This chapter first provides a brief historical overview of the international indigenous rights movement. It then discusses the definitions of “indigenous peoples”. It also analyzes the content of “indigenous rights,” focusing on the issues of right to self-determination and economic, social and cultural rights, followed by an examination of the role of the UN and indigenous NGOs in protecting and promoting indigenous rights.

Scholars mainly focus on individual movements or movement organizations, but the major impact of contentious politics takes place as the result of cycles of contention in which movements converge, reinforce one another, and come into conflict with counter-movements. In the process of cycles, some movements radicalize and others institutionalize, leading either to violence, pacification, or the combination of the two.

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded by a poor peasant who joined the rebellions against Mongol rule, was an era of great changes in society, political dynamics, ethnic composition, foreign relations, and culture. The founder's armies managed to secure all of China proper and even to attract some Mongol nobles as allies and supporters. The early Ming emperors continued some of the institutions the Mongols had used, such as hereditary military households, but also returned to long-standing traditions of governance, such as careful census and registration of the population and land. Although the early emperors used terror to keep officials in line, competition to join officialdom quickly reached and exceeded Song levels. Literati culture was especially vibrant in the Lower Yangzi region, where urbanization reached high levels and the publishing industry grew rapidly. One reason for the prosperity of this region was a burgeoning of trade, including international maritime trade. Piracy became a major problem until the government relaxed its prohibitions on private trade. In the early seventeenth century, global cooling added to farmers’ hardships and the government's problems.

Ming Taizu and his successors

Seldom has the course of Chinese history been as influenced by a single personality as it was by the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), better known by his imperial temple name, Taizu, and the name of his reign period, Hongwu. The first commoner to become emperor in 1,500 years, Taizu proved shrewd, hardworking, and ruthless. He knew poverty firsthand. His destitute parents frequently had to move to look for work or escape rent collectors; they even had to give away several of their children because they could not afford to rear them. When Zhu Yuanzhang was sixteen years old, a shift in the route of the Yellow River brought floods, famine, and disease to his region and took the lives of both his parents. Taizu, unable even to buy coffins in which to bury them, presented himself to a Buddhist monastery; but the monastery, hard-pressed itself, soon sent out the novices to beg. After several years wandering across east-central China, Taizu returned to the monastery for three or four years until it was burned to the ground by the Yuan militia attempting to suppress local rebellions.

This chapter considers the role of the media in promoting and protecting human rights. With the rise of the Internet and highly offensive material “going viral” have come calls for more regulation. It is challenging to balance human rights to freedom of expression, access to information, freedom of assembly, and privacy against countervailing interests. While media freedom is important for the mobilization of shame, it carries risks explored here. Deciding how to balance competing considerations without adopting overbroad legislation should lead to lively class discussions.

From early times, Chinese myths about their origins focused not on gods but on a series of extraordinarily brilliant human beings who invented writing, agriculture, states, and the other key elements of their culture and society. Modern scholars, drawing on knowledge of geology, palaeoanthropology, and archaeology, not surprisingly construct very different stories of the origins of Chinese civilization. Their accounts do not slight agriculture, writing, bronze technology, and state formation, but usually differ from the traditional story in giving more weight to the role of ritual and religion in shaping the significant characteristics of Chinese culture and more attention to the physical environment. Equally important, they do not see Chinese history as a single-stranded story, centred on a royal line, but as a many-stranded one in which a great many distinguishable cultures interacted, some perhaps colonies of the more central state, others probably enemies. As more archaeological sites are excavated, the distortions of the single-stranded story become more apparent. Archaeology has also added greatly to our understanding of the early states in central China and what gave them advantages.

Origin myths

Through most of the imperial period, literate Chinese had a ‘great man’ theory of how their civilization developed. Unlike other peoples who pointed to gods as their creators or progenitors, the Chinese attributed the inventions that step by step transformed the Chinese from a primitive people to a highly civilized one to a series of extraordinarily brilliant human beings. Fu Xi, the Ox-tamer, domesticated animals and invented the family. Shen Nong, the Divine Farmer, invented the plough and hoe. Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, invented the bow and arrow, boats, carts, ceramics, and silk. He also fought a great battle against alien tribes, thus securing the Yellow River plain for his people. In China's earliest history, he was labelled the first of the five great pre-dynastic rulers, the last two of whom were Yao and Shun. Yao was credited with devising the calendar and rituals. Rather than hand over power to his own less worthy son, he selected Shun as his successor, a poor peasant whose filial piety had been demonstrated by his devoted service to his blind father and evil stepmother.

This chapter tackles the challenge of characterizing those rights that constitute socio-economic rights. It offers a brief consideration of this catalogue/generation by assessing the rights to adequate standard of living, housing, food, water and sanitation, and clothing. After distilling the main idea of the specific right, illustrations are set forth. In this area, the tendency of states to deny they have resources necessary to guarantee these rights has largely undermined the progressive development of this set of rights.

This chapter reveals how social movement performances congealed into repertoires and engaged in interaction with states and other actors to produce the modern strong repertoire of contention and formative movements.

The centuries that separated the Han and Tang dynasties were marked by multiple regimes, incessant warfare, and governments that struggled to gain firm control of their territories. After several decades of rivalry among three contenders (the Three Kingdoms, 220–265), the Western Jin (265–316) briefly rejoined the regions. After the Jin fell to internal squabbling, non-Chinese peoples entered the fray, and China entered a prolonged period when the north was under the control of foreign rulers and the south ruled by Chinese courts. Each was prey to its own internal conflicts and the border between them regularly shifted in accordance with the fortunes of war. The governments of this period had little success in curbing tendencies toward social inequality, and during these centuries aristocratic tendencies developed at the top of society and personal bondage expanded at the bottom. Confucianism lost some of its hold and people in all walks of life found hope in religions promising salvation and transcendence, above all the newly introduced Buddhist religion, which vastly expanded China's intellectual and religious imagination.

The Three Kingdoms period and the Jin dynasty

During the period between the Han and Tang dynasties, short-lived courts were the norm, making the political history of these three-and-a-half centuries one of the most complex in Chinese history. It began when the generals assigned by the Han government to put down the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans became stronger than the throne and fought among themselves for supremacy. By 205 the poet-general Cao Cao had made himself dictator of north China. Instead of trying to curb the growth of hardto- tax local magnates, Cao Cao developed alternative ways to supply his armies. He carved out huge state farms from land laid waste by war and settled captured rebels and landless poor to work them and thus made the state the greatest of all landlords. He also established military colonies for hereditary military households whose men would both farm and fight. For his cavalry, Cao Cao recruited Xiongnu tribesmen in large numbers, settling many in southern Shanxi.

The rights of children undergo close scrutiny in this chapter. Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Magna Carta of children’s rights, enjoys nearly universal support, it did not settle all interpretive questions. This chapter reviews definitional questions such as when the rights of the child are being, shown to ascertain, in practical ways, the difference between a child and an adult. Among the topics covered are the exploitation of child labor, “streetism” as it affects children, the participation of children in armed conflict and the landmark prosecutions of those who recruite them in international criminal tribunals. The global campaign to discourage child marriage is another matter considered. The chapter ends with a consideration of empowerment rights such as enfranchisement.