Xia Yong (b. 1961) is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and has been an active participant in discussions of human rights through the 1990s. Xia wrote the first dissertation in China to deal with human rights, from which the following piece is taken. He has written on the history of and current debates in Western rights theory, on rights in Chinese law, as well as on the complex relations between Chinese tradition and Chinese rights discourse. He was also the lead editor of a multifaceted study of the contemporary consciousness and practice of rights in many different aspects of Chinese society. The essay we present here is one of the few Chinese contributions to the recent literature on human rights to deal extensively with the question of human rights and China’s cultural tradition. Xia’s sympathetic account of Confucian ideas, and his criticisms of Western excesses, bears a resemblance to Liang Shuming from seventy-one years earlier (see Text 17), although unlike Liang, Xia consciously sets out to relate Confucian concepts to the concept of human rights. In this respect at least, he has more in common with Hang Liwu (see Text 45). Xia asks whether there are fundamental conflicts between traditional Chinese thought and human rights, and answers that there are not. Indeed, he goes on to argue that far from conflicting with human rights, the central Chinese commitment to harmony can make constructive contributions to international human rights discourse. He does recognize that human rights were not developed in traditional China, which he explains in part by suggesting that they were not needed to the same degree as they were in Western society.
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