Gao Yihan (1884–1968) was among the Chinese thinkers most familiar with Western political thought during the May Fourth period. He graduated from Meiji University in Japan in 1916, returned to China and was appointed professor of political science at Beijing University in 1918, where he remained until 1926. He subsequently taught at the Law School of the China National Institute of Shanghai, served as a member of the Control Yuan, and after 1949 was Dean of the Law School of Nanjing University. He wrote extensively on political theory, evaluating and synthesizing various trends in Western political thought. Rights figure prominently in Gao’s writings; in addition to being one of the most subtle analysts of the general notion of rights writing in China, Gao was among the earliest advocates of economic rights, as we will see in Text 16. The present essay is among Gao’s earliest writings and articulates the central features of the conception of rights he discusses throughout his career: rights are to be protected by the state, but they are neither innate nor ends in themselves. He strongly argues that the state exists for people, rather than vice versa; one of the central purposes of the state is to safeguard people’s rights and freedoms.
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