China calls the very notion of universal values a Western imposition. In 2021 Wang Yi, the foreign minister, criticised the Biden administration for saying that the international rules-based order was under attack. This was “power politics”, Mr Wang retorted: a bid to “replace commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries”. - The Economist, Special Report on China. October 15, 2022 Issue
Mr Xi’s aim is not to make other countries more like China, but to protect China’s interests and establish a norm that no sovereign government need bow to anyone else’s definition of human rights. - The Economist, Special Report on China. October 15, 2022 Issue
A good place to begin this discussion would be the Preamble to the United Nations Charter, which affirms “fundamental human rights”. While rights aren’t exactly the same thing as values, the UN Charter does present human rights as a universal value, that is, one that applies to all peoples. Here’s the relevant passage from the Charter’s Preamble:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…
And then there’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected”. Per the Declaration’s own preamble: “… the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…[and] it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”.
So, per the UNDHR, fundamental human rights include freedom of speech and belief, as well as freedom from fear, want, tyranny, and oppression. Are such rights - and by implication the values they represent - a Western imposition on the rest of the world? Well, what do the world’s people say? Luckily, the World Values Survey have been asking them for years, and it turns out that the peoples in the West and the Rest pretty much agree with the UN’s take on basic human rights and values.
Next: The latest findings on “emancipative values” from the World Values Survey.