Beginning in the late 1980s and taking off in the early 1990s, academics in China began to explore human rights from a number of perspectives. Li Buyun (b. 1933), vice-director of the Human Rights Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been one of the most influential voices in these discussions. Some of the academics come quite close to official government positions; indeed, some of them participated in the drafting of documents like the 1991 White Paper (see Text 52). Others, like Li and the authors of Texts 54 and 55, push the discourse in new directions. Li’s basic orientation is Marxist, but he develops out of Marx a quite robust doctrine of human rights. His main argument in the essay here translated, that prior to any legal rights people have “due rights,” is quite important, since it seeks to establish a ground for human rights independent of the state, yet without falling back on earlier Western ideas about “natural” rights. Li argues that our due rights derive from a combination of our biological and social natures, and that far from being mere abstractions, they concretely exist in a variety of social practices and norms. Legal rights, to be sure, have various advantages over rights that are merely supported by (often implicit) social agreements, but Li stresses that legal rights are justified by their tie to due rights. In the essay’s incisive final section, Li adds that in all countries, but especially those with weak democratic traditions (among other things), legal rights often fail to be translated into “real rights”—that is, rights that people enjoy in practice.
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