In recent years, U.S. newspapers and magazines have been filled with dramatic stories about all manner of popular protest in China: tax riots by aggrieved peasants in the agrarian countryside, strikes by disgruntled workers in the industrial rustbelt, petitions by feisty retirees whose pensions fall short of expectations, resistance by irate villagers to the illegal sale of their collective lands, and so forth. Journalists are not the only people writing about this issue. The study of contentious politics in contemporary China has of late become a rapid-growth industry among American social scientists.¹

A distinctly normative tone, inflected with an Anglo-American language of human rights, can be seen in many of the recent writings on this issue. On the one hand, some journalists (and more than a few scholars as well) describe the contemporary protests as symptoms of a pervasive “moral vacuum” in which Chinese supposedly find themselves. Post-Mao China is depicted as a society where Marxism has been discredited, but—absent a Western appreciation of individual natural rights—Chinese have no moral compass to guide their changing and confused lives.²

Because of this alleged ethical and spiritual vacuum, we are told, millions of Chinese have turned to other forms of solace (e.g., Falun Gong, underground Christianity, and so forth) that often result in the trampling of their unprotected human rights by the state. On the other hand, many scholars (and some journalists as well) have detected in the surge of popular protest in post-Mao China an emergent “rights consciousness”—indicating a supposed bottom-up claim to citizenship and auguring a fundamental breakthrough in state-society relations.³ In the judgment of these American analysts, “rights talk” among Chinese protesters represents a powerful new social phenomenon, posing a potential challenge to the survival of the Communist state.

The Chinese government paints a very different picture, of course. In a State Council White Paper, issued in the year 2000 and entitled “Fifty Years of Progress in China's Human Rights,” the government credits the People's Republic with having bestowed upon the Chinese people an unprecedented enjoyment of human rights—most notably in the form of socioeconomic justice. Interestingly, this official Chinese White Paper does not suggest that such rights were entirely absent before the Communist revolution. Rather, the State Council report contends that—prior to the advent of Western imperialism—the Chinese people had experienced some minimal fulfillment of rights, but that this safety net was demolished by the foreign assaults of the mid-nineteenth century. To quote directly from the 2000 White Paper:

Beyond its obvious propagandistic flavor, this passage is revealing in several respects. First, it suggests that before the opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century, imperial Chinese regimes did have some commitment to a minimum guarantee of “human rights” for their people. And second, it makes clear that—in the eyes of the contemporary Chinese government—the West was responsible not for bringing to China a newfound appreciation of human rights, but rather for depriving the Chinese of rights that they had previously enjoyed. State sovereignty and national independence are seen as the basic prerequisites for a further improvement in human rights, an improvement that must after all be founded in a political and social system of China's own choosing.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups immediately labeled this Chinese White Paper a “whitewash” and denounced the PRC's failure to live up to its own claims.⁵

The U.S. State Department chided China for a “poor” human rights record marred by “numerous and serious abuses.”⁶ The Chinese government responded with an equally unflattering assessment of America's human rights record, pointing to flagrant racial discrimination, callous neglect of the poor and homeless, and so on.⁷ This war of words continued, and even escalated, in subsequent years.⁸

My purpose in this article is not to evaluate the actual human rights record of either America or China—whether at present or in the past. My purview is limited to conceptions of rights, as reflected in the ethical discourses of Chinese philosophers, political leaders, and protesters (and as contrasted with American understandings of rights). In examining these normative claims, I will question both the “moral vacuum” and the “rights-based challenge” perspectives that infuse much of the Western literature on contemporary China. Arguing that an enduring emphasis on collective socioeconomic justice distinguishes mainstream Chinese political thought from an Anglo-American focus on individual rights, I conclude that the contemporary Chinese political order is neither as vacuous nor as vulnerable as sometimes depicted.

The 2000 White Paper makes crystal clear, as have numerous other publications by the Chinese government before and since, that—when it comes to human rights—socioeconomic considerations rank first among its priorities. The recent amendment of the Chinese Constitution to include a provision respecting and protecting human rights does not change this basic conception of human rights. The 2004 Chinese White Paper on human rights progress, issued two weeks after the amendment of the Constitution, states the following: “The Chinese government continues to put the safeguarding and promotion of the people's rights to subsistence and development on the top of its agenda.”⁹

The government asserts, in other words, that its people have a right to some minimum standard of living (“subsistence” or shengcun)—and, moreover, they have a right to expect an improvement in that standard (“development” or fazhan). The first idea—that people have a just claim to a decent livelihood and that a state's legitimacy depends upon satisfying this claim—goes very far back in Chinese political thought. It has roots in the teachings of Confucius (sixth–fifth century BC) and was elaborated by the influential Confucian philosopher Mencius (fourth–third century BC). Although Mencius never framed his arguments in a language of “rights,” he did emphasize the links between economic welfare and legitimate rule. The second idea—that the state should promote socioeconomic development—is a more recent notion, advanced by Chinese political leaders since the late nineteenth century and articulated with particular force by Mao Zedong during his revolutionary drive to power and afterwards.¹⁰

Both of these concepts, subsistence and development, are not simply abstract mantras uttered by Chinese philosophers and statesmen; they are also central to the ways in which ordinary people in China think and act politically.

Concerns about socioeconomic justice are not peculiarly Chinese, of course. T.H. Marshall, in his classic work on the rise of citizenship in Western Europe, pointed to “social citizenship”—or the collective right to economic welfare and social security—as the highest expression of citizenship. In Marshall's evolutionary account, a minimalist civil citizenship—or the guarantee of individual rights to property, personal liberty, and legal justice—appeared in eighteenth-century Europe, while the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a more developed sense of political citizenship—or the right to participate in the exercise of government power. Only in the twentieth century, however, did a claim to full social citizenship (as embodied in the modern welfare state) become widespread across Europe.¹¹

Samuel Fleischacker, in his recent history of distributive justice, traces the acknowledgment of “a right of all people to a certain socioeconomic status” back to the eighteenth century, to the writings of Rousseau, Smith, Kant, and Babeuf.¹²

According to Fleischacker, however, “for most of human history practically no one held, even as an ideal, the view that everyone should have their basic needs satisfied.”¹³ While Fleischacker may well be correct in his critique of early Western thought, his argument entirely overlooks the Confucian tradition. An abiding concern with distributive justice has marked Chinese political thought for more than two millennia.¹⁴ Contrary to the scenario that Marshall outlines for Western Europe, in China an appreciation of “social citizenship” predated political citizenship by many centuries.¹⁵

In the U.S., by comparison with both ancient China and modern Europe, a commitment to social citizenship has been notably weak. American political philosophers, in pondering the primary function of government, have historically emphasized the protection of individual freedoms (or what Marshall regarded as the lowest form of citizenship). This view, which prizes strict limits on state intervention, has pervaded popular political sentiment in the U.S. as well. The political theorist Louis Hartz characterized the American Way of Life as “a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved.”¹⁶

Fundamental to Locke's political philosophy was an emphasis upon natural rights as both prior—and superior—to laws enacted by the state. Locke's understanding of natural law stressed individual inalienable rights (to life, liberty, and property). In his conception, the role of government was a limited one; the state simply guaranteed the social order necessary to permit the exercise of individuals' natural rights. Rebellion was justifiable, but only if government violated the “social contract” either by failing to ensure public order or by aggrandizing its powers vis-à-vis society.¹⁷ Locke's views were consistent with mainstream European political thought in his day, which saw the state's responsibilities as highly circumscribed.

By contrast, Chinese statecraft since the times of Mencius has envisioned a more proactive role for government—which was expected to promote economic welfare and security. Such expectations carried important practical consequences. As R. Bin Wong observes in his comparison of European and Chinese state formation, “When we turn to issues of material welfare, we find a [Chinese] tradition of intervention in subsistence issues that dwarfs European government efforts to address the insecurities of agrarian economies.”¹⁸

The idea that good governance rests upon guaranteeing the livelihood of ordinary people has been a hallmark of Chinese political philosophy and practice from Mencius to Mao—and beyond. It is reflected not only in government pronouncements and policies, but also in grassroots protests—an issue to which I shall return later in this paper.

Another thing that the ancient philosopher Mencius and the modern revolutionary Mao shared in common, besides an expressed concern for collective welfare, was an explanation—and in Mao's case even a celebration—of popular uprisings as a legitimate response to a government's failure to fulfill its social responsibilities. When Mencius was asked by one anxious king what he should do in order to hold onto the throne, Mencius answered simply: “Protect the people.”¹⁹

He continued, “An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that … in good years they shall always be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the danger of perishing.”²⁰ Here then was a crisply stated Confucian “moral economy” that made protecting and promoting the people's livelihood the cornerstone of statecraft.

The Book of History (Shujing), an ancient Chinese philosophical text from which Mencius—like Confucius—drew many of his central ideas, contained the notion of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) which treated rebellion as Heaven's way of removing the mantle of leadership from immoral rulers and bestowing it instead upon those who were virtuous enough to replace them. The concept of the Mandate of Heaven as a rationale for rebellion first appeared in China around the founding of the Zhou dynasty in the eleventh century BC. Seven hundred years later, Mencius expanded upon this idea by linking the authority of Heaven (tian) with the support of the people (ren). When asked by one of his disciples how a ruler had gained the realm, Mencius replied, “Heaven gave the empire to him; the people gave it to him” (tian yu zhi, ren yu zhi).²¹

He went on to explain, “The people are the most important element … Therefore to gain the support of the ordinary people is to become emperor.”²² Mencius' idea of anchoring political legitimacy in the assent of the people may not seem particularly noteworthy today; after all, since the American and French revolutions most modern states have advanced far bolder claims to popular sovereignty. But considering the time in which it was proposed, more than two millennia ago, this stress on popular support was truly extraordinary.

When we compare the Mencian Mandate of Heaven with a European divine right of kings or a Japanese belief in an unbroken imperial line descending from the Sun Goddess, the contrast is stark. In Mencius, royal blood did not constitute a continuing basis of political legitimacy. The Mandate of Heaven was subject to change (tianming feichang),²³

and required constant renewal through popular support. How did one garner such backing? By behaving benevolently and providing for the people's livelihood. The ancient emperors, Mencius noted with nostalgic approval, undertook frequent “tours of inspection” for the purpose of ensuring a bountiful harvest: “In the spring they examined the plowing, and supplied any deficiency of seed; in the autumn they examined the reaping, and supplied any deficiency of yield.”²⁴ Only when the harvest was secure and the peasantry was satisfied did a ruler enjoy the Mandate of Heaven. To neglect the people's livelihood was to invite rebellion: “When the hungry go without food … the people become unruly.”²⁵ The most important virtue of a ruler was benevolence (ren) or sympathy with the plight of the people. If a sovereign failed to provide for the well-being of his people, rebellion was the natural reaction. As Benjamin Schwartz noted, “It is made amply clear in the Analects and particularly in the Mencius, that the moral behavior of the masses is dependent upon their economic welfare.”²⁶

The differences between the Chinese and other imperial systems (European as well as Japanese) were significant, but so too were the differences with many modern republican political systems. Compare Mencius' view of rebellion with that of Thomas Jefferson, for example. Both Mencius and Jefferson stress the granting or withholding of popular support, but to very different ends. Jefferson's understanding of revolution drew not on the Book of History but on Locke's Second Treatise.²⁷

In Jefferson's stirring speeches, rebellion was both natural and justifiable—but as a check on political tyranny, not as a reaction to socioeconomic injustice. A child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson viewed periodic armed rebellion as essential in sustaining democratic freedoms. As he put it, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…. What country can preserve its liberties if the rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms…. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.“²⁸ For Thomas Jefferson, tyranny, not poverty, was the root cause of periodic rightful rebellion.

Mao Zedong, who came of age more than a century after Jefferson, was of course deeply influenced by Western political philosophies—first anarchism and then Marxism. But many of Mao's ideas were congruent with his own cultural traditions as well. As Schwartz stresses, although a principal source of the Maoist vision was Marxist-Leninist ideology, “this does not preclude the fact that in some of its aspects it coincides with certain traditional Chinese habits of thought and behavior.”²⁹

Indeed, there are more than a few points of commonality between Confucianism and Marxism. The belief that human nature is inherently social, and that conflict between the individual and the larger community is unnatural and unnecessary, is certainly central to both.³⁰

Here I would like to highlight two affinities between Mao and Mencius: the importance of popular—in particular peasant—support in establishing political legitimacy, and relatedly, the natural propensity of those who are hard pressed economically to rebel against rapacious officials.³¹

Nowhere did Mao express these views more passionately or eloquently than in his famous “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” published in March of 1927 at a time when most of his comrades in the Chinese Communist Party were still focusing on workers in the cities rather than on the rural peasantry. Based upon a 32-day investigation of five counties in his home province of Hunan, Mao described his awakening to the importance of the peasantry. As he wrote:

Here Mao depicts the peasantry as a force of nature—“a mighty storm,” “a hurricane”—and argues that revolutionary success hinges upon acknowledging and accepting the natural inclinations of the peasants, rough and violent as they may be.

In Mao's view the revolutionary instincts of the peasantry derive from their poverty. Hence it is the poorest peasants, those with the least to lose, who are naturally the most revolutionary.

In these stirring passages, Mao puts forth a view of revolution quite different from that of Marx and Lenin; whereas for Marx the urban proletariat served as the revolutionary vanguard and for Lenin the Communist Party fulfilled that purpose, Mao is here assigning the role of revolutionary vanguard to the poor peasants who, as he described them “are not afraid of losing anything.”

Although Mao's Marxian celebration of class struggle put him at odds with a Confucian preference for social harmony, he nevertheless shared with Mencius a stress on the peasantry as the decisive political force—and a belief that peasant poverty was the root cause of revolution (the modern Chinese term for which, geming, carries the meaning of “to change the mandate”).³⁵

After the establishment of a Communist regime in China, when Mao's thoughts turned to developmental issues, he continued to emphasize the pivotal and dynamic role of the peasantry. In late 1955, Mao wrote of agricultural collectivization much as he had written of rural revolution thirty years before:

Again it was the peasantry, rather than the cadres, who were naturally attuned to the demands of revolutionary progress. And again it was poverty that generated their insight and enthusiasm:

Those who were materially well off, by contrast, failed to appreciate the latent power of the masses. They failed, in other words, to grasp the “Mandate of Heaven.”

Here, six years after the founding of a new Communist government, Mao was again identifying peasant poverty as the motor propelling historic transformation—now not political revolution but economic development in the form of agricultural collectivization.

We can certainly question the degree to which collectivization benefited the Chinese peasantry, but regardless of how we evaluate China's actual record of collectivized agriculture, it is worth recalling the political rationale that lay behind it. As Mao presented the situation to his skeptical colleagues, collectivization was being driven by the irrepressible yearning of the poor peasants for a better life. Once again, as had been true twenty years before when he investigated the peasant movement in Hunan, Mao insisted that the peasants were out in front of the Communist party—and party cadres would have to catch up quickly unless they were to be trampled underfoot by a restless populace rushing forward along the road toward socialism. The impoverished peasants, he exclaimed, were performing what had once seemed impossible: chicken feathers were flying up to Heaven. As in Mencius, cosmic authority (Heaven) was linked to the well-being of the peasantry—and political leaders, if they were to retain their legitimacy, would have to get in step with peasant demands to protect and promote their livelihood.

For Mencius, peasant demands had been limited to subsistence. By Mao's time, the peasantry was seen as demanding not only subsistence, but development as well. Central to Marxism-Leninism is of course an appreciation of the dynamism of economic transformation. Peasants now rightfully expected to see an improvement in their livelihood—and held government officials accountable to this higher standard. Mao cautioned that cadres would have to stop tottering along like women with bound feet if they were going to satisfy the peasants' escalating aspirations.

Today, more than thirty years after Mao's death, his ideas—not to mention those of the ancient Mencius—may appear somewhat dated. I have revisited these ideas because I believe that they offer some telling clues about contemporary Chinese politics. Chairman Mao's successors—Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Wen Jiabao—have all emphasized economic development, and specifically poverty alleviation for the hard-pressed peasantry, as a cornerstone of their claim to political legitimacy. This was the rationale with which Deng Xiaoping launched his historic economic reforms in December 1978—spearheaded by the household responsibility system for peasants in poorer parts of the countryside. When rural incomes soared in the early 1980s, Deng rejoiced that his reforms were off to a promising start.

Although Western observers have often faulted the post-Mao leadership for a failure to promote democratization and the enlargement of political rights, Chinese leaders themselves appear far more concerned about aggressively pursuing socioeconomic objectives—especially the goal of ensuring that poor peasants enjoy a decent and improving livelihood. When Deng Xiaoping initiated his reforms, in sharp contrast to Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, he talked not of glastnost (political openness) or of perestroika (restructuring) but of xiaokang (economic comfort).

In December 1979 Deng Xiaoping was asked by the Prime Minister of Japan about the meaning of China's so-called Four Modernizations, the catchy phrase that summed up the post-Mao reform effort. The Four Modernizations, as articulated by the late Premier Zhou Enlai, called for developing China's agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense. Some Chinese dissidents, such as Wei Jingsheng, criticized the Chinese leadership for not including a fifth modernization in its recipe for development: democratization. But Deng Xiaoping, in responding to the inquiry of the Japanese Prime Minister, mentioned none of these things. Instead, he replied this way: “The Four Modernizations that we want to implement are a Chinese-style of Modernization. Our concept of Four Modernizations is not the same as your concept of modernization. What we seek to realize is an economically comfortable family (xiaokang zhi jia).”³⁹

The term xiaokang has an ancient lineage. It appears repeatedly in the Confucian classics. In both the Book of Rites (Liji) and the Book of Songs (Shijing), the term xiaokang refers to a type of society which, although not as perfect as the utopian Great Harmony (datong)—the ideal society that both Confucius and Mao were prone to invoke—is nevertheless the next best thing because it provides everyone with economic comfort.⁴⁰

In the Book of Songs the “economically comfortable family” (xiaokang zhi jia) is described as a household whose labors afford it a decent level of subsistence.

In January 1980, Deng gave concrete meaning to this concept. He explained his economically comfortable (xiaokang) standard as a per capita GDP for China of $1,000 (U.S.) dollars by the end of the twentieth century. Four years later, Deng backpedaled a bit, shaving a couple hundred dollars off his target. As he put it in October 1984: “We have established a clear political goal: to reach a per capita GDP of $800 (U.S.) by the end of this century, so that the people's livelihood reaches an economically comfortable standard (renmin shenghuo dadao xiaokang shuiping).” In June of 1986, he explained further: “By the year 2000 we plan to establish an economically comfortable society (xiaokang shehui). To be too ambitious won't work. We must seek truth from facts. A so-called economically comfortable society, although not wealthy, is able to make do. We are a socialist country. Our national income should be distributed fairly so as to allow all the people to benefit—without some people becoming too rich and others too poor.”

A similar rationale was embraced by Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, when he announced his Great Western Development Strategy in June of 1999. Jiang's “Great Leap West” called for massive state investment, foreign loans, and private capital to be diverted from the rich coastal areas to the more remote regions of the interior countryside. The stated goals of Jiang's ambitious policy were to “increase the income of the population” and “bring prosperity to all nationalities.”⁴¹

In his final speech as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang updated Deng's xiaokang target, pledging to turn China into an “economically comfortable society” with a GDP of $ 4 trillion (U.S.) by the year 2020.⁴²

In the run-up to the 16th Party Congress in the fall of 2002, an article in the Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, announced that “the ancient Chinese ideal of an economically comfortable society (xiaokang shehui), revitalized by the country's late leader Deng Xiaoping, is likely to be a hot topic at the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.”⁴³

At the 16th Party Congress the new Chinese leadership, in keeping with Jiang Zemin's parting pledge, set forth the goal of establishing an “economically comfortable society” by the year 2020. Appropriately enough for a 16th Party Congress, sixteen targets were announced. For example, whereas in 2002, China's per capita GDP stood at 8,000 yuan, by 2020 it is supposed to soar to 24,000 yuan.⁴⁴ While in 2002, per capita peasant income was a mere 2,476 yuan, by 2020 it is projected to reach 6,860 yuan. And so on. Still, compared to Jiang's paramount interest in economic growth, his successors have put greater emphasis upon socioeconomic well-being. At the last party congress, several central leaders pointed out that peasants lag behind city dwellers not only in terms of income, but also in access to medical care, education, and other key indicators of human welfare.

The aim of an economically comfortable society is considerably less ambitious than the utopian Confucian (or Communist) vision of a “Great Harmony,” but the current Chinese leadership in directing attention to the plight of the peasantry draws inspiration from Mao Zedong as well as from Mencius. Both Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao have made highly publicized trips to poor rural areas that once served as Mao's revolutionary bases—underscoring the central government's deep concern for the livelihood of the struggling peasantry and its avowed commitment to socioeconomic justice. On a visit to the site of the former Jiangxi Soviet in the summer of 2003, Hu Jintao enjoined officials at all levels of the party to “carry on the revolutionary tradition.” As Hu put it, “Comrade Mao Zedong and other revolutionaries of the elder generation not only made historical achievements by realizing national independence and liberation, but also bequeathed to us precious spiritual wealth.” A front page article in People's Daily elaborated on Hu's remarks: “such revolutionary spirit and tradition, which were fostered through arduous struggles, provide strength for overcoming difficulties and risks of all kinds in our way forward.”⁴⁵

The current leaders of China are acutely mindful of the decisive role of the peasantry in facilitating—or forestalling—overall national progress. At the 10th National People's Congress in March 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao set forth the guiding policy of “building a new socialist countryside.” In an international press conference held at the conclusion of the NPC, the Premier explained:

A year later, Wen's two-hour keynote speech at the March 2007 National People's Congress struck a similar theme, repeatedly emphasizing the central government's concern for the “three rurals” (sannong)—i.e., peasants (nongmin), agriculture (nongye), and countryside (nongcun): “We will focus on rural economic development and make substantial progress in building a new socialist countryside. We need to consolidate, improve and strengthen policies for supporting agriculture and giving favorable treatment to farmers, provide more support for agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and promote restructuring of agriculture and the rural economy.”⁴⁷

The central leadership is not shy about touting the Maoist bona fides of its “new socialist countryside” campaign. As one government report lauded the benefits of the program:

In practice, the new socialist countryside initiative—which is often coercively implemented—replicates some of the excesses and insensitivities toward the peasantry for which Mao's own campaigns were known.⁴⁹

Yet, conceptually, it shares with Maoism an overriding concern for peasant livelihood.

While Western critics express disappointment that China's leaders seem reluctant to devote the same attention to political reform that they lavish upon precise indicators of socioeconomic goals, those who are most affected by these policies—the ordinary Chinese people—may feel somewhat differently. If we examine the recent protests that have erupted in China, we generally find them framed in a language more reminiscent of Mencius or Mao than of Locke or Jefferson.

In many rural protests, the symbolism of the Mandate of Heaven remains salient. Just a few years ago, peasant protesters in Hunan—in the manner of third century BC rebels Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, who led the first peasant revolt recorded in Chinese history—swore an oath to Heaven and marched behind banners proclaiming “Prepare the Way for Heaven” as they pressed their demands for lower taxes on township and county offices. Their rhetoric was replete with Mencian resonance: “The people's anger overwhelms Heaven;” “If the people are impoverished, the realm should be anxious; if the people complain, the realm should be afraid.” Equally interesting is the manner in which local officials responded to these challenges. In one Hunan county, authorities posted a sign outside the tax office saying: “Like the imperial grain tax, the state tax cannot be resisted.”⁵⁰

But of course much has in fact changed since imperial days, and contemporary peasant protesters have other, more recent rhetorical weapons with which to fight their battles. In phrases redolent of Mao Zedong, today's protesters proclaim, “It is right to rebel,” “All Power to the Peasants,” “The Peasants are Clear Sighted,” “Down with the new landlords!”⁵¹

Peasants are not the only protesters to draw inspiration from the Chinese tradition of distributive justice. A protest by displaced workers at a knitting mill in Chongqing was one of many such incidents that have erupted in depressed industrial centers around the country in recent years. The factory announced in November 1992 that it was declaring bankruptcy and that its 3,000 workers would have to seek alternative employment on their own. Moreover, retired workers were to be reduced to monthly stipends of only 50 yuan, in contrast to original levels of 150 to 250 yuan. To protest these reversals, a petition movement was launched:

While arguments about surplus value and the economic plan reflect the influence of Marxism and Communism, demands claiming a fundamental right to subsistence—presented on bended knee—have a much older pedigree.

We find numerous expressions of this Mencian claim in urban as well as rural protests. A report in 1995, for example, noted that “workers in Liaoning and Sichuan often took to the streets and staged demonstrations to express their resentment. They called for ‘being able to get food for survival.’”⁵³

Sociologist Ching Kwan Lee concludes in a recent survey of labor unrest in China that “subsistence rights occupied top priority in the slogans.”⁵⁴ In foregrounding subsistence demands, today's workers are echoing long established protest frames. In the first major industrial strike instigated by Mao and his comrades—the Anyuan coal miners' strike of 1922—the strikers (who were among the best compensated workers of their day) issued a manifesto that proclaimed: “We want to live! We want to eat! Now we are starving! Our lives are in danger! Seeking life in the midst of death, we have no choice but to take up the weapon of last resort—to strike.”⁵⁵ During recent pension protests at the Anyuan mine, retired miners demanding higher compensation highlighted the gap between the image of xiaokang prosperity put forth by the Communist Party leadership and their own dismal circumstances.⁵⁶

In contemporary Chinese labor protests, moral economy claims to subsistence are often laced with Marxist rhetoric: “Workers are the masters of the country,” “Yes to socialism, no to capitalism,” “Long live the working class.”⁵⁷

Frequently the catchwords of the central leadership are invoked, as in the recent Anyuan pensioners' demonstration: “Strengthen the Three Represents! We want to eat, and we also want to move toward economic comfort (xiaokang)!”⁵⁸ The slogans that appear to resonate most strongly with officials, however, are those that avow an age-old claim to a basic livelihood. A newspaper report on a series of labor protests in the northern industrial city of Shenyang gave the following account:

To be sure, the protests sweeping both urban and rural China today spring from multiple causes and are manifested in many different ways. In the countryside, with the recent abolition of the state agricultural tax, land disputes have replaced tax protests as the primary trigger of collective violence. Even so, the insistent demand for socioeconomic justice—framed as a moral claim to subsistence—is a thread that binds many of these otherwise disparate incidents together. Although the land disputes concern property rights, they tend to be presented in moral economy terms. In a recent protest against the seizure of collective land in Guangdong's Shunde county, for example, villagers complained to higher-level officials that local cadres “don't care if the peasants are without land and livelihood.”⁶⁰

In a land dispute near Shenzhen, a protester explained to a foreign journalist, “I have no choice. I have an obligation to fight for our land, along with my fellow villagers. We have to keep fighting until we get our land back. This is the root of our life.”⁶¹ In response to the spate of land conflicts, Premier Wen Jiabao declared that “some locales are unlawfully occupying farmers' land and not offering reasonable economic compensation and arrangements for livelihood, and this is sparking mass incidents in the countryside … We absolutely cannot commit a historic error over land problems.“⁶² Wen's speech was followed by a deluge of state-issued pledges for the construction of a new, more just “socialist countryside.” The articulation of a well-recognized right to a decent livelihood indicates that, despite the Chinese government's apparent lack of concern for human rights as Americans may define them, the country is not necessarily suffering from a moral vacuum.⁶³

Despite America's own persistent problems of poverty and homelessness, we do not see many social movements in the contemporary United States focused on a demand for economic justice. Instead, collective actions generally center on claims of individual civil rights. Take, for example, the numerous—and sometimes violent—confrontations surrounding the question of abortion. “Pro-life” advocates put forth claims on behalf of an unborn child's “natural right” to life, whereas “pro-choice” advocates advance claims on behalf of “reproductive rights”—or a woman's “natural right” to control her own body. Fierce as the conflict is, both sides agree that the proper role of government in this bitter controversy is to protect inalienable individual rights (whether by upholding or by overturning the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973).

Consider another persistent source of unrest in contemporary America—the extremist militia groups which have mushroomed across the land in recent years. Armed militias claiming Jeffersonian roots have been linked to a string of terrorist attacks against the U.S. federal government.⁶⁴

Insisting that their activities conform to the spirit of the American Revolution, these groups honor an individual's right to bear arms in defense of freedom (enshrined in the Second Amendment) as the central cause and lasting legacy of the Revolution.⁶⁵ As a member of the Missouri Fifty-First Militia puts it, “the primary trigger for the Revolution was the same as it is today: you don't mess with a free man's right to keep and bear arms.”⁶⁶ In the eyes of their militant members, these maverick militias stand as guardians of a natural right to personal liberty against an oppressive federal government. The literature produced by such groups makes frequent reference to an eighteenth-century republican ideology that saw the armed citizen as a people's best protection against despotism. Thomas Jefferson's call to arms is quoted with particular fervor.⁶⁷

In America, even fundamentally economic protests are framed as a question of civil rights. Take the case of the “California Tax Revolt,” whose successful challenge to escalating property taxes (with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978) ignited similar protests across much of the U.S.⁶⁸

The leader of the movement, Howard Jarvis, justified his activities not with socioeconomic arguments, but in terms of a struggle by rights-bearing citizens against despotism: “The entire basis of free government in America was being destroyed by virtually unlimited taxation, which can only lead to … dictatorship.”⁶⁹ Tyranny, not poverty, was offered as the reason for rightful rebellion. To Americans, liberty rather than livelihood is the foundation of political morality.

In arguing for a significant difference between mainstream Chinese and American conceptions of rights, and their implications for popular protest, I do not mean to suggest that all (or even any) Chinese think only about socioeconomic security, to the exclusion of all other concerns. That would be just as silly as to suggest that Americans care only about political freedom and eschew all material interests. The example of China's Tiananmen Uprising (led by students demanding democracy) or of America's pay equity campaign (led by women demanding equal pay for equal work) is enough to dispel any such misunderstanding.⁷⁰

But there is nonetheless, I believe, an important difference in emphasis between the two political cultures—manifested not only in abstract philosophical discourse but in political rhetoric and popular protest as well.

For that reason, I am skeptical of a central theme in much of the recent American social science scholarship on China, suggesting that the popular discourse of “rights” observable in recent protests indicates a newfound claim to citizenship that poses a fundamental challenge to state authority.⁷¹

Such arguments, I believe, overstate both the novelty and the political threat posed by such protests. Kevin O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, in their study of rural protest in contemporary China, note that “the notion of being a citizen is seeping into popular discourse” and urge that “we should not underestimate the implications of rising rights consciousness and a growing fluency in ‘rights talk’ in a nation where rights have traditionally been weakly protected”—on grounds that “today's rightful resistance could … evolve into a more far-reaching counterhegemonic project.”⁷² David Zweig attributes China's “current political and social dilemma” to “the confrontation between an emerging ‘rights conscious peasantry’ and rapacious or entrepreneurial bureaucrats.”⁷³ Maria Heimer highlights the possibility that “growing rights consciousness in the Chinese countryside may contribute to significant political changes.”⁷⁴ Merle Goldman argues in her book From Comrade to Citizen that “one of the major changes in the last two decades of the twentieth century was a growing sense of rights consciousness, particularly of political rights” among the Chinese population at large. The rapid and widespread development of citizenship and civil society, she contends, has the potential “to produce in China changes as profound as those that occurred earlier in Eastern Europe.”⁷⁵

The impact of China's 1995 Labor Law on the swelling tide of labor disputes has attracted particular attention from observers in this country.⁷⁶

Mary Gallagher sees the new law, and related legal institutions as helping to generate “increased societal conflict and rising rights-consciousness among Chinese workers ….[W]orkers are increasingly likely to use these new institutions to press for the protection of their rights and interests.”⁷⁷ Bolder claims appear in journalistic reporting on China; a recent Business Week article, mindful of the precedent of Solidarity in Poland, speaks glowingly of “a new labor-rights revolution sweeping China.”⁷⁸

There is no doubt that the terms “rights” (quanli) and “citizen” (gongmin) suffuse both official and popular discourse in contemporary China. But workers who demand that as “citizens” they have a “right” to eat would seem to be following more in the moral economy footsteps of Mencius and Mao than in the liberal tradition of Locke or Jefferson. In a series of newspaper articles that Mao Zedong published in 1922 to promote the idea of a national labor law, Mao (drawing upon the international socialist discourse of his day) identified three “rights” (quan) that such a law would guarantee: (1) the right to subsistence (shengcun quan); (2) the right to work (laodong quan); and (3) the right to the entire proceeds of one's labor (laodong quanshou quan).⁷⁹

Surely, then, we should not impute to the discussion surrounding China's latest labor law some new sense of citizenship rights heralding a democratic revolution-from-below. Indeed, when Sociologist Ching Kwan Lee, impressed by the “constant invocation of law and legal rights in workers' interaction with local officials,” suggested to some protest leaders that they were fighting for citizens' legal rights, she was greeted with ridicule: “Workers' thinking is not that advanced,” “Legal rights? What is legal, where is the law?”⁸⁰ The 1995 Labor Law makes clear that its provisions are designed to facilitate state goals: “This Law is hereby formulated in accordance with the Constitution in order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of laborers, readjust the labor relationship, establish and safeguard the labor system to suit the socialist market economy, and promote economic development and social progress.”⁸¹

China's pervasive moral economy protests, framed in a language of “rights,” have often demanded (sometimes successfully) the removal of unpopular lower-level officials. Rarely, however, have they questioned the ruling authority of either the Communist Party or its ideology. In this respect, contemporary protesters bear some resemblance to imperial-era rebels. The endemic unrest that punctuated the history of imperial China often led to the replacement of particular officials (and very occasionally even of dynasties), while at the same time retaining and reinforcing certain basic principles of the Confucian order. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, the English Sinologist Thomas Meadows offered the following explanation for the remarkable longevity of the imperial Chinese system: “In China … it is precisely the right to rebel that has been a chief element of a national stability, unparalleled in the world's history.”⁸²

While one would be foolhardy to forecast for the current political order anything approaching the lengthy lifespan enjoyed by the imperial system, it does nonetheless appear that today's patterns of protest—still animated by a widespread appreciation of “the right to rebel”⁸³—may prove more system-supportive than system-subversive. In an authoritarian polity, where elections do not provide an effective check on the misbehavior of state authorities, protests can help to serve that function—thereby undergirding rather than undermining the political system.⁸⁴ Moreover, the current central government's willingness to respond to some of the protesters' key grievances, witnessed most dramatically in the 2006 abolition of the age-old agricultural tax followed by the promulgation of a new property rights law, points more toward political flexibility than toward fragility.

The Chinese state itself actively encourages a conceptual linkage between “livelihood” and “rights.” At a government-sponsored art exhibition held in Beijing in February, 2003, to celebrate the first anniversary of the founding of the officially-authorized Chinese journal, Human Rights, the editor-in-chief (speaking beneath portraits of Mao, Deng, and Jiang) praised the exhibits for portraying “stories in which the Chinese government and the Chinese people fight for human rights (renquan). Graphically, they reflect the spirit of the Chinese people in striving for a xiaokang, or economically comfortable standard of living, and a vigorous development of the human rights under-taking in China.”⁸⁵

This is not to deny that the pervasive “rights talk” in contemporary China, officially encouraged though it is, may serve to stimulate even further popular protest. Indeed the Chinese term for “human rights” (renquan) also carries the possible meaning of “people's power.” However, expectations of welfare provision from the state (i.e., what T.H. Marshall called “social citizenship”) clearly cannot be equated with demands for legal protections against the state (“civil citizenship”)—nor with demands for participation in the state (“political citizenship”). Moreover, in China even political citizenship (e.g., the right to vote, to file petitions, to stage protests, to establish associations, etc.) is generally understood as a state-conferred privilege rather than as a natural or inalienable prerogative. Andrew Nathan points out that “political rights in China were consistently regarded as a grant given by the state to the citizens, to enable them to contribute their energies to the needs of the nation.”⁸⁶

The Chinese term for “citizen” (gongmin)—literally a “public person”—connotes collective membership in the polity, rather than a claim to individual or inalienable rights vis-à-vis the state. Although the term “rights” (quan or quanli) did not figure centrally in Mencius, it has played an important role in Chinese political discourse since its introduction in the mid-nineteenth century by the American missionary, W.A.P. Martin.⁸⁷

But the meaning of the term quan (as is also true of the term “rights” in Western philosophical discourse) was from the start inconsistent.⁸⁸ Even Martin sometimes used the character quan to translate the English word “authority” as well as “rights.”⁸⁹ And Chinese thinkers who contributed to what Marina Svensson has characterized as “a rich and internally contested debate on human rights since the late Qing dynasty,”⁹⁰ often did so within a Confucian—specifically Mencian—framework.

Liang Qichao, modern China's most influential proponent of “rights consciousness” explicitly linked his concept to Mencius' understanding of human morality.⁹¹

Liang's notion of rights implied an ethical responsibility toward the collective good, rather than a protection of individual freedoms: “As rights consciousness gets increasingly developed, people's duties become increasingly strong.”⁹² This understanding of rights as an expression of group unity, rather than of personal liberty, can be seen in Republican-period popular discourse as well. The Anyuan coal miners, whose 1922 Communist-inspired strike manifesto had highlighted subsistence claims, savored their historic victory with a return-to-work manifesto which pledged a continuing struggle for collective rights: “Starting today, let us tighten our group unity, a multitude with but a single mind, to struggle for our own rights!”⁹³

Liang Qichao was certainly not the only modern Chinese thinker to develop a conception of rights as a cornerstone of his philosophy. But regardless of variations in partisan leanings, and despite the growing influence of Western ideas on this discussion, political rights in modern China were consistently regarded as bound up with a moral responsibility to the larger political community. The anarchist Liu Shipei credited Mencius (via Wang Yangming) with an ethical understanding of human nature that underpinned his own views of rights as inextricably tied to mutual and collective responsibilities on the part of rulers and ruled alike.⁹⁴

The co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu, concluded that it was necessary for the sake of the nation to “sacrifice a part of the rights of individuals, in order to protect the rights of the whole citizenry.”⁹⁵ A similar perspective, in which the state is both the benefactor and the beneficiary of citizen rights, permeates official Chinese state discourse. Examining China's national constitutions from the late Qing (1908) through the PRC, Nathan observes that “in none of the constitutions were rights considered to be derived from human personhood; they were derived from citizenship in the state …”⁹⁶

Stephen Angle's careful study of the philosophical origins and implications of Chinese conceptions of human rights since the Song Neo-Confucianists argues persuasively that “Chinese rights discourse is not merely an imperfect attempt to mirror Western ideals … it has a coherent history and is made up of Chinese concepts and concerns … China has a rich and distinctive rights discourse.”⁹⁷

This is of course not to suggest that Chinese conceptions of rights are consistent, unchanging, or impervious to foreign influence. However, rather than assume that the invocation of “rights” in contemporary China bears a close affinity to Anglo-American conceptions of human rights and civil society, which ipso facto imply a liberal critique of overweening state power, we should be alert to the distinctive origins and implications of “rights talk” in other cultural and political contexts.

In a country where rights are seen more as state-authorized channels to enhance national unity and prosperity than as naturally endowed protections against state intrusion, popular demands for the exercise of political rights are perhaps better seen as an affirmation of—rather than an affront to—state power. For this reason, I prefer to characterize the framing of protest in contemporary China as “rules consciousness” rather than “rights consciousness.”⁹⁸

In 2004, the Anyuan protesters presented a petition to the Pingxiang Mining Company and its Communist Party Committee:

In their various manifestos, the Anyuan retirees stressed that their protest was purely a demand for economic justice, as promised by the state; it therefore posed no threat to political stability. An activist explained, “We're seeking wages and welfare, not power (quan) or politics. We are asking for permission to stage a demonstration. We may not receive it, but the right to request it is stipulated in the national constitution.”¹⁰⁰

It is of course entirely possible, indeed probable, that Chinese protesters—like their counterparts around the world—often parrot the language of the state in order to maximize the chances for a favorable outcome and minimize the likelihood of repression from otherwise hostile officials. Even so, it would seem unwarranted (and quite misleading) to read into their impassioned pronouncements something resembling an Anglo-American “rights revolution.” Taken seriously on its own terms, widespread popular protest in China points neither to an indigenous moral vacuum nor toward an epochal clash with state authority.