human value and humanitarianism, and which instead can be solved mainly by actively constructing the material civilization and spiritual civilization”.²⁵ If the right to development of the country cannot be well guaranteed, all other human rights are out of the question.

 

Under the joint efforts of the former Soviet Union, China and the third world developing countries, the Marxist assertions on collective rights such as the right of national self-determination and the right to development have been incorporated into the system of international human rights norms. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights noted that realization of the right to self-determination is a necessary condition for effective protection of and adherence to individual human rights, and promotion and strengthening of those rights. The "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" and the "International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights", adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1966, provide that each sovereign state has the right to freely choose its political, economic, social, cultural and legal systems, in accordance with their national conditions, and has the right to determine their own development model. The right to development was also recognized in the "Declaration on the Right to Development" adopted by the 1986 U.N. General Assembly, and in the "Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action" adopted unanimously by the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.²⁶ Although there is controversy about collective rights such as the right of self-determination and the right to development in Western countries, it is an indisputable fact that they have been incorporated into international human rights instruments.

 

 

In the view of the epistemology, the concept of human rights can be classified into that of universalism and that of relativism. The Western liberal concept of human rights believes that human rights are a kind of value which is rooted in human nature and is universally applicable to all individuals of human beings, advocating that human rights are universal rights enjoyable by people as human beings, and that human rights should be superior to sovereignty,. Therefore, even if the human rights of some individuals are denied by the law of their country, these people can still demand and struggle for human rights based on the common human values of human rights. In the mid-1970s, after the Carter administration pursued the policy of “human rights diplomacy”, the universalistic concept of human rights became the main channel for the United States and other Western countries to export the model of liberal concept of human rights. Proponents of the universalistic human rights theory advocate that human beings have the same concept of human rights, and oppose the cultural relativism which believes that different cultures have different concepts of human rights, saying that “human rights belong to human beings, and can never be determined by the law and morality of different societies”.²⁷

 

Marxism is opposed to the universalistic concept of human rights. Marx criticized the "universal human rights" fallacy of liberalism, and pointed out that the universal human rights concept of capitalism actually meant affirmation of the individualistic foundation of the bourgeois national egoism in terms of legal rights, saying that “a modern state acknowledges this natural foundation of theirs through universal human rights.”²⁸ On the basis of materialistic philosophy, Marxism believed that all rights are subject to certain constraint of the socioeconomic base and cultural level, and that “rights can never go beyond the economic structure of society as well as the cultural development of society restricted by the economic structure”.²⁹ 

 

The interpretive theory of Chinese scholars on Marxismalso believes that as human rights are concrete and historical, and are associated with certain social and historical conditions, they are therefore of relativity. Especially, in China and other developing countries, as a result of differences in national realities including cultural traditions, history and stages of development, the people in these countries will inevitably have human rights claims different from those in developed Western countries.³⁰ In China and other developing countries, because the overall level of economic and social development in them is still relatively low, and the people’s life there is not affluent, they not only require giving priority to the protection of the rights to existence and development in terms of specific human rights claims, but also stress respect for cultural diversity in terms of specific modes of human rights development, believing that different countries have different patterns of human rights practices. Deng Xiaoping pointed out that we should put forward problems and solve problems in accordance with our own realities, and “it is impossible to demand all countries in the world to mechanically transplant the models of the United States, Britain and France”.³¹ Since protection of human rights is associated with development of democracy, with regard to development of democracy, Deng Xiaoping also stressed that “as for how to engage in the various forms of democracy, it depends on the actual circumstances.”³²

 

With the efforts of China and a majority of the third world countries, the assertion of relativity of human rights has gradually gained recognition in the international community. As a result, even scholars advocating universalistic concept of human rights had to admit: “We must admit that the concept of human rights indeed varies from culture to culture, and we must examine such factors in decision-making. The question is that a balance point needs to be found out, so that the entitlement of everyone  to human rights because of the human nature should be adhered to, while admitting that the existence, connotation and significance of these rights are controversial.”³³ If the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" signed in 1948 still keeps centralism of Europe and America, the "Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action" adopted by the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights took a big step forward, with its Article 5 providing clearly, “The significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind”.³⁴

 

 

Joseph Nye, who put forward the concept of "soft power", said that values are a kind of intangible national interests. Since the end of the Cold War, the competition of values between the Eastern and Western countries has been strengthened, instead of having been weakened, and developed Western countries even intensified the execution of their strategy for “exporting values”, launching strong discourse penetration into the non-Western civilization system. The United States and other Western countries have not given up their traditional human rights diplomacy, but have rather increased the expansion of human rights values, intensifying advocacy of "dialogue on human rights", launching the “transnational civil society” movement, and inoculating people with the “universal concept of human rights”.³⁵ Issues of values such as human rights are still the focuses of today's dialogue between Eastern and Western civilizations, as Yasuaki Onuma said, “human rights are used as a political tool of big powers, which is something inevitable in the reality of international politics to some extent.”³⁶

 

At the same time, the pattern of rights of international discourse with “prevailing of the West over China” makes some citizens at home keen on the Western system of discourse on human rights and democracy, and despise or distort the results of domestic practice and exploration in human rights and democracy. And the ideological circles and the public at home are divided in the cognition of and position on values such as human rights and democracy, and there is a lack of sufficient consensus among them thereon. In face of such a situation, the resources of Marxist human rights theory needs to be further carried forward in the current development of human rights in China, with active participation in international dialogue on human rights and development of international human rights norms, to keep enlarging the space for discourse on human rights practice in China.

 

First of all, importance is attached to discourse disciplines, distinction between the moral dimension and descriptive dimension of human rights, and clarification of the similarities and differences between the Western liberal concept of human rights and the universal discourse of human rights. There is no doubt that human rights discourse in the modern sense originated from the Western liberal concept of human rights. But after extension of human rights discourse onto a wider scope, human rights discourse has begun to break away from the Western liberal concept of human rights, and the non-Western world has kept enriching their human rights discourse while they are forced to use human rights discourse to reflect on their own culture. “Human rights are one of the globalized European and American ideas and systems. Only in this sense, it is not unreasonable to regard what is European or American equivalent to what is universal. However, for any system or idea, it will be inevitable for its content to undergo changes in the process of its generalization and expansion from its birthplace to other fields.”³⁷ Therefore, the Western liberal concept of human rights is obviously not the entirety of the human rights discourse system, and to reject the universal discourse hegemony of the Western liberal concept of human rights apparently does not mean denial of the value of human rights to the protection of human dignity. The Western liberal concept of universal human rights judges and criticizes other countries’ human rights theory and practice from the particular perspective of Western countries, which apparently runs contrary to the connotation of human rights and the objective history of the continued development and improvement of international human rights norms.

 

Judged from the perspective of ways of defining rights, human rights include two aspects -- the moral dimension and the descriptive dimension. The moral dimension of human rights, from the philosophical perspective of moral principles and moral philosophy, examines what human rights should be granted to human beings. The moral considerations of rights attempt to define those human interests that do not require special justification before the trial of conscience. The descriptive dimension of human rights is a kind of empirical study of the protection of various rights and interests executed with respect to a particular society or an organization, which specifically corresponds to the rights of a state in the legal sense, and whose method of defining human rights is descriptive rather than evaluative.³⁸ Each regime (or law) intrinsically embodies the social concept of human dignity of a particular country and nation. The specific content of any human rights of the moral dimension that have been institutionalized (or that have been prescribed by law) must have become diversified. The Marxist concept of human rights including socialism with Chinese characteristics believes that the descriptive dimension of human rights is historical and empirical, and is subject to inhibition by different nations, regions, national development stages and cultural traditions. The vital point of the Western liberal concept of universal human rights lies in the coverage and replacement of the particularity and relativity of the descriptive dimension of human rights with the universality of the moral dimension.

 

And secondly, the connotation of universality of human rights based on the existing international human rights instruments is reconstituted to promote extension of the philosophical foundation of human rights from the Western liberalism onto the the system of polyatomic ideologies with compatibility of civilizations. Although the Western liberal concept of human rights provided the philosophical and structural basis for initial formulation of international human rights instruments, and there are also parts in need of improvement in existing international human rights instruments,  international human rights instruments as a whole, under the joint efforts of the former Soviet Union, China and other developing countries, have already reflected to varying degrees the human rights demand of non-Western countries and cultural traditions, and have demonstrated to some extent the principle of compatibility of different civilizations.³⁹ In a speech made after the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" was adopted, Eleanor Roosevelt, the first president of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, also pointed out: “This is not a perfect document. But it is a document that reflects the composite views of so many different men.”⁴⁰ Therefore, it is tenable to say that the signing of a series of international human rights instruments such as the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (1948), the "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" (1966), the "International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights" (1966), the "Declaration on the Right to Development" (1986) and the "Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action" (1993) was a result of game playing and wrestling between various forces of the East and West and of the South and North, and Marxism including socialism with Chinese characteristics also had a significant impact thereon. There are even comments saying that “In the revaluation of issues of human rights and issues concerning the role of human rights, the Marxist traditions have taken a dominant position in terms of both history and rationality."⁴¹

 

The above-mentioned international human rights instruments have also been affirmed by the Chinese government. The Government White Paper entitled "China's Human Rights Situation" published by the State Council Information Office in 1991 once stated that the declarations of and conventions on human rights adopted by the United Nations should be respected. The Chinese government has also spoken highly of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", believing that as the first international document on human rights issues, it has laid the foundation for practice in the international human rights field. The Chinese government delegation attending the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights also said: “Human rights have commonality, namely, universality, and the United Nations has adopted dozens of international documents on human rights, which is a manifestation of universality.”⁴² Therefore, construction of the connotation of universality of human rights discourse on the basis of these international human rights instruments cannot only continue to carry forward the historical achievements of the Marxist concept of human rights in criticizing the liberal concept of human rights, but can also promote evolution of the philosophical foundations of human rights from Western liberalism toward the system of polyatomic ideologies including Marxism, so as to keep enlarging the discourse space for practice in human rights in China.

 

(Translated by Ou Xiaoqi)

 

* HUANG Shousong（黄寿松）, associate professor at School of Marxism, Zhongshan University.

1. See Vincent, R.J. Human Rights and International Relations. Translated by Ling Di. Beijing: Knowledge Press, 1998. 83.

2. See supra ote 1, at 5.

3. See Nowak, Manfred. U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: CCPR Commentary (Vol. I). Translated by Bi Xiaoqing, et al. Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2003.

4. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 1). Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1956, at 427.

5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 3). Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 2002, at 188.

6. See supra note 4, at 439.

7. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 23). Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1972, at 199.

8. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 2), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1957, at 156.

9. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital (Vol. 1), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1975, at 262.

10. See surpa note 8, at 647.

11. Ibid., at 156.

12. Ibid., at 648.

13. Engels, Frederick. Anti-Duhring. Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1970, at 146.

14. The Collected Works of Lenin (2nd Edition) (Vol. 12), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1987. at 90.

15. The Collected Works of Lenin (1st Edition) (Vol. 30), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1957, at 38.

16. See Duzina, Kesitasi. The End of Human Rights. Translated by Guo Chunfa. Nanjing: Jiangsu People's publishing house, 2002, at 169.

17. See Marks P. Stephen, “Emerging Human Rights.” Law Renditions 2 (1982).

18. See Jack,Donnelly  Universal Human Rights in the Theory and Practice, Translated by Wang Puqu, et al., Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2001, at 118.

19. Ibid., at 169.

20. See supar note 1, at 35.

21. The Collected Works of Lenin (2nd Edition) (Vol. 1), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1984, at 373.

22. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 1), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1956, at 452.

23. The Collected Works of Lenin (2nd Edition) (Vol. 7), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1984, at 258.

24. See Han Depei, The Theory and Practice of Human Rights. Wuhan: Wuhan University press, 1995, at 159-160.

25. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Vol. 3), Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1993, at 41.

26. See Asbj?rn Eide et al. Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Translated by Huang Lie. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2003. 128, 139.

27. Quoted from Li Shi’an, "Tentative analysis of U.S. ideological trend of 'concept of universal human rights', 'human rights dialogue' and 'transnational civil society movement’,” Human Rights(2002), No. 1.

28. See supra note 8, at 145.

29. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Vol. 19).,Beijing: the People's Publishing House, 1963, at 22.

30. See Huang Shousong, “Democracy and Consciousness About Chinization in Transformation,” Modern Philosophy (2012), No. 5.

31. See supra note 25, at 261, 359-60, 182.

32. Ibid., at 242.

33. See Note 1, at 78.

34. Onuma, Yasuaki, Human Rights, Nation and Civilization, Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2003, at 353.

35. See supra note 27.

36. See surpa note 34, at 160.

37. Ibid., at 196.

38. See Holmes, Stephen. & Sunstein, Cass. The Cost of Rights,translated by Bi Jingyue, Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004, at 4.

39. See supra note 34, at 268.

40. See supra note 27.

41. See Note 16, p. 178.

42. Jia Zhuowei. “ Analysis of and Reflection on the Debate of ‘Universal Human Rights’.” Shandong University Law Review 2013: 183.