Chinese Values and Human Rights

Abstract

From its emergence as a fully fledged idea in the early 1990s, the concept of “Asian values” appeared as a cultural construct erected by authoritarian political leaders in the Asian region to fulfill various instrumental goals (Kausikan 1993; Kent 1999: 22; Tang 1995). It was devised to achieve legitimization of their authoritarian rule at a time when authoritarian communist regimes in Europe were crumbling. It was also designed to ward off the threat of cultural, political, and social change posed by an increasingly globalized world. At the same time, it was an understandable reaction by non-Western states to the emergence of the international human rights regime as a major focus of international politics in the West. Global politics became clad in the garb of culture, replacing the ideological clothing of the rapidly warming cold war.