A Beijing Oriented Human Rights Order: A disruptive imitation
GHRTV
24-02-2022
Marc Luetz
China Human Rights Researcher
Global Human Rights Defence
The universality of Human Rights, is a concept that has long been championed by western liberal democracies, and one that the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has historically viewed with distrust. A notion that has fostered a policy of considering human rights as an inherently domestic issue and that should fall under the jurisdiction of a sovereign state as part of its internal domestic affairs, rather than as an international one.
However, recent political rhetoric at an address to the inner circle and cadre of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing by Xi Jingping has marked a new and dangerous direction that human rights in China are about to head into. Last Friday, Xi Jingping in his address made it clear that China intends to develop and promote an alternative path in addressing human rights that is reflective of Chinese cultural practices and social factors. This is a development that mirrors an increasingly assertive Chinese position on the international stage in relation to the ‘universality’ of western liberal norms and values. This is reflected in the upcoming Chinese release of a report entitled “Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021”, which seeks to identify the hypocritical actions and policies that the United States pursues against its own citizens.
Beijing in this context is decisively pursuing and constructing an alternative narrative on the treatment of human rights that serves to be a disruptive imitation which threatens not only the current situation of Human rights in the state, but also mirrors a troubling development in the system as fragmentation of fundamental norms such as Human Rights threatens the rules based international order.
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