In September, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a surprising announcement, stating that “Human rights for all is the shared pursuit of humanity.” This might appear to be a remarkable pivot for China, especially in light of a new research paper showing that its state-sponsor of forced labor in the western province of Xinjiang continues unabated. After all, if human rights mean anything, it is that slavery is bad. However, in the very next paragraph, the Ministry states that “There is no one-size-fits-all model for promoting and protecting human rights. All countries’ independent choice of their own path of human rights development should be respected.” According to China, countries should decide for themselves what constitutes human rights based upon “historical background, cultural heritage, social systems and levels of socio-economic development,” and government leaders are the people within a country who should make this determination.
In other words, governments get to decide what the phrase “human rights” should mean. For China, its historical background and cultural heritage apparently indicate that forced labor is just fine.
Beijing’s new interpretation of human rights must be a relief to Vladimir Putin, who can now argue that imprisoning political opponents is part of Russia’s historical background—an incontrovertible fact. For Saudi Arabia, the assassination of journalists would be fine, of course, as would torture and death by regimes in Syria, North Korea, and Afghanistan. Indeed, what horror would not be justified by historical background? Even the Holocaust was built upon a cultural heritage of antisemitism and violence against Jews that went back hundreds of years throughout Europe.
