Description: What is the place of human rights in a society shaped by Confucian principles? Can Confucianism offer useful perspectives on the Western conception of human rights? In this enlightening volume, eighteen leading Western and Chinese authorities on Confucian tradition, modern China, and modern human rights address these timely questions. They offer a balanced forum that seeks common ground, providing needed perspective at a time when the Chinese government, after years of denouncing Confucianism as an artifact of a feudal past, has made an abrupt reversal to endorse it as a belief system compatible with communist ideology.

In lucid essays exploring the relationship of contemporary human rights doctrine to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, Confucianism and Human Rights explores concepts of the individual in relation to community, state, and society; the notion of "rights" in Confucian ritual and in Chinese law; social justice and religious and intellectual freedom in Chinese and Western traditions; and constitutionalism and the rule of law in China and the West.

For students of Chinese history and any reader interested in understanding the clash of Western notions of human rights with the ideologies of some non-Western regimes, this volume provides a clear, thought-provoking entry to this complex subject.

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