Discourse and Human Rights

Abstract

In international scholarship, Chinese political communication is usually viewed from a Westcentric, nation-based, political-economic perspective. Consequently, it is often portrayed as a product of the Chinese Communist Party and government(’s ideology), deviant, totalitarian and unchanging. In this chapter, I first argue for a historical and intercultural perspective and hence a view of contemporary Chinese political discourse as dynamic, critical-creative and cultural-hegemony-resistant. Proceeding from this new conception, I analyse and assess the case of the contemporary Chinese discourse of human rights. It will be shown that this discourse has been evolving topically, reinforcing socially and responding interculturally, thereby constituting a historic, cultural transformation of China’s human rights conditions on the one hand and a countervailing force in the otherwise unbalanced international communication on human rights on the other. In conclusion, I suggest that mainstream scholarship go beyond the ahistorical and a-(inter)cultural approach to political communication in general and to that of non-Western societies in particular.