THE LESSON OF THE LAST CHAPTER has been that if there is moral pluralism in our world, it is there because the concepts with which different groups make moral judgments are different from one another – perhaps radically so, perhaps in more mundane ways. This is not to say that our languages determine what we think; rather, it is our practices and the commitments they entail that shape our languages. As our commitments change, so too can the meanings of our words, or even the words we use themselves. One of the goals of this chapter is to think about the ways in which these changes can occur as we interact with one another.

Chapter 2 was motivated in large part by Liu Huaqiu's claim that the Chinese concept of rights differed from corresponding Western concepts. In order to know what to make of this claim, we needed to understand better what it means for concepts to differ from one another. We came to see concepts as emerging from relatively stable agreements in a community's norms, rather than as single, unchanging things that people had to share for communication to succeed. Concepts are more messy and complicated than Liu's formulation envisioned.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY brought with it the beginnings of sustained engagement between Western and Chinese rights discourses. This chapter focuses on the works of the two Chinese intellectuals who best exemplified this trend at the turn of their century. The first is Liang Qichao (1873–1929), who was a student of Kang Youwei, a sometime employee of Zhang Zhidong, and a participant in the failed Hundred Days reform movement, after which he fled to Japan and wrote the essay we will examine here. My second subject is Liu Shipei (1884–1919). After a classical education, Liu found himself drawn to revolutionary activities in Shanghai, where he wrote the texts with which I am here concerned. For a time Liu became increasingly radical, even founding an anarchist journal in Tokyo, but after 1908 he left politics and returned to his first (and abiding) passion, namely classical scholarship.

Choosing to focus on Liang and Liu also means choosing to leave out a host of interesting texts and authors; justifying my choice of subject matter thus has two dimensions. On the positive side, I include Liang and Liu because they are the most sophisticated advocates of a “new morality” in their day. Their grasp of foreign ideas far exceeds that of most of their contemporaries; their knowledge of and engagement with their own traditions are similarly broad and deep.

I BEGIN FROM THE UNCONTROVERSIAL fact that prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese had no word that we can translate as “rights.” There were, to be sure, concepts whose meanings partially overlapped with the meaning of rights. There were ideas and institutions whose roles might be argued to have served functions similar to those served by rights. I begin from the lack of a single translation because my first task is to explain what the subject matter of this chapter is: If not “rights,” then what?

Suppose that instead of assuming that “quanli” meant rights, we ask what the word would mean to an audience of educated Chinese in the nineteenth century who did not benefit from special glosses or explanations. They probably would take it to mean what the characters had been used to mean for 2000 and more years: power and benefit. To say that “one ought to enjoy quanli,” then, would just mean that one ought to enjoy powers and benefits. What would our hypothetical audience make of this notion? The more thought we give to this question, the more questions we realize must be answered before we can be sure of any assessment. After all, what powers and what benefits are we talking about? Must anything have been done to make the recipients merit the rewards? Does it make a difference who the people are – what roles they play in society?

RIGHTS DISCOURSE HAS CONTINUED to develop in China since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. As we might expect, given the ambivalent attitude that Marxism has toward rights, the developments have been neither simple nor continuous. In addition, while we have certainly seen some tensions between different ideas of rights in the pre-1949 period, contestation over who has rights, and what rights are, becomes even more prominent in the years since then. Be that as it may, most participants in Chinese rights discourse continue to conceive of rights in ways that will be familiar from earlier in the century.

This chapter has two goals. To begin with, I aim to assess the extent to which recent Chinese thinking about rights substantiates the first of Liu Huaqiu's claims, with which the book began: Do we in fact find in China today a distinctive conception of rights? Chapters leading up to this one have made clear that Chinese discussions of rights emerged and developed in a distinctive way, sharing some but not all features with developments outside China. Among other factors, concerns over the satisfaction of legitimate desires, the construction of a nation within which individuals could flourish, and the protection of individuals' abilities to develop their personalities all played important roles in the Chinese discourse.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES IT MEAN to say that speakers of one language have a different concept of rights than speakers of another? If their concepts are different, can they still communicate with one another? Is it even true that all speakers of a given language share the same concepts – especially of loaded terms like “rights”? To pursue the issues at the heart of this book, we need answers to these questions. First, we need a framework for talking about concepts that is precise enough to bear philosophical weight but not so technical as to be impenetrable to non-specialists. With that in hand, we can turn to the question of pluralism: that is, the claim that there is more than one legitimate morality. Doing justice to claims like those of Liu Huaqiu requires that we think carefully about what moral pluralism is, and about what its implications might be.

To do this, I proceed as follows. Section 2.1 aims to motivate the analytical framework within which I will discuss concepts, a framework that draws on the recent work of Robert Brandom. One of the chief goals of the section is to defend the idea that there are always conceptual differences between us, even if we speak the same language, but this need not stand in the way of successful communication.

The beginnings of this book lie in a chapter that I decided not to write for my dissertation. I was intrigued by what Liu Shipei had written about “quanli” – his term for rights – in the first years of the twentieth century. I was coming close to finishing my dissertation on the nature of cross-cultural ethical differences, and I thought that a study of the differences between Liu's concept of quanli and Western ideas of rights current in his day would enhance what I had already written. At some point, though, it occurred to me that if I didn't write the chapter on Liu, I could finish the dissertation that much sooner – and maybe, if I was lucky, get a job. My advisers agreed, and I filed away my notes on Liu for another occasion. My thanks once again to an excellent trio of graduate advisers, Don Munro, Peter Railton, and Allan Gibbard, both for all their help and for knowing when I should stop.

A few months later, luck had come through and I was starting a job at Wesleyan University. Soon after I got there I learned that a major East-West Philosophers' Conference was to be held the following January in Hawaii, and that Wesleyan would pay for me to go if I could get my name on the program. This sounded like too good an offer to pass up, so I called Roger Ames and asked if there was anything he could do for me.

IT IS OFTEN DIFFICULT to identify beginnings. Ask when rights discourse began in Europe, and you can receive answers that differ by centuries, depending on which stage of the ongoing evolution of concepts and practices related to “rights” – and to its correlates and predecessors in a half-dozen languages – one counts as the beginning. It might be thought that the beginning of rights discourse in China would be easier to locate: As there was no concept of rights in traditional thought, shouldn't we just look for the moment that the idea of rights was introduced to China from Europe? Unfortunately, this “moment” is rather difficult to identify precisely. To be sure, we must look carefully at early translations of European texts concerning rights into Chinese, but we will find that these translations seem to be part of an existing discourse almost as much as they begin a new one.

In addition, I need to be very careful when I say that the discussions initiated by these texts are about rights. Since my discussion of these matters will depend on some of the conclusions from Chapter 2, let me briefly review the relevant issues. I argued there that conceptual content depends on the inferential commitments we take on when we use language, and I further contended that the norms governing these inferences are instituted by the practices of the groups to which we belong.

In June Of 1993, His Excellency Mr. Liu Huaqiu, head of the Chinese delegation, made the following statement in the course of his remarks to the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna:

This statement contains two claims: first, that countries can have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human rights concepts different from their own. The principal goal of this book is to assess these two claims.

It is important that we know what to make of these two claims, for reasons that range from the immediate and practical to the broadly theoretical. Assessment of the two claims should influence activists and international lawyers, both within China and without.

THE TWO DECADES from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s saw some progress and much frustration toward the realization of a stable, empowered state and society in China. During the decade and a half after 1935, China would be wracked by invasion and civil war, but 1915 through 1935 were years of enormous intellectual vitality in which theories that could help people to understand and improve their world were subjected to passionate debate and rigorous analysis. They were also years in which Western philosophies were interpreted and adopted with increasing sophistication. Numerous young people studied in and then returned from Western countries, and important American and European thinkers visited and lectured in China.

In such a context, quanli discourse underwent important changes. It lost most of its explicit connections to the Confucian tradition, which itself came under sharp, though often simplistic, attack. The flip side of this increased distance from Confucian vocabulary and sources of authority was the increasingly direct and complete engagement of Chinese writers with themes from contemporary Western rights discourse. If the Confucian source of quanli discourse and the Western stimulus to that discourse were of approximately equal importance during the earlier period we have discussed, that dynamic changes in the 1910s. Western writings are no mere stimuli, but become full-fledged participants in the debates over quanli.

THIS BOOK HAS REVOLVED around two questions: whether China can be said to have its own concept of rights, and whether countries with their own concepts of rights are immune from criticism phrased in terms of foreign rights concepts. Liu Huaqiu answers both of these questions in the affirmative. My own answers should now be clear. First, there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse. These concepts are certainly China's “own”: The contexts within which they have emerged and been contested are central episodes in China's cultural and political history, and they have always drawn importantly on preexisting concepts and concerns – even when they have criticized some of the commitments central to those existing values. Second, we have seen that the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune to the scrutiny of others is through “parochialism,” which also cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. As I will explain later, the activities of China's government, to say nothing of other Chinese actors, make it clear that they do not think of their values as parochial. This means that China cannot be immune from criticism, though it is no guarantee that any accommodation, much less constructive engagement, will be forthcoming between the Chinese and other communities.