Education
Explaining China’s continued resistance towards international human rights norms: a historical legal analysis
Why does China not conform to human rights norms?
Authors:
S. Sitaraman; Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security
Publisher:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, 2008
This article examines why China is wary of international human rights law and why it has difficulties complying with international human rights norms. It particularly focuses on establishing why the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is antagonistic towards human rights law, while it has been welcoming of other forms of legal reform, institutional development, and foreign cooperation.
The author argues that China’s compliance problem and its inability to fully internalise international human rights norms can be explained by the combination of the following three factors: (1) Confucian influence and imperial institutionalist heritage, (2) Maoist socialist order, and (3) authoritarian-developmentalism. These three structural factors have interacted in complex ways at different political junctures to inhibit China from fully internalising international human rights norms, thereby affecting its ability to successfully comply with its treaty obligations.
The People’s Republic of China has made significant strides in updating its commercial law, introduced a series of environmental regulations, and utilised international legal statutes to reform various aspects of its municipal legal system. However, problems persist in the area of compliance with and implementation of international human rights regimes.
Key concluding points include:
- China’s international accession has been accompanied by a surge of reactive nationalism - periodically expressed in the form of anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts, which has emboldened China’s leaders to dismiss international criticism of its human rights policies
- historical experience and homegrown intellectual discourse on law and politics have influenced China’s combative posture towards the international human rights - although China has ratified nine major human rights conventions, it has engaged only in procedural cooperation
- today Beijing is more interested in consolidating its economic gains, reasserting power, and fulfilling its national strategic objectives such as finding suppliers for its growing energy needs, politically isolating Japan, and incorporating Taiwan into the mainland. Given these strategic goals, Chinese leaders are less interested in creating a system that will generate or tolerate more political dissent.
