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> China does not recognize Human Rights and so it is difficult to say they are "breaking" them.

Whether or not China recognizes human rights doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not they are breaking them.

The international community recognizes human rights at least on some level, and it’s not particularly useful to use China’s perspective as a lens here any more than it would be useful to judge other atrocities throughout history through the eyes of the perpetrators.

Edit: Adding [0] for consideration as some responses seem unaware.

- [0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

This is poor logic, even if we agree on the ultimate result.

> Whether or not China recognizes human rights doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not they are breaking them.

"Whether or not your country recognizes Sharia doesn't have any bearing on whether or not you are breaking it and you should be prosecuted for breaking it."

See how stupid your logic sounds when it is told from another perspective?

If you want to fight for something at least try to understand what makes you right and the other one wrong.

> when it is told from another perspective?

The difference is that the other perspective is wrong, and ours is much closer to being correct (even if it still has problems).

So that is why your statement is silly.

And before you say it, no, I do not care about any of your arguments about cultural relativism.

I am perfectly happy, saying that people who, for example, want to kill gay people, have morals that are wrong, and that our morals, which are that we shouldn't do that, are correct.

Are you able to do that?

You are mixing "Rights" and "Laws" in your analogy, which are often directly at odds with each other.

Rights are laws.

In US they are written into Constitution which is the law and which is source of these rights and basis for enforcing them.

"Human rights" are part of international law which is an agreement signed by multiple countries -- a form of law.

>which is source of these rights

Not in the American tradition.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/rights-constitut...

A right without enforcement is just a nice idea. I don't think we've ever had anything close to international human rights. It is not remotely obvious how a framework of global human rights would work in current times.

Poorly, and with lots of violations, is how I imagine the framework would work, but by having such a framework we have something that we can refer to, something that we can point to when countries aren't living up to it.

Yes, it is just a peace of paper, except that it is also not once it becomes something to fight for and something that people believe in.

The US declared itself independent while British troops were in the country. It asserted rights against somebody else who didn't recognize them.

And that worked well enough that later people would refer to those assertions when debating freeing the slaves, and it was that which MLK was able to refer to in his speech.

I won't live long enough to see international human rights become a norm and neither will anybody else alive right now. But that doesn't mean that it isn't important that we start creating the norm now.

> A right without enforcement is just a nice idea.

There was a time that all of these were just "nice ideas" in the US

- Same sex marriage

- Women having the right to vote

- People of color having the right to freedom

- And on the list goes

Most of these rights were not enforced, or even recognized until people fought either with pens or with weapons and progress was made.

I linked to the UN's framework for this in my parent comment, and while I agree that this is an incredibly hard problem to address globally, we shouldn't discount the value and power of "nice ideas".

the "international community" is dominated by an affluent western minority that had no qualms about pillaging the rest of the world for centuries with no regards for human rights. _This_ is the Chinese - no, the foreign - perspective. If we think it's not useful to consider then so be it, we'll be locked in cold war for the foreseeable future. Personally I think there are more productive methods than hypocritical grandstanding.

don't understand why it's down voted. seems to be a valid argument. care to clarify?

Looking back at what other countries did centuries before is a weak argument for justifying what one does today. The “international community” includes more than a western minority when it comes to the issue of Hong Kong.

yes, basically the argument against 'whataboutism'. however I have a hard time to process the idea of 'follow what I told you, not what I have done' attitude.

The affluent Western minority is led by an anti-colonial rebellion whose record on this issue, while nowhere near perfect or even an absolute good, is the best of any major power in the history of humanity.

When China says "You know what, China? No. We will not break our own agreement. How could you even suggest that? Hong Kong is sovereign" (as the United States recently did in McGirt v. Oklahoma), then we can talk about whataboutism. Until then, that kind of argument is utterly unconvincing.

Sure is easy to give ourselves a good grade when we're also the judges. Shall we discuss track records of interference in external affairs? How many foreign regimes have we toppled in comparison?

Always disappointing to see such vitriolic rebuttals to the mere idea of considering a Chinese perspective.

The issue is its not a Chinese perspective, it's the CCP perspective. The Hong Kong narrative inside the mainland is heavily guided by the media in China. You average Chinese person either has no opinion or just repeats the Party line, because they don't know much else.

> In China, people have no innate rights.

It is a cornerstone principle that all people everywhere have innate rights. The entirety of the Enlightenment is based on this idea. And while China may be actively involved in oppressing these rights domestically, it tacitly endorses them on the international stage.

Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better.

The enlightenment was a European ideology. China is influenced still by Taoism, which has very different belief structure that emphasizes harmony with the masses over the individual.

> The enlightenment was a European ideology. China is influenced still by Taoism

That doesn't mean one isn't morally right and one isn't morally wrong.

If you want a hint for which one is which: one asserts that every living person has basic human rights. The other has frequent videos of people ignoring people who are dying, are currently destroying an indigenous population in concentration camps, and when a novel virus broke out, first shut up scientists trying to get the news out, then underplayed it, and then as it started spreading saw citizens weld shut doors of people suspected of having that virus.

I'm not sure who/what you're replying to here. I wasn't making a moral judgement at all. I'm just correcting the GP suggesting that the Enlightenment is somehow a universal ideal (the way I read it), when that's far from the case. In fact there have been many ideologies even in Europe since then dealing with criticism of each former philosophical movement.

Meanwhile it's undeniable that Taoism is a major cultural cornerstone of China and very much affects how the state and its population are related. Thus "Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better." is actually quite an ignorant statement that applies a specific moral lens to the entire world without acknowledging the lack of universality in ideals across humanity.

> Thus "Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better." is actually quite an ignorant statement that applies a specific moral lens to the entire world without acknowledging the lack of universality in ideals across humanity.

The existence of other frameworks of morality doesn't mean that there isn't one True Morality. It just means that some people act against it.

And that One True Morality is from the Enlightenment? Humans have existed a lot longer than the Enlightenment and battled with ideals of morality throughout the ages. To suggest that there's somehow a single philosophy that's correct is quite pompous.

No living creature enjoys suffering therefore do no action of intent which causes suffering to any other living thing. That's the One True Morality and every person can measure it for themselves because all of us is directly connected to suffering.

It's not pompous, it's reasonable, as in it's a deduction that anyone can make for themselves with the reason they have, applied to the vessel they were born with.

> And that One True Morality is from the Enlightenment

Probably not, because anything human will only be an approximation. It's probably a whole damn closer than the Chinese morality though.

> To suggest that there's somehow a single philosophy that's correct is quite pompous. Why? In science we accept that there's one true way that any process can be described. Others might be entirely wrong (theory of Humors), or partially wrong, but useful (Newtonian physics). Why is the notion that there's on true moral framework so outlandish?

Great! Which one is it?

>If you want a hint for which one is which: one asserts that every living person has basic human rights. The other has frequent videos of people ignoring people who are dying...

A big argument I see by Chinese nationalists online, which I think carries validity, is that Western governments who enshrine human rights and democracy in their constitutions throw their weight behind horrific dictators that support their business interests and suppress democratic movements that don't.

Basically, Western governments aren't more moral than China; just more constrained by our institutions.

Regarding the lack of good samaritanism in China, this is a recent thing stemming from a 2000s legal case where a man was sued after taking an injured girl to hospital. Most Chinese, especially the older ones, find this aspect of their culture abhorrent and there are active campaigns against it in several cities.

Chinese leaders are likely more familiar with Western thought than the other way around.

I am an American that loves to read the Global Times sometimes because it often has brilliant pieces. Media like we use to have before the internet.

Chinese leaders might even understand America better than we understand ourselves.

I had just read an op ed the other day how America has no strategic thinkers in positions of power at this point. Someone like Kissinger. I don't even know how to argue with that because we don't. We don't even have the political will to want someone like that. We want a circus. China can see this, we are basically blind to it.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted, because it is most likely true.

Focus in Western civilization shifted to trivia. We are spending all our effort deciding whether or not to take vaccines rather than deal with this problem efficiently and talk about really important problems like, you know, future of our civilization.

One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have an agreed upon word for "human rights" until the 1970s or so.

I think this is what the parent was trying to communicate. All humans may have certain inalienable rights, but not all humans fully understand the concept, let alone demand (or even desire) that their rights be respected.

It's kind of mindblowing to contemplate, but enlightenment thought has yet to deeply penetrate the mainland Chinese populace.

> One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have an agreed upon word for "human rights" until the 1970s or so.

Simplified Chinese:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E4%BA%BA%E6%9...

English:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=human+rights&y...

That claim appears to not be true. And since many Western concepts (like all the specialist communist terminology) made their way to Chinese through Japanese words using Chinese characters, if it _were_ true it would seem like it'd imply something about Japan too. Japanese uses a word with the same characters but I couldn't run down a good citation of the first dates all of these appeared besides the ngrams.

Well...unless you are one of the people that don't have innate rights at the moment. See, for example, the Dred Scott decision.

Your choices are (a) moral relativism, or (b) all humans are despicable. Choose wisely.

B. Next question.

Half the point of civilization is accepting the fact we're all terrible people ready to stab each other in the back to get ahead and deciding not to do so so we can actually take a shot at building something great.

And honestly, that's a trick question, because one is a subset of the other. Despicable people being a superset of moral relativists.

>Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better.

That's quite a strong statement about a theory taken seriously by a number of moral philosophers.

> as if Iran started accusing Canada of breaking Sharia

More like if Iran agreed not to invade Canada, invaded it, and implemented Sharia law.

If by "invaded it" you mean "dropped two nuclear weapons on its enemies, saving it from utter destruction, and then mostly let it do its thing and even helped them grow economically," then sure.

China is not the victim here.

I know the Chinese government themselves are just as given to engaging in it, but the idea of talking about "thousands of years" of Chinese administration as if there's no real difference between China's various dynasties and the modern state makes about as much sense as considering the Firth Republic as representing an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne.

Arguing that the moral standing of genocide is a matter of cultural construction is a pretty tenuous position.