Introduction to the Special Issue on Human Dignity, Religion, and Rights in Contemporary China

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay to a special issue on “Human Dignity, Religion, and Rights in Contemporary China” provides background material for readers unfamiliar with debates over religion and politics in China today. Political theology in China raises many questions that western readers will find familiar, but the Chinese context often requires different answers, so that gaining familiarity with the Chinese discussion can broaden our view of the available options at the intersection of religion and politics. At the same time, seeing familiar questions from a Chinese perspective can illuminate implicit disagreements within the western context that would otherwise remain hidden. This special issue brings together theologians, ethicists, sociologists, and legal scholars around fundamental questions of political order in a rapidly changing society.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion in China
• human rights
• human dignity
• religious freedom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joshua T. Mauldin, a scholar of religious ethics, writes on law and religion, the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth, and religion and politics in China. He is the co-editor of Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry: Learning with and from the Natural and Human Sciences (Eerdmans, 2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Reinhold Niebuhr (forthcoming).

ORCID

Joshua T. Mauldin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3855-6410

Notes

1 This symposium on Human Dignity, Religion, and Rights in Contemporary China began as a conference held at the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong in November 2017, led by Daniel Yeung, Director of ISCE, and Zhibin Xie (Tongji University). The topic was dignity, morality, and rights in China and the essays included here draw from the work of that conference while adding new voices as well.

2 Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China.

3 Angle, Human Rights and Chinese Thought.

4 Angle, Human Rights and Chinese Thought, 117.

5 For an example of a similar sense of hopefulness at the time in the field of law, see Peerenboom, China's Long March toward Rule of Law.

6 See, for example: Pils, Human Rights in China, and Biddulph, The Stability Imperative.

7 Eva Pils thus writes,

There are many ideas resonating with that of rights as a particular conception of justice in China's long moral tradition; but the contemporary Chinese words for ‘rights’ and ‘human rights’ were only coined in the second half of the nineteenth century, when China was in the declining years of the Qing Dynasty. Pils, Human Rights in China, 17.

8 This is Stephen Angle's strategy in Human Rights and Chinese Thought.

9 As Svensson notes, some Chinese thinkers have suggested that the West in fact borrowed the concept of human rights from Chinese thought, rather than the other way around. Writing in the 1940s, for example, Zhang Junmai “put forward the view that the concept of human rights originated in China and only later [was] exported to the West.” Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China, 195.

10 Interestingly, economic rights were present in the 1948 Universal Declaration, and more recently scholars like Samuel Moyn have emphasized that human rights language is inadequate to the extent that it fails to acknowledge economic rights as central to human flourishing. See Moyn, Not Enough.

11 More recently, the Chinese Communist Party in 2013 “issued an official document renouncing ‘so-called universal values,’ including ‘western democracy and human rights.’” Pils, Human Rights in China, 94; see also ChinaFile, “Document No. 9: A ChinaFile Translation,” August 11, 2013, available at http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation [last accessed May 23, 2019].

12 Maria Svensson argues for such a view. See Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China. It is also important to note that there is a wide variety of understandings of human rights in China today. As Eva Pils notes,

it is not possible to identify one coherent position [on human rights] taken by the Party-State; rather, the authorities employ arguments that seem convenient in the moment without recognizing any need to provide a coherent account, and without having to adopt a coherent position in the disciplining setting of a judicial process. Pils, Human Rights in China, 6.

13 For more on the current revival of Confucian political thought in China, see Jiang, A Confucian Constitutional Order; Bell, China's New Confucianism; Chan, Confucian Perfectionism; de Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights; Møllgaard, “Political Confucianism and the Politics of Confucian Studies.”

14 The role of Marxist thought in the governance of China today is exceedingly convoluted and vague. As Eva Pils writes, “While it remains committed to maintaining its own authority, it would be hard to claim that the Party-State today was still clearly committed to coherent socialist principles.” Pils, Human Rights in China, 84.

15 Yang, Religion in China.