The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
1990
First Published
496
Number of Pages
Part of Series
A unique revisionist study of contemporary human rights concerns as expressed in two Asian civilizations over the past 2,000 and more years. The book demonstrates a timeless, non-Western concern for what the modern world considers its innovative and so privileged respect for individual powers and opportunities. The book provides a heuristic with which to universalize across cultures the practices and aspirations of contemporary “human rights” jurisprudence and legal practice. The book proposes a new understanding of the Chinese Imperial Order with its own jurisprudence – “the Way of the Emperor” ( Huang Di Dao ) - different from those associated with the “Way of the King” ( Wang Dao ) and the “Way of the Hegemon” ( Ba Dao ). Chinese jurisprudence began in a feudal order out of which came both an Imperial Order and independent and contrary heterodox aspirations. The feudal and the subsequent heterodox norms and expectations both resonate well with modern human rights standards. The book reveals the evolution of Legalist jurisprudence into the Imperial Order but the continued appeal of heterodox beliefs outside Imperial structures. The book also refutes the narrative of traditional French scholarship on the Vietnamese as being merely replicating in a small setting the Chinese normative and social order. The book thus documents how the Vietnamese preserved cultural and social independence from Chinese norms and institutions until the advent of the Nguyen Dynasty and its supportive Sino-centric elite in the 19th Century. Nguyen Ngoc Huy, PhD and professor at the National Institute of Administration in Saigon, had previously translated Han Feizi into Vietnamese and wrote the two volume treatise on Vietnamese political philosophy Dan Toc Sinh Ton . He was a principal founder of the Tan Dai Viet political party and the Progressive National Movement. He and Stephen Young, JD Harvard Law School, collaborated at the Harvard Law School on an English translation of the law code of Vietnam’s Le Dynasty. Stephen Young has written Moral Capitalism and The Theory and Practice of Associative CORDS in the villages of Vietnam 1967-1972 .
