Zhang Wenxian, a legal scholar at Jilin University, has been an important contributor to academic discussion of human rights throughout the 1990s. His 1991 article “On the Subjects of Human Rights and the Human Rights of Subjects” generated considerable controversy by downplaying the importance of collective rights and stressing that individuals were the proper subjects of human rights. The official stance on these issues, as seen for instance in Texts 52 and 56, is that collective rights (such as the nation’s right to development and self-determination) are human rights that actually have priority over individual human rights. It should be noted, as indeed Zhang takes pains to point out in the present article, that Zhang never denied the existence of collective human rights in the realm of international law. Be that as it may, several articles were published criticizing Zhang on these counts, one of which Zhang replies to in the article we have translated here. Zhang’s views, like those of Li Buyun and Xia Yong, represent the development of a cautiously independent scholarship on human rights during the 1990s.
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