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No Fixed Standard on Human Rights
Scholars said at a China Society for Human Rights Studies meeting in Beijing Tuesday that human rights should be applied according to different economic, historical and cultural circumstances.
"When the people cannot feed and dress themselves, it is impossible for them to develop any human rights," said Professor Xu Huanzhou, an ethnic researcher from Guangzhou-based South China Normal University.
Also at the meeting, Zhou Jue, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, said China has long held that a nation's rights to subsistence and development are key to human rights.
He refuted western media reports that say China invokes subsistence and development as excuses to suppress people's political rights.
"In fact, Chinese people enjoy broad political rights including speech, press, assembly, and voting freedoms," Zhou said. "But such rights must be performed within the framework of laws."
Zhou said China also values political rights. He said certain political rights have been curbed for economic and cultural reasons but said such rights are being advanced.
"For example, the direct election at the village committee level can be gradually transmitted to direct elections at higher levels when conditions allow," said Zhou, former Chinese Ambassador to France, in an interview with China Daily.
Xu said that China's culture, which places national or collective interests over those of individuals, is reflected in Chinese thinking on human rights.
"Therefore, in China, sovereignty, or the rights of the State, is the totality of all people's human rights," he said.
Wang Guangya, vice-minister of foreign affairs, said at the meeting that as Western countries have used human rights problems to interfere in the affairs of developing countries, experts should study human rights to correct wrong ideas.
Wang encouraged Chinese scholars and media to introduce China's human rights theories and its achievements to the world.
Relations between ethnic minorities and the Han nationality also suggest China respects human rights, said Shes-Rab Nyi-Ma, a Tibetan studies professor from the Central University of Nationalities.
"Unlike those of nation-states in Europe, various peoples in China have seen in their long historical process the country as their big family, so to defer to their human rights is to respect their choices of remaining in such big family," Shes-Rab said.
He said Tibetan people's political, religious and economic rights are highly respected.
"People in foreign countries should visit the (Tibet) autonomous region to testify to the facts themselves," Shes-Rab added.
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