Whose Asian values?

HANOI - As China's President Hu Jintao welcomes President Bush to Beijing this weekend, he's surely hoping to avoid another lecture on human rights like the one Bush delivered Wednesday in Kyoto, Japan. Urging China to ''continue down the road of reform and openness," Bush held out a shining example of ''a free and democratic Chinese society" - namely, Taiwan. China's leaders no doubt found this vision less than inspiring.

Earlier this month Hu paid a visit to a foreign capital where he didn't have to worry about such unpleasant comments: Hanoi. ''Different civilizations and social systems of the world," Hu said in a Nov. 1 speech to Vietnam's National Assembly, ''ought to pursue common development by seeking common points while reserving differences." In other words, the Americans should keep buying our sneakers and stop complaining about our political detainees.

These days, however, it's not only America or the international community that are pushing China and Vietnam towards greater respect for human rights. It's their own citizens. In Hong Kong in recent years, democracy rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands of marchers; on the mainland, mass protests over corruption and environmental degradation have proliferated. ''What we have seen in China is the growth of a human rights consciousness," says John Kamm, founder of Dui Hua, a San Francisco-based NGO that pressures the Chinese government to release political prisoners. In Vietnam, meanwhile, the government's steady improvement on freedom of worship and property rights issues has as much to do with rising levels of religious belief and private land ownership among Vietnamese themselves as with any foreign pressure.

If Hu's implication that China's restrictions on human rights are a matter of cultural differences sounds familiar, that's because it's a version of the ''Asian Values" thesis, first advanced in the early 1990s. Asian societies, so the thesis runs, legitimately place a greater emphasis on communal harmony and economic development than on Western-style individual rights. But if human rights are a Western import, they are one that has taken root in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia.

Indeed, as Hu and his Vietnamese counterpart, Nong Duc Manh, entered the headquarters of the Vietnamese Communist Party on Oct. 31, a group of Vietnamese protesters stood a few hundred yards away, holding placards complaining of inadequate compensation for the government's seizure of their land. Such land rights protests, once unthinkable in Vietnam, are now routine. Private property rights, the freedom to assemble and to criticize the government, and the expectation that government is bound by the rule of law, are all gradually becoming ''Asian values" - even in Hanoi.

In August, Vietnam's foreign ministry issued the government's first-ever white paper on human rights, something China has done yearly for over a decade. And in October, China came out with a white paper on democratization. The two documents seem to have been cribbed from the same playbook. Both argue that different definitions of human rights are appropriate to countries with different cultures, and both denounce any attempt by foreigners to impose standards.

Both papers do a clumsy job of defending their nations' records on political liberties. (The Chinese section on freedom of information simply cites the number of newspapers and television stations in the country.) But they do a better job on economic and social rights; both countries can justifiably boast of having lifted vast numbers of their citizens out of poverty in the last two decades. Indeed, the papers consider economic and social rights - "the rights to subsistence and development," as the Chinese government puts it, ''the right to food, clothing, housing, education, and dignity," in the Vietnamese formulation-to be more fundamental than civil ones.

The 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights - signed by nearly all the original UN member states, including the US - does include these economic and social rights. But the United States Constitution doesn't, and most Americans don't really think of them as universal rights. Americans have an Enlightenment conception of rights, rooted in 17th-century philosopher John Locke's formula of life, liberty, and property (or the pursuit of happiness, as the more spiritual Thomas Jefferson would have it). For Americans, it is the ''negative" rights - freedom to think and do as we please, without government interference - which are fundamental, not the ''positive" social and economic ones.

In the early 1990s, a number of Asian intellectuals, notably Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani, and statesmen, including Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, argued that Asian civilizations based on communal ethics shouldn't be forced to accept Western norms of individual rights. These ''Asian Values" proponents - from whom the current Sino-Vietnamese rhetoric on human rights is largely lifted - traced the divide back to the roots of Asian political philosophy, most often to the development of Confucianism in China from the 5th century BC onward.

Some philosophers agree that there are fundamental differences between the ethical traditions of East Asia and those of the West. ''There is more emphasis, in the moral and political traditions of Asia, on providing material security and good order. And civil rights are not as assured," acknowledged Duke philosophy professor David Wong in a recent interview.

Wong is the co-editor of ''Confucian Ethics," a collection of academic essays published last year by Cambridge University Press. He agrees that East Asian communalism is partly rooted in Confucianism, which from the 2d century BC on was the governing ideology of Imperial China (and of Vietnam from the 11th century on), informing everything from the school curriculum to civil service entrance exams to the relations between parents and children. Wong thinks that individual rights can be inferred in Confucianism to some extent, but ''you have to tease them out; they're not there to start with."

Some of the authors in ''Confucian Ethics" don't agree that teasing individual rights out of Confucianism would be a good idea. Henry Rosemont Jr., an emeritus professor at St. Mary's College in Maryland, argues that Confucianism does a better job than classical Western rights theory of grounding the positive social and economic rights. It is difficult, Rosemont feels, to get from the right to liberty (i.e. the Lockean right to be left alone) to the obligation to provide others with education and healthcare. Confucianism, with its focus on promoting communal harmony and well-being and on fulfilling one's social roles and obligations, has no such difficulty. ''For myself," writes Rosemont, ''the study of classical Confucianism has suggested that rights-oriented moral and political theories ... are flawed."

But other authors in ''Confucian Ethics" dispute the contention that Confucianism is incompatible with Western rights-based ethics, or renders them unnecessary. Hong Kong University philosophy professor Chad Hansen sees a value in the Confucian preference for the private cultivation of virtue and the sense of shame over law enforcement.

''My favorite statement of this is the 'Analects', 2:3," said Hansen in an interview, citing a record of Confucius's conversations with his disciples that forms one of the doctrine's founding texts. '''Lead them by laws, and cultivate them by punishment, and you can make them good, but they will never develop the sense of shame. If you lead them with propriety, and cultivate virtue, they will be good of their own accord."'

Hansen finds this philosophy not unrelated to East Asia's exceptionally low crime rates. But he sees no legitimacy in authoritarian regimes citing their Confucian heritage to justify ignoring individual rights or the rule of law.

Furthermore, Hansen points out, Confucianism is just one among many competing philosophical traditions within China, let alone the rest of Asia. Classical Confucianism, elaborated by Confucius, Mengzi, and Xunzi between the 5th and 3d centuries BC, faced fierce competition at the time from Moism, a sort of egalitarian utilitarianism, and from Legalism, which focused on law and punishment in place of Confucianism's responsibilities and virtues. When Legalism briefly became the official ideology under the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), Confucianism was almost wiped out, though it was revived under the subsequent Han Dynasty.

Buddhism and Taoism have also been hugely important in shaping Chinese culture and ethics. ''Taoism is a philosophy of spontaneity, pluralism, tolerating difference," Hansen pointed out in an interview. ''The fundamental orientation of Confucianism is that the goal of government is to get people to think the same way. Taoism says, 'What a boring idea - why would you want that?"'

What's more, for most of the Communist era, Confucianism was a dirty word in both China and Vietnam, a relic of feudalism whose goal of social harmony was antithetical to the Maoist doctrine of permanent class struggle. It is only now, with Communism having settled into complacent orthodoxy, that Hu Jintao can give the Party a new slogan with unmistakable Confucian overtones: ''the Harmonious Society."

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 - when the currencies and economies of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea collapsed one after the other - dealt a severe blow to the Asian Values thesis. Though recent analyses have laid much of the blame on panic by Western investors and a lack of controls on capital outflows, the conventional wisdom at the time was that Asian governments and banks had concealed tremendous fiscal vulnerability due to cronyism, corruption, and lack of transparency. Western critics began reacting to claims of Asian cultural exceptionalism with exasperation, arguing that the crisis proved the need for the rule of law, freedom of information, and skepticism towards authority in modern economies.

In this context, even China began to realize it had less to gain by resisting claims of universal human rights than by acknowledging them.

''In principle, because they want to seek international friends and relationships, they admit the universality of human rights," said Bruce Van Voorhis of the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission. ''But they don't actually practice it."

Of course, today it is even harder for China to maintain that human rights concerns are being imposed from outside when so many of the rights advocates in China are Chinese.

''There is a much higher level of consciousness today on the part of the average citizen of what their rights are," says Dui Hua's John Kamm. ''They have been exercising their protest rights. It's quite astonishing, the level of local protest" - 74,000 in the last year alone. Kamm also cites China's announcement in October that all death penalties would be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which followed growing anti-death-penalty sentiment among the Chinese public touched off by an academic conference in Hunan last January. ''That's a popular human rights reform. So it's not just imposed from the outside anymore."

Dui Hua compiles lists of some 400 political detainees known to be held by the Chinese government. Kamm estimates the full number at something like 10 times that. And while many of China's activists are university-educated intellectuals, many more are simply average people who have been exposed to democratic ideas through the village democracy initiatives introduced in the late 1980s.

None of this implies that China or Vietnam is about to turn into a hotbed of liberal individualism. But after more than a century of galloping modernization, and decades of capitalism and rising political freedom, the political philosophies which took hold in the West during the Industrial Revolution have taken root here as well. Hu himself is a good example: the head of a political party based on ideas born in 19th-century Austria, now adjusting to the free-market doctrines that evolved in 20th-century Washington.

The traces of Confucian ethics in China and Vietnam are strong, in the altars for ancestor veneration in private homes, in the impressive strength of familial bonds, in the exaggerated deference accorded to superiors. But the ethics of individual rights, too, are here to stay. Indeed, they stand at the very core of the modern Asian state.

Vietnam officially dates its independence to Sept. 2, 1945, when Ho Chi Minh ascended a platform in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square and proclaimed the country's freedom from France. ''We hold the truth," Ho said then, cribbing from a rather different playbook than the recent white papers, ''that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

It is not Americans but Asians themselves who are starting to hold their governments to such promises.

Matt Steinglass lives in Hanoi, where he writes for the Globe and other publications.