Hacker News Reader

Comment by terenceng2010 | Hacker News Reader

terenceng2010

It might not change HK government attitude after all, but it shows that Hong Kongers align with western values - no one should live under the fear of arbitrary prosecution.

View on HN

This idea that fundamental human rights are “western values” is profoundly unhelpful, because it implies that in some sense to fight injustice is to no longer be truly Chinese—a nonsense whose propagation is both supported by and helpful to the CCP.

Taiwan is a very democratic and open society, but evolved on its own from a dictatorship to a proud free society. I think many Taiwanese would be very proud to say they developed it with their own distinctive Taiwanese values (and bento box throwing matches in the Legislative Yuan).

At one level I understand what you area saying but at another level I think your statement undermines what it means to relinquish one set of ideas in favor of another.

It is perhaps a hindrance that we don't have an ethnic-neutral term for the set of ideas associated with "western values" but "western" is descriptive of the origin not the applicability of the ideas.

In order to genuinally adopt and espouse "western values" you have to at some level abandon "non-western values". This of course has as a pre-requisite that you've discarded the notion of multiculturalism -- at least the version of multiculturalism that insists that avoiding value judgements between cultures as a virtue unto itself.

What makes it tough is that many more cultures have a concept of "fundamental human rights" than ones that agree with western countries on which specific rights are fundamental.

You have to add in a lot of other ideas though to come close to the basket of ideas associated with "western values". For example: limited government, representative government, scientific inquiry, equality of women, due process, free markets, private property, contract law, and so on.

Why say 'align with western values' instead of 'respect human rights'? Freedom of speech and assembly are encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Because the issue they are protesting is extradition and the rule of law being maintained; HK has a western style rule of law, mainland has practically no rule of law to speak of.

I think the distinction trying to be made here is that Chinese, Hongkongers, and Taiwanese people don't see themselves as westerners. Posters aren't saying that they shouldn't fight for basic human rights, but rather that basic human rights aren't "western", they are human. We being westerners should be proud that we have laws like this, but that doesn't mean we need to impose everything western on others. It also doesn't mean that our fight for basic human rights is fundamentally western. Just the same way it isn't American, British, German, etc. They are basic human rights after all, and last I checked these people are still humans.

TLDR: basic human rights doesn't mean you have to identify as western.

Human rights written by westerners.

The UN, particularly at that time (1948), was a creation and creature of the western world. The drafting committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt: http://research.un.org/en/undhr/draftingcommittee. Of the nine drafters, six were from a western country (US, UK, France, Australia, and Chile). Two (the ROC delegate and the Lebanese delegate) were educated in the US. (The ROC delegate moved to New Jersey and lived there until his death). The other delegate was from Russia, which is a mostly western country.

You're using "west" as in western aligned? If not Australia and Russia are most definitely not western geographically. I've also never heard of Russia mentioned as western or grouped with other western countries. There's a lot of political tension between Russia and the "west" some I'm surprised to hear you say that.

"Western" is generally defined in terms of historical/cultural affiliation, not geography. Almost 90% of Australia's population is of English/Irish/Scottish descent, and Australia's laws, institutions, and culture are directly descended from Britain.

Russia is harder to pin down. Historically, they self-identified as western, even though the geographic center of Russia is actually in Asia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com