Tan Mingqian (1886–1956), also known as Tan Pingshan, was a leading member of the CCP until 1927 when he lost out in factional struggles. He was later active in the Revolutionary Committee of the GMD, one of a number of democratic parties competing with the GMD and CCP. After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Tan served in various governmental positions. The article translated here was written during May Fourth for the magazine Xin chao, published by students at Beijing University. Tan’s article is a Communist critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. As Karl Marx’s own criticism of the Declaration might lead one to expect of a Marxist, Tan is explicitly critical of the rights granted in the French Revolution—and implicitly critical of many of the rights proposals made by liberals in his own day. The French Revolution was about the bourgeois wresting privileges from the aristocrats, but it did not institute genuine democracy because it did not realize true equality and freedom. Despite their sacrifices for the revolution, proletarians gained no political rights; indeed, the rise of capitalism has meant that proletarians have lost any self-mastery (zizhu) that they ever had. Tan argues that the real spirit of contemporary democracy lies in two things, equality and freedom. True equality requires giving people equal opportunities, and thus true freedom means allowing for both the satisfaction of one’s own self-regarding desires and the similar satisfactions of others: all people must have equal opportunities if freedom is to be meaningful.
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