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The revolutionary helmsman : Mao and Maoism -- Continuing the revolution : rural collectivisation and the great leap forward -- Destroying the revolution : the great proletarian Cultural Revolution -- Revolutionary or revisionist? Foreign policy under Mao -- Stuttering towards recovery : the political succession to Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping -- Abandoning the revolution : recovery, reform and repression in the 1980s -- China's economic rejuvenation : assessing the price of success -- China's rejuvenation on the world stage : an international threat or a peaceful regional power? -- A Chinese perspective on human rights : discourse, diplomacy and defensive nationalism -- China's theory of regime legitimacy : using the past to serve the present -- China and the environment : the discourse of eco-civilisation -- The narrative of Chinese nationalism : national rejuvenation or a double-edged sword?

"Robert Weatherley examines the role of nationalism in Chinese thinking on democracy and human rights spanning four successive periods: the late Qing, the Republic, Mao's China and post-Mao China. During this time, many of the debates in China about democracy and rights have been tied to the question of how to make China strong. The trigger is usually a perceived threat from foreign imperialism. Following the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, this imperialism took a military form, leading many Chinese reformers to embrace a system of democracy and rights in order to protect China from further foreign encroachments. In more recent years, the perceived threat has come from cultural imperialism, most apparent, Beijing claims, when the West criticises China for its poor record on democracy and human rights. This has led to the evolution of a distinctively Chinese model of democracy and rights that differs significantly from that deriving from the West."--

This article examines the analogous views of liberal Chinese rights scholars during the late Qing and post-Mao eras. The author identifies thinkers from both periods who have argued fervently in favour of a rights (rather than duties) based society in which human rights are the birth right of all human beings irrespective of age, gender or class. In both cases, scholars have challenged a predominantly illiberal state orthodoxy on rights, Confucian during the late Qing and Marxist during the current era. Significantly, however, it is only during the contemporary period that liberal rights thinkers have impacted on the official position. Whereas late Qing scholars failed to convince the state to adopt a more universalist, rights-oriented perspective, China's current crop of rights thinkers are having more success in this regard.

This article examines and rejects the perspective that Confucianism was compatible with a notion of rights. In contrast to the established doctrine of human rights which conceives human beings as moral equals, Confucianism was grounded in a philosophy and practice of moral inequality which measured human morality in relation to each person's position in the familial and social hierarchy. The roots of the Confucian antipathy towards human rights stemmed from the overriding significance attached to the attainment of social harmony since it was this that justified the apparent need for a hierarchical and therefore unequal society. This propensity towards harmony and hierarchy also ran counter to the notion that individuals possessed rights per se. With each person in the hierarchy expected to perform an onerous array of duties, there was little, if any, room for the pursuit of independent or separate interests. Consequently, any understanding that individuals were endowed with "rights" was stifled from the outset.