The new attention to human rights among establishment intellectuals and official China after 1978 was primarily a reaction to the democracy activists’ calls for human rights. As the article translated here reveals, it was generally held that discussions of human rights constituted a direct attack on the regime, and human rights were simply dismissed as a bourgeois slogan. Those who advocated human rights risked being charged with opposing socialism and wanting to restore capitalism. The democracy wall activists’ open letters to the West, calling for Western leaders to show concern for the human rights situation in China, were strongly criticized as selling out to foreigners. “Human rights,” according to the more conservative intellectuals, was not and could not be a dominant slogan in a socialist society. Some official writings, however, acknowledged that human rights talk at times could be useful to socialists as a weapon to oppose the bourgeoisie and obtain rights for themselves, but this constituted more of a tactical strategy than an affirmation of human rights as such. In these writers’ analysis, based as it was on Marxist theories, there could be no such thing as universal and supra-class rights. Rights were not eternal, absolute, or universal, but reflected the productive forces in society and the interest of the class in power. In a class society, rights would thus reflect the interests of the bourgeoisie, whereas in a socialist society, the workers would enjoy extensive democratic and economic rights. This leads to the glorifying of the situation in socialist countries and a critique of the situation in the West. This article and the response from Lan Ying that follows illustrate how sensitive and problematic the topic of human rights was in the late 1970s.
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