In the text translated here, Gao Yihan criticizes earlier human rights declarations for exclusively focusing on civil and political rights. Gao points out that since it was the bourgeoisie who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were responsible for these declarations, they failed to stipulate the economic rights needed by the proletariat. This critique was shared by the Communist Tan Mingqian (see Text 15), but it was the liberal Gao Yihan who elaborated a “right to subsistence” [shengcun quan]. Gao argued that civil and political rights would be empty if people’s livelihoods were not protected via rights to subsistence. Around the same time as Gao began to talk of the right to subsistence, others also did so, although sometimes out of different ideological convictions, as in the case of the GMD ideologist Dai Jitao. By the early 1920s, the right to subsistence had entered the Chinese rights discourse; it was thereafter embraced by people of different political persuasions, ranging from social liberals to socialists. The concept of and interest in a right to subsistence was thus not an invention of the CCP, as the invocation of this right since 1991 often makes it seem (see Text 52).
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