In the immediate post–June Fourth period the Chinese leadership quickly voiced concerns about the use—or as they preferred to describe it, abuse—of human rights slogans during the democracy movement. At a national conference on propaganda in July 1989, President Jiang Zemin remarked that since young people were attracted to the concept of human rights, it was of vital importance to promote a Marxist analysis of human rights to counteract any bourgeois influences. The government’s urgency to grasp the human rights issue was further underlined by the fact that human rights had now become an important and problematic issue in China’s relations with the international community as China faced strong criticism for its suppression of the democracy movement. The Chinese authorities regarded the critique and sanctions imposed by Western governments as constituting interference in China’s internal affairs. Human rights, they argued, was only being used by the West as a weapon in its strategy of “peaceful evolution”: the policy of trying to subvert the socialist system in China. As the article translated here reveals, China no longer simply dismissed human rights as a bourgeois slogan, but instead tried to portray itself as the true defender of human rights. In this context it based its arguments on a selective reading and interpretation of international human rights standards.
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