The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights Joanne Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds.
Li, Xiaorong
BOOKS ABOUT "Asian values" may seem obsolete these days. What else can be said, when the verdict seems indisputable? Asia's recent financial crisis has discredited the "Asian way" as a hybrid of...
...In the end, the claim of an East Asian challenge to international human rights seems less substantial than the sense of an East Asia challenged by local demands to incorporate international norms in governance...
...The double threat from market and state, writes Ghai, makes it ever more critical for workers and other vulnerable social groups to secure protection of their economic rights by supporting an accountable government, a free press, and independent unions that truly represent them...
...Can these ties be preserved and nourished in societies that do not respect freedom of association, assembly, worship, and expression...
...In practical terms, it is inhumane to treat people as creatures content with material abundance, cleanliness, order, and efficiency, but incapable of thinking for themselves, taking responsibility as citizens, and making reasonable decisions...
...Ghai apparently is not convinced...
...But the question is whether citizens' equal rights to basic education and medical care can be safeguarded when they face punishment for speaking freely in public and criticizing government policy...
...Less persuasively, Taylor dismisses any realistic chance of (and any need for) a convergence on the legal means for achieving these norms...
...For successful implementation of international norms, human rights have to make sense locally...
...These sentiments were genuinely on display—however authorities may have manipulated them—when Chinese students demonstrated violently in early May to protest NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade...
...In his essay, Charles Taylor explores the nature and the limits of this agreement...
...The idea of "Asian values" may be fading into disrepute, but it has generated debates over a number of compelling issues...
...Nationalist sentiments build on the humiliating experience of Western colonization of Asia in the nineteenth century and seem reinforced by the continent's rapid modernization today, its rising power, and its thirst for advanced technology, investment, and respect from world players...
...As Asian nations pursue economic development, will they necessarily embrace the rule of law and strict standards of government accountability...
...When the modern state and a global economy erode traditional social buffers and expose individuals to new sources of indignities and deprivation, people in vulnerable communities look to human rights to protect their material and spiritual well-being...
...The justifications underlying these norms will inevitably vary from one tradition to the next...
...Government leaders in China, disciples of the "Asian values" school, dress up xenophobic nationalism as concern for protecting national sovereignty...
...And in the search for humane or less painful solutions, these societies may find that the rest of the world community, particularly those who have paid dearly and developed workable institutions from their own experiences, has much to offer...
...Even more important, Asian democrats, human rights activists, and scholars, including some whose essays are under review here, have debunked the idea that there is a set of values that are "Asian" in the sense that they span the continent's diverse cultures...
...The government offered public housing and compulsory education as incentives to shape people's preferences and behavior...
...Asia's recent financial crisis has discredited the "Asian way" as a hybrid of capitalism and autocracy, which not long ago was championed by some Asian politicians as morally and economically superior to the Western model...
...XIAORONG LI is with the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park...
...Similarly, members of the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than fifty years ago claimed a moral agreement among the diverse cultures they represented in condemning crimes against humanity...
...He points out that the Singapore approach is "closely connected with economic and political controls over the public," and, that the government is "leaving the distribution of resources to rather managed markets," which may have been "managed" with the aim of aiding business, rather than with the aim of protecting people's social-economic rights...
...Fifteen authors explore these questions in the collection at hand...
...The right not to be tortured for one's Buddhist beliefs, for example, cannot be safeguarded without civil-political liberties, particularly in societies where the people worship in different temples...
...Asian values" based on the Singapore model are a far cry from great Asian civilizations' energy, spontaneity, dynamics, entrepreneurship, and innovative quests for human freedom...
...The "Asian values" advocates have responded that Asian governments are protecting the human rights that really matter— economic rights, which deserve priority over civilpolitical rights...
...As these authors try to explain precisely how culture can support local demands for democracy and human rights, they seem to talk past each other, because by "culture" they don't refer to the same thing...
...Can traditions of strong familial and community ties inoculate them from some of the negative consequences of a market economy...
...Thus, any international scrutiny of the way government treats its citizens, such as locking them up for disturbing "public order," becomes interference in a country's "internal affairs...
...As Inoue Tatsuo argues in his contribution, those who define sovereignty in this way misappropriate the concept...
...Even some of their critics, such as Onuma Yasuaki, take this claim for a genuine "East Asian" contribution...
...But Taylor fails to acknowledge that certain legal instruments (such as freedom of speech and immunity from arbitrary trials) might be essential for upholding those basic norms on which there is convergence...
...0 THER CONTRIBUTORS, such as An-Na'im and Yash Gai, note that the global market has compelled states to override citizens' rights and liberties in the name of economic competitiveness...
...After all, "local culture" seems most assertive when xenophobic nationalism counters efforts to implement human rights...
...Lee Kuan Yew's government has perhaps done better than others in the region to feed, shelter, school, and care for people...
...For Taylor, "culture" refers to discrete spiritual traditions, whereas for An-Na'im and Ghai, it refers not just to such traditions but also to the emerging practical arguments from local perspectives...
...An East Asian challenge for human rights, as the title may suggest, would imply that East Asia—its culture and societies—is unique such that the conception of international human rights does not apply there, or not until it is significantly amended or altered...
...Human rights and democracy appeal to many Asians because they offer traditionally unavailable protection to vulnerable individuals and endangered communities...
...But the real issue here is whether it is conceptually misleading to draw an equation between economic rights and welfare that is conditioned on the recipients' political quiescence and self-censorship...
...Do Asians possess cultural resources to draw upon when confronting such problems as social violence...
...In his essay, Yasuaki sees this claim as a correction of the "biased" approach of Western international human rights organizations, which allegedly urge civil-political freedom on poorer countries while refusing to acknowledge their own countries' failures in protecting social-economic rights...
...When the modern state eroded the traditional protections (as well as the social tyranny) of churches, guilds, and kinship, it offered to its citizens some form of rights DISSENT / Summer 1999 119 protection and equality...
...Are there desirable "Asian" formulas for apportioning responsibility between the state and society for providing social security to the unemployed, safeguarding the cultures of minority groups, and protecting women from being abducted and sold into forced marriage, labor, or prostitution...
...The truth is that Asian governments have largely failed to protect the economic rights of those harmed or left behind by economic transformation...
...However, aggregate national growth should neither be confused with, nor assumed to go hand in hand with, the protection of economic rights— which, as Tatsuo points out, are intended to safeguard individuals' "fair share of the means for a decent human life...
...120 DISSENT / Summer 1999...
...Moreover, the authors give scant thought to the ways in which "local culture," depending on how it is defined, can undermine efforts to implement human rights protections...
...A government that denies its citizens liberty and equality thus undermines its claim to equality among nationstates and freedom from foreign interference...
...Sovereignty, as first conceived by NiccolO Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, is a companion to the notion of "human rights...
...ADVOCATES OF "Asian values" invoked East Asia's economic "miracles" to justify subordinating civil-political rights to economic rights in developing countries...
...Daniel A. Bell, an editor of The East Asian Challenge, suggested in Dissent (Summer 1996) that the Singapore government might have been justified, in order to prevent racial violence, in curtailing minorities' social-economic rights, such as the right to live in separate ethnic communities and to teach in their native languages...
...A distinction between the "levels" of convergence is surely helpful...
...At best, he argues, one can hope for an "overlapping consensus" among different religions about norms of conduct (for example, "Do not torture" and "Do not commit genocide...
...But what precisely have these cultures agreed upon and how significant is this agreement for the justification of international human rights...
...Or, as Amartya Sen has shown, a free press and government accountability is linked to the prevention of famine-induced starvation...
...Efforts to identify local traditional roots for embracing human rights norms underpin what Abdullahi A. An-Na'im here calls "the cultural mediation" of human rights...
...But national sovereignty is hardly an "Asian" value...
...In doing so, local communities draw on indigenous values and norms, as well as practical rational arguments...
...Two other contributors, Norani Othman and Suwanna Satha-Anand, agree when they describe, in separate essays, how women's rights activists in Malaysia and Thailand have argued for their 118 DISSENT / Summer 1999 respective causes from within Islamic and Buddhist perspectives...
...But one walks away from these essays with the impression that for all the cultural and historical uniqueness of East Asia, most of the problems confronting these societies are similar to those of any transitional societies experiencing the pain of growth...
...The editors of The East Asian Challenge could have clarified matters by sorting out these different meanings in their introduction to the volume...
...The state's own claims to self-determination and equality in international relations were conceptually extrapolated from the rights of individuals...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
