Don't let Western bias cloud view of China

In Western culture, the snake is one of the most hideous creatures in the world. It was the serpent that tempted Eve with the poisonous fruit and got us thrown out of Eden and burdened us with original sin. Yet, Chinese people love this sneaky reptile and included it as one of our Zodiac icons. The Cantonese savour snake soup as a delicacy. We see the world differently.

To the West, human rights are associated with freedom and democracy, seemingly identical to political rights. To most Chinese, who can still recall the taste of hunger, human rights first and foremost is the right to stay alive, and to make a decent living. Other rights may take precedence over political rights.

To people in the developing world, this perception of human rights is not only more reasonable, it is downright obvious. What is the point of one man, one vote when one is struggling for survival?

In the West, slavery as an economic system has survived until recent times. In the US, slavery was formally abolished only in 1865 with the passage of the 13th amendment to the US constitution. In China, slavery as an economic system ceased to exist during the Warring States era over two centuries ago. After that, there were slaves who served mostly as domestic servants, but not production workers.

Chinese thus on the whole do not find freedom an issue, and, in fact, before the Communist regime, many lamented that we were much too free - just like "loose sand" - and this has made us weak.

Few Chinese would be obsessed with democracy as an "inalienable right". "Democracy is a good thing"; this was the evaluation of a contemporary Chinese scholar and has been cited many times, meaning democracy is a tool for good governance. Lamentably, judging from recent experience in the West, whether democracy is such a good tool is increasingly questionable.