In the early 1990s, “Asian values” became a hot topic in the international human rights debate. Several countries, with Singapore among the most prominent, accused the West of imposing its human rights standards on Asia without regard for Asia’s specific culture and history. The proponents of Asian values argued that their countries had a different understanding of human rights due to their specific culture and history. While they did not completely reject universal human rights, their cultural relativism nevertheless represented a major challenge to an international consensus on human rights. References to culture and to national conditions (guoqing) have become more prominent in Chinese human rights discourse in the 1990s, but the Chinese government itself has placed much less emphasis on cultural arguments than have nations like Singapore. As a socialist country, China is more wont to argue that different economic systems and levels of economic development influence the understanding and realization of human rights. China’s official position is to identify itself with the Third World as a whole, rather than with Asia alone. Examples of the relative balance between economic, cultural, and other arguments can be seen in Texts 56 and 57. Despite the relatively small importance of cultural arguments in official discourse, several Chinese intellectuals and dissidents have written explicit critiques of Asian values. Liu Junning (b. 1961) is one of those who strongly refutes the view that Asian people would have different views from Westerners on human rights and democracy. He believes that the Asian values advocated by Asian political leaders only serve to defend their hold on power and suppress people’s genuine demands for human rights and democracy. Writing in 1998, Liu blames the leaders’ particular concept of Asian values for both the recent Asian economic crisis and the attacks on ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in May of that year.
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