48518 }
The Diplomacy of Damage Control
Differing Conceptions of Human Rights and State Sovereignty
The CCP decision in 1989 to employ military force against unarmed civilian
protesters was strongly at variance with norms of state sovereignty that had
evolved in the West over several centuries. Beginning with the American
and French revolutions and the Enlightenment philosophies that under-
pinned those two upheavals, Western thinkers had embraced the notion that
citizens possessed certain rights, “natural rights” they were then called, that
transcended and limited state sovereignty. Gradually, the older seventeenth-
century notion that the sovereignty of rulers was absolute within their speci-
fied territories was conditioned by the expectation that the ruler’s sovereign
powers would be exercised with due respect for the natural rights of indi-
vidual citizens. These changes were linked to the transfer of the locus of
sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the people of a nation, ideas
associated most powerfully with the French Revolution. These ideas of con-
ditional sovereignty were well established by the early twentieth century, but
were greatly reinforced after 1945, when the peoples of the world, and espe-
cially of Europe, confronted the monstrous nature of the Nazi Holocaust,
much of which took place under laws and decrees promulgated by sovereign
states. The Nuremberg Tribunal institutionalized legal norms that state sov-
ereignty did not empower violation of basic “human rights,” as natural rights
had come to be called.^1
China, in contrast, was not shaken by the ideas of the Enlightenment
and the American and French revolutions—at least not until the late nine-
teenth century, when Chinese thinkers began to conclude that China’s sur-
vival required a new culture. Even then, China’s trauma of humiliation at
Western and Japanese hands led most Chinese to conclude that China needed
a powerful, even absolutist, state that could unite and develop the country.
Most Chinese patriots concluded that a strong central state was necessary
to “save China.”^2 The Marxist-Leninist variant of this strong-state preference