Jiang Shigong on Commerce and Human Rights

Jiang Shigong, “Commerce and Human Rights (Part One):  World Empire and the Roots of American Behavior”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jiang Shigong (b. 1967) is a professor of law at Peking University, a prominent member of China’s New Left, and a skilled defender of Xi Jinping Thought.  Several of his texts have been translated on published on this site, treating themes such as the nature of Xi Jinping Thought, American foreign policy, the historical and contemporary importance of empire, the Hong Kong issue, and the arrest of Meng Wanzhou.  I often disagree with Jiang, but nonetheless find him to be a subtle thinker and a persuasive writer.  Of course, Jiang is not trying to convince me of anything; his arguments are directed at his fellow Chinese intellectuals, many of whom are Liberals.
 
The text translated here is inspired by the Biden administrations attempt to take the moral high ground by criticizing China on human rights grounds, thus undoing some of the damage of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, and hoping to rally the world against China.  Jiang, who has already written extensively on America’s trade- and capital-driven world empire, weaves the human rights theme into his narrative, offering his interpretation of the “roots of American behavior.”
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Jiang’s argument is fairly straight forward, and based in notions of “first-generation” and “second-generation” notions of human rights. 

First-generation human rights grew out of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century establishment of the British empire, and defended the freedom to trade and the right to private property, “negative freedoms” that sought to constrain government control of individual behavior in public, commercial contexts.  Second-generation freedoms were the product of the French Revolution, and emphasized égalité and fraternité, “positive freedoms” often linked to collective or collectivist projects in which governmental power is employed to achieve these projects, which often take on national form.  Jiang makes no claim to have invented these concepts; they are most often attributed to the Czech-French thinker Karel Vašák (1929-2015), who in fact talked about three generations of human rights theories.
 
Jiang notes that at the time of its founding, America inherited both visions of human rights.  England was the United States’ principle model in terms of basic political and economic structures and policies, but also rebelled against Britain, rejecting its status as a colony.  Throughout the rest of American history, it would employ the two generations of human rights theories according to the needs of the moment, encouraging free markets and domestic expansion in the nineteenth century even as it protected infant industries.  Other times, the two generations were employed in a sort of one-two punch, as when the U.S. used second-generation human rights claims to encourage the independence of the colonies of other countries’ empires, only to follow up by playing the “Open Door” card and demanding access to the economies of the newly independent countries for American trade and capital. 

Biden’s current China policy is completely consistent with this history, Jiang insists, and Biden’s goal is to press human rights claims against China merely to safeguard the interests of America’s world empire.  Americans may not realize the contradictions in their own thinking about human rights, Jiang argues, but Chinese should not be led astray by lofty talk about Xinjiang and Hong Kong, because the final issue is money and power, after all.
 
Scholars of American foreign policy or of the history of human rights might well quibble with any number of Jiang’s characterizations and arguments, but I suspect that in the Chinese context, his text is quite convincing.  There has been a fair bit of discussion in China about what is new and different about Biden’s China policy (see here for one example), and much nervousness about the future of Sino-American relations.  In making an argument that puts the Biden doctrine in historical terms, Jiang seeks to take some of the urgency out of the issue.
 
I might note that this article is merely part one of what will surely be a two-part text.  Presumably part two will address China’s foreign policy, which in the text translated here is limited to the Maoist era, and served as a powerful example of the impact of second-generation human rights theories.  Chinese foreign policy since reform and opening, and particular since China’s rise, seems to work according to a quite different set of logics, and it will be interesting to see what kind of contrast Jiang draws between the U.S. and China as the world’s two largest economies, both seeking market share throughout the world.
 
My thanks to Chris Buckley for bringing this text to my attention.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
Linking the issues of "trade" and "human rights" so closely represents a fundamental shift in the Democratic Party's future strategy toward China, which is an attempt to seize the moral high ground in "human rights" terms along the lines of a "new Cold War.”   The goal is to strengthen the construction of a "democratic alliance" in Western Europe and East Asia and mobilize the power of world empire to exert overall pressure on China. For this reason, the competition between China and the United States today absolutely must not be understood as a "Thucydides trap" between the two countries, but as a conflict and competition triggered by the American-built world imperial system to blunt China’s rise.
 
If we do not understand the construction and development of the world imperial system from the perspective of the evolution of the history of all humanity, then we will not clearly perceive the unchanging elements in the swings between Republican and Democratic policy toward China.  Nor we will truly understand that Sino-U.S. competition is not simply reflective of a change in the power relations between the two countries, but instead relates to a competition between two human rights theories, two political philosophies, and two conceptions of the world order. In this competition, we can see two diametrically opposed views of the international order: one is the imperialist and hegemonic view of the world imperial order championed by the United States on the basis of economic and military hard power and cultural soft power; the other is China's "one world, one family 天下一家" order based on the concept of "harmony without uniformity 和而不同," which supports the resolution of disputes through dialogue within the framework of the United Nations and is committed to the construction of a community of human destiny in the era of globalization.
 
Whether in the design of political institutions or the promotion of commercial expansion, the British Empire was always the object of emulation in the founding of the United States. The Federalists were active promotors of first-generation human rights theory. Internally, they advocated the separation of powers and limited government to restrain political power; externally, they insisted on a "strong federal system" to guarantee individual liberty and to open up space for Americans and American businesses to conduct free commerce around the world. They also advocated a strong navy, independent and equal diplomatic, judicial, and administrative powers, and even imitated the British mercantilist strategy in the protection of the country's "infant industries," all of which was clearly modeled on the example of the British Empire. The political ideal of the Federalists was to follow the traditional path of Britain’s free trade empire. Those who advocated this path invariably used the Whig narrative to tell the story of the American liberal tradition.

This Whig narrative of liberalism was further reinforced by the post-war theories of the Atlantic system based on the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and by the Cold War discourse condemning socialism and planned economies. In the post-Cold War period, neo-liberalism emerged in the United States, with a systematic critique of second-generation human rights theory, a rejection of the French Revolution and the continental philosophical tradition, and a consequent rejection of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the socialist path.
 
However, during the founding of the United States, the most powerful spiritual force was grounded in second-generation human rights theory. The American version of this theory of human rights advocated the creation of a "new world" of freedom and equality through popular sovereignty and republican traditions as opposed to the "old world" of the colonial imperial system. The United States is often seen as representative of the "new world," which aimed to completely abandon the authoritarian rule of European colonialism, to establish the political independence of national development through "popular sovereignty," to abandon the world empire established by Europe under the colonial system, and then to establish a "union" among independent and equal nations.

This in fact amounted to a "new path," different from that of the European colonial-imperialist system. This claim was particularly reflected in the anti-Federalist discourse represented by Jefferson. It was on the basis of this tradition that Woodrow Wilson in the 20th century proposed the idea of a "community of nations," a set of "international alliances" which eventually developed into the United Nations system. In the interwar periods, the United States was a "beacon of light to the world" because, compared to the European colonial system of world empire, the progressive forces of the United States the system of independent and equal alliances of sovereign states advocated by the American progressive forces represented the direction of human progress. 
 
While these two human rights theories and the world political philosophy behind them may seem to be "contradictory," they are precisely what the United States used them to build a new world empire. On the one hand, the U.S. used second-generation human rights theory of free nation-building to promote its own westward expansion, and incorporated the newly opened West into the federal system by means of “alliances,” allowing the United States continue to grow and develop on the North American continent, eventually building a new "continental empire." This was why the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) worried that the American idea of the republic would decline with the end of frontier expansion. At the same time, the United States also employed the commercial trade theory of first-generation human rights discourse, adopting a mercantilist strategy to accelerate the rise of commerce in the American economy.

Especially after the Civil War, the United States formed a unified domestic market, and the "American system," as the government's industrial protection policy was known, was gradually completed and strengthened. The United States finally shook off its marginal position in the "cotton empire" constructed by Britain to become an industrial power and then a global power in trade and commerce. Throughout the 19th century, the United States made full use of these two human rights theories to expand rapidly in the in the continental United States and across the oceans, absorbing new states and developing commerce and industry, and finally achieving its own rise and beginning to climb onto the world stage.
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Links to other texts on this site
 
For texts related to liberalism, click here
 
For texts related to Sino-American relations, click here
  
Translation
 
The Question:  How to Properly Tell the Story of “Human Rights?”
 
When Trump launched his full-scale trade war against China, many enlightened people simply took it as an act of populist madness, and expected that once the Democrats took office with their liberal principles, the Biden administration would return to a rational stance on commerce, and, for the sake of the commercial interests of both countries and in hopes of easing relations with China, would resolve economic and trade frictions between the two countries through negotiations.  However, at the U.S.-China Alaska Dialogue in March 2021, under the gaze of the entire world, the two sides argued not about specific economic and trade differences, but about the broader positioning of the relationship between the two countries.

The Biden administration attempted to show the world that the U.S. was reassuming its position as a "human rights empire" through which it would continue its world leadership, correcting the damage that Trump's "America First" policy had done to the U.S. image. Consequently, the Biden administration imposed further sanctions on Hong Kong on human rights grounds the day before the U.S.-China talks began. Immediately thereafter, the West also besieged China at the United Nations on human rights grounds such as "genocide" and "forced labor," and imposed sanctions on cotton exports from Xinjiang.
 
Linking the issues of "trade" and "human rights" so closely represents a fundamental shift in the Democratic Party's future strategy toward China, which is an attempt to seize the moral high ground in "human rights" terms along the lines of a "new Cold War.”   The goal is to strengthen the construction of a "democratic alliance" in Western Europe and East Asia and mobilize the power of world empire to exert overall pressure on China. For this reason, the competition between China and the United States today absolutely must not be understood as a "Thucydides trap" between the two countries, but as a conflict and competition triggered by the American-built world imperial system to blunt China’s rise.
  
If we do not understand the construction and development of the world imperial system from the perspective of the evolution of the history of humanity as a whole, then we will not clearly perceive the unchanging elements in the swings between Republican and Democratic policy toward China.  Nor we will truly understand that Sino-U.S. competition is not simply reflective of a change in the power relations between the two countries, but instead relates to a competition between two human rights theories, two political philosophies, and two conceptions of the world order.

In this competition, we can see two diametrically opposed views of the international order: one is the imperialist and hegemonic view of the world imperial order championed by the United States on the basis of economic and military hard power and cultural soft power; the other is China's "one world, one family 天下一家" order based on the concept of "harmony without uniformity 和而不同," which supports the resolution of disputes through dialogue within the framework of the United Nations and is committed to the construction of a community of human destiny in the era of globalization.
 
The competition between China and the United States is not only a competition between the economic, technological, and military strength of two countries, but more importantly, it is a competition over the construction of a global political order according to particular concepts and values, which is undoubtedly a competition with universal historical significance. In this competition, "trade" and "human rights" play important roles, with the former related to economic and political power and the latter evoking cultural values. This means that in the future, China and the United States will inevitably compete in the field of international discourse on the issue of "human rights.”
 
Regrettably, it would seem that China is still not fully aware of the importance of telling the originally wonderful "human rights story" from the perspective of the universal value of “human rights.”  On the one hand, China has made tremendous contributions to the cause of human rights that have attracted worldwide attention, yet we have never been able to tell the Chinese "human rights story" well; at the same time, we have not been able to expose the hypocrisy of the American version of the "human rights story” told from the American perspective. As a result, China has consistently been at a disadvantage in this global struggle of discourse and ideology. The crux of the issue lies in our failure to understand the internal connection between trade and human rights from a global perspective, and our failure to grasp the different versions of human rights theory and their internal connections.

This is particularly true since from the beginning of the period of reform and opening, we have fully accepted the first-generation human rights narrative of the American-led world imperial system, ignoring or forgetting the worldwide contribution of the socialist tradition that China upholds in the second-generation human rights narrative. For this reason, if China wants to compete with the United States in the field of human rights discourse, it must first understand how the United States uses the interaction between trade and human rights to build a world empire, which will in turn allow us to understand at a very basic level the "roots of American behavior.” Only in this way can we build self-confidence from a global perspective and further develop the traditional socialist theory and narrative of human rights, so that we can raise the banner of "human rights" in global affairs and win the war of public opinion in the field of human rights discourse.
 
"The Empire of Free Trade:" First-Generation Theories of Human Rights
 
As everyone knows, the theory of human rights as we understand it today has its roots in Enlightenment philosophy, specifically in theories of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract, which laid the basic framework for modern constitutionalism, rule of law, and democracy. What should be noted is that the theory of rights at that time was called "natural rights," which emphasized the legitimacy of idea that "natural persons" were like animals in a state of nature and could do what they wished.  Yet once these “natural persons” became part of a social contract they became “citizens," after which they could only enjoy "rights under the law"—or "civil rights” —as established by public authority.  In this sense, there are only "natural rights" or "civil rights", but no "human rights." Because "man in nature" is an animal, not a "human" in the civilized sense; and once men in nature become human, they are under the restraint of public power and become a concrete "citizens" of a specific country.
 
According to the theories of Enlightenment philosophy, people in the state of nature will transition to different political states under different social conditions, and will necessarily enjoy different "civil rights" according to different legal systems. In other words, the natural rights of human beings are the same, but the "civil rights" enjoyed by peoples in different countries are different. The civil rights found in primitive, nomadic, agricultural, and commercial societies undoubtedly differ in important ways, to say nothing of the civil rights attached to different religions and civilizational traditions.

Therefore, if we truly uphold the Enlightenment philosophical tradition and "courageously apply our reason," we will not accept "slanderous" statements such as "traditional China had no freedom, human rights, rule of law, constitutionalism, or democracy" that are popular in mainstream academic circles today, nor do we need to go out of our way to criticize so-called "Western-centrism." This means that the political controversies we are facing today cannot be blamed simply on differences between "East" and "West," but arise instead out of different traditions created by Enlightenment philosophy. To resolve this debate, it is necessary to use our Enlightenment-based reason to understand the history and future of humanity.
 
In the case of 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy in the West, human rights discourse was constructed to justify an unprecedented lifestyle that emerged in European history. This was the proliferation and growth of a kind of social life marked by market exchange, free mobility, private property, the spirit of contract, and city life, all driven by the global commercial trade originating in Western Europe, beginning from the age of discovery. This socio-economy and way of life had a huge impact on the feudal and religious  order in Europe, on the imperial regimes in East Asia, and on the social order of the indigenous people in the newly discovered parts of the world. Western Enlightenment thinkers called this new way of life "civil society," or the "bourgeois" way of life, or more broadly, "capitalism.”

From that point forward, the "civil society" and capitalist societies of Western Europe, the feudal and religious societies in Eastern Europe, the agricultural imperial societies in East Asia, and the primitive societies in America, Africa, and Oceania coexisted on the global geographical map; commerce and trade linked these different civilizational orders, which were once divided in different geographical spaces, and gave birth to the earliest vision of globalization. 

At the time, the newly emerging West had a huge advantage over the newly discovered primitive societies and colonized them.  However, Europe was at a distinct disadvantage against the powerful and wealthy empires of East Asia, and racked its brains to figure out how to use trade and gunboats to break into the centuries-old systems of "East Asian commerce." It was through the use of gunboats and the silver and cheap products obtained through the colonization of Africa and America that Western Europe was able to enter these commercial networks. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, two major events in Europe profoundly changed the historical picture of globalization. 
 
First, Britain succeeded in achieving its Industrial Revolution through a long-term strategy of mercantilism. The Industrial Revolution changed the global situation, as Britain used gunboats to pry open the gates to East Asian commerce, subsequently opening up the vast markets of the East Asian empires with the help of cheap industrial goods, turning these regions into its own source of raw materials and markets for its goods. In the course of this process, Britain gradually evolved from a European hegemon to a global hegemon, and finally became the sole world hegemon in the 19th century after defeating its continental competitor, the Napoleonic Empire. In order to integrate the whole world into the British-led trade system, Britain began to promote the theory of "free trade" around the world.

As Britain became the center of global industry and trade, London became the global financial center, and the British pound replaced silver as the world’s currency. This meant that global economic hegemony shifted from East to West, from China to Britain, and the global economic and power landscape underwent a historic shift. Ultimately, Britain established the first global empire, the "Empire of Free Trade." It is only against the backdrop of the rise of a world empire and the great shift in global power driven by the Industrial Revolution and free trade that we can understand the history of China after 1840.
 
Second is the revolutionary contribution of the French Revolution in the field of ideology. Over the course of the 18th century, Britain and France competed with each other at the global level for an extended period. The British gained many colonies and great wealth through maritime trade, while France had long been hampered by a continentally oriented agricultural policy and had failed to move toward global commercial expansion in the way that Britain had. In this sense, the French Revolution can be described as an extreme spiritual reaction triggered by France's global humiliation.

This spirit gave rise not only to the passions of the revolution, but also to the important document that followed it, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” This document took abstract generalizations of Enlightenment philosophy to the extreme and pioneered the concept of "human rights." This concept differs from the Enlightenment thinkers' understanding of "natural rights" by elevating the rights of human beings in their natural state as animals to the rights of human beings. But more importantly, human rights provided a standard and a measure of what is "human" and what is not.  Concretely speaking, the Europeans equated their own capitalist way of life to that of “humanity” as a whole, which meant seeing other peoples from other places and other civilizations elsewhere in the world as “inhuman” or “primitive.”

Accordingly, the European capitalist lifestyle came to represent "civilization" and the other ways of life "barbarism."  This "barbarism" justified not only colonialism but also racism and genocide. The "barbarism" of modern Europe actually stems from the fact that Europeans invented and monopolized the concept of "human rights" and thus monopolized the right to judge who was "human" and who was not. 
 
The rise of Europe achieved the perfect integration of the economic and social life of trade, which was dominated by the British Empire, and the expression of the values of human rights, which was dominated by French philosophy. The "civil rights" developed within the particular societies, institutions, and lifestyles associated with trade-driven capitalism gave concrete content to "human rights," centering on private property rights, the right to market exchange, the right to free trade, and the limited government and constitutional rule of law to guarantee these rights. This is the logic of the human rights theory in the Whig narrative with which we are so familiar today.

Once these "civil rights," which were the product of specific historical conditions, are considered "human rights," or even as the dividing line between what is "human" and "non-human," what is "civilized," and "barbaric," then the primitive societies of Africa and the Americas became "barbaric" in the eyes of Europeans, while China and India, which had long-standing historical and cultural traditions and social and political systems but had not yet entered the capitalist way of life, were seen as “unenlightened.” The colonial conquest and the economic, social and political and cultural transformation of these "barbarians" and "unenlightened" people, and their integration into the world imperial system of global capitalist commerce and trade, clearly meant the "salvation" of these peoples and regions, a "salvation" that was seen by European humanists and humanitarians as a historical destiny consciously taken by the white man, or "the white man's burden" (in Kipling's words). Hence we can understand why European liberals who advocate human rights may be imperialists at the same time.
 
It is through this implicit distinction between "human" and "non-human," "civilized" and "barbaric," that human rights theory became the ideology of legitimacy promoting the unbridled expansion of the world empire of global commerce and trade. It was during the construction of world empire that "trade" and "human rights" began to work hand in hand, with "trade" representing the "hard power" of Western capitalism and "human rights" representing its "soft power," together promoting the expansion of the Western capitalist world empire. We call this theory of human rights, which is closely linked to the world empire of free trade, "first-generation human rights theory," the essence of which lies in the right to private property and the right to free market transactions based on individualism, or what Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) later called "the freedom of modern man," or what Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) called "negative freedom."
 
From "Revolutionary Rights" to the "Right to Development": The Emergence and Development of Second Generation Human Rights Theory
 
What the French contributed to the rise of Europe was not merely the abstract concept of "human rights."  More important was that the concept of "human rights" was given a different meaning from the "negative freedom" to engage in commerce and trade. This was democratic freedom, the right to participate equally and actively in political life, and the idea that “popular sovereignty” had the right to exercise political power,  what Constant called "the liberty of the ancients," or what Berlin called "positive freedom."  The founder of this theory of human rights was undoubtedly Rousseau. From its foundation in the right to democratic freedom and the sovereignty of the people, this theory of human rights developed the right to democratic revolution, the right to independent statehood and the right to an independent path of development. Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong were the heirs of this theoretical tradition, and they constantly continued to develop the right of people's freedom and political autonomy proposed by Rousseau.
 
A distinction is often made in European thought between Anglo-American liberalism and continental liberalism, emphasizing that the former is based on what is called empiricism and the latter on what is called rationalism, etc. This philosophical division is also reflected in the difference between two theories of human rights and their corresponding two paths of development: the former is a first-generation theory of human rights based on the historical experience of Britain’s global commerce, while the latter is a second-generation theory of human rights based on the historical experience of the French Revolution, the 1848 Revolution, the European communist movement, and the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

The core value of first-generation human rights theory is freedom, with particular emphasis on the freedom of individuals from interference by political power in the economic sphere, but the price of this freedom is the creation, expansion, and even perpetuation of social inequality. As a correction to first-generation human rights theory, the core value of second-generation human rights theory is the pursuit of equality, an equality that extends broadly across individuals, countries, peoples and even civilizations. Over the centuries, first-generation human rights theory has become an unchanging dogma in the Whig narrative of history; second-generation human rights theory, however, has been able to continuously explore new possibilities in response to changing historical circumstances, and is therefore always in a state of development and change. 
 
Although second-generation human rights theory has evolved and changed, its core essence has always been the subversion of and rebellion against first-generation human rights theory and the world empire of free trade it promoted, even if the subversion and rebellion took different paths in different eras. In the early period, Marx's, Lenin's, and Mao's right to democratic revolution, national self-determination, and independent statehood pushed colonies or semi-colonies under the European colonial imperial system to establish independent states one after another, leading to the dissolution of  the world empire of free trade, following which, the socialist path of class equality, gender equality, and ethnic equality, as well as the "right to development" of developing countries, became important elements of human rights theory.

After World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, in the face of the global victory of the world empire of free trade, the Western Left has advocated post-modern theory and post-racism, which marked a turn to the pursuit of equality in the field of cultural and private life, trying to overturn the cultural foundations of world empire, and consequently the core issues of political life in developed countries also turned to "identity politics" based on race and gender. 
 
Once we examine the different development paths promoted by the two human rights theories, it becomes very clear that if one defends the world imperial tradition of free trade from the British Empire to the United States, one necessarily emphasizes the importance of first-generation human rights; if one opposes the Anglo-American world imperial tradition and emphasizes the republican or cosmopolitan, internationalist tradition of equality for all, one necessarily emphasizes second-generation human rights. 

This is because first-generation human rights theory is intimately linked to the world imperial system constructed by Great Britain, while the greatest achievement of second-generation human rights theory is that it provided the ideological weapon for the achievement of the independence of nation-states after World War II, which led to the collapse of the world imperial system (colonial system) and promoted the formation of a community system (United Nations) composed of equal sovereign states. The UN Charter not only emphasizes the principles of absolute sovereignty, the sovereign equality of states, and non-interference in internal affairs, but also, and more importantly, the different understandings of the idea of rights entertained by different civilizations. The two theories of human rights and the two global orders they support have always been in a state of constant struggle.
 
Consequently, once we understand the human rights theories, we see that what is important it is not the discourse, but the historical actions and political practices the theories promote at the non-discursive level. The same "revolutionary rights" have evolved from a republican system that pursues equality for all within a single country to a United Nations system that pursues equality of peoples and nations in a global order, the former taking aim at authoritarian regimes established by the intertwining of colonialism and feudalism, and the latter at the world empire established on the theory of a global free trade system.

However, if one realizes that the economic basis of the world imperial system is a center-periphery world system of technology, industry, trade, and finance, then the colonial or post-developing countries on the peripheries must not only use their political "revolutionary rights" to break away from their "dependency" on this unequal economic system, but also use their political "revolutionary rights" to break away from or even overthrow the world imperial system. 

More importantly, they should also grasp the "right to development" based on independent political sovereignty to explore their own realities, especially to escape from the exploitation and oppression of international capital, to protect their own industries and markets, and to promote their country's economic development. For this reason, in the postwar period, both theories of protecting infant industries, which have been endorsed in countries like the United States and Germany, as well as Marxist theories of the planned economy, have had great appeal to developing countries or the Third World.
 
Against this backdrop, the core concept of second-generation human rights theory has shifted from the "right to revolution" to the "right to development," meaning the that developing countries have the same rights to develop their economies as do developed countries. Many people refer to first-generation human rights as "individual human rights" and the second-generation as "collective human rights." But whether it is the "right to revolution" or the "right to development," the cornerstone of second-generation human rights theory is popular sovereignty, which means political "autonomy" and "independence," emphasizing that each country has the "revolutionary right" to destroy the world imperial system in order to maintain its independence, and that each country has the "right to development," the right to use its independent intellectual judgment to choose the path of economic development, institutional model, and civilizational values.

​First-generation human rights theories inevitably produced the theory of the "end of history," that is, that there is only one modernization path for all of humanity, which is the path to the world imperial system, while second-generation human rights theories inevitably emphasized the theory of "plural modernity," emphasizing the diversity of development paths and civilizational models. Second-generation human rights theory must emphasize the theory of "pluralistic modernity," a “world unity” grounded in the recognition of what is beautiful in oneself and in others.[2] 
 
It is because of such criticisms of the capitalist world imperial system that, within the framework of the United Nations, there have always been competitions and debates between capitalism and socialism, developed and developing countries, free trade and fair trade (protectionism), and market economies and planned economies, all of which revolve around the two theories of human rights. The competition between the two is reflected in two UN human rights covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which embodies first-generation human rights theory, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which embodies second-generation human rights theory.

Based on the second-generation human rights theories, such as the "right to development," developing countries have legitimately chosen developmental paths and developmental models that are different from that of the Western free market economy, with particular emphasis on the active role of government in promoting economic development. Against this backdrop, even developed countries that believe in first-generation human rights theories are forced to respect the concept of the "right to development," and to put together the discipline of "the economics of development" as a discourse strategy, although the only remedy they offer to developing countries consists of private property, the market economy, and free trade.
 
“The Roots of American Behavior:"  Uniting the Essence and Utility of the Two Theories of Human Rights

Beginning with the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists at the time of the founding of the nation, the United States has been in a constant state of "contradiction," between isolationism and cosmopolitanism, idealism and realism, conservatism and liberalism, allowing for many different generalizations in attempting to understand the American experience. This contradiction traces its roots to the fact that North America inherited both European traditions of human rights theory in the process of its achieving its independence.
 
Whether in the design of political institutions or the promotion of commercial expansion, the British Empire was always the object of emulation in the founding of the United States. The Federalists were active promotors of first-generation human rights theory. Internally, they advocated the separation of powers and limited government to restrain political power; externally, they insisted on a "strong federal system" to guarantee individual liberty and to open up space for Americans and American businesses to conduct free commerce around the world. They also advocated a strong navy, independent and equal diplomatic, judicial, and administrative powers, and even imitated the British mercantilist strategy in the protection of the country's "infant industries," all of which was clearly modeled on the example of the British Empire.

The political ideal of the Federalists was to follow the traditional path of Britain’s free trade empire. Those who advocated this path invariably used the Whig narrative to tell the story of the American liberal tradition. This Whig narrative of liberalism was further reinforced by the post-war theories of the Atlantic system based on the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and by the Cold War discourse condemning socialism and planned economies. In the post-Cold War period, neo-liberalism emerged in the United States, with a systematic critique of second-generation human rights theory, a rejection of the French Revolution and the continental philosophical tradition, and a consequent rejection of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the socialist path.
 
However, during the founding of the United States, the most powerful spiritual force was grounded in second-generation human rights theory. The American version of this theory of human rights advocated the creation of a "new world" of freedom and equality through popular sovereignty and republican traditions as opposed to the "old world" of the colonial imperial system. The United States is often seen as representative of the "new world," which aimed to completely abandon the authoritarian rule of European colonialism, to establish the political independence of national development through "popular sovereignty," to abandon the world empire established by Europe under the colonial system, and then to establish a "union" among independent and equal nations.

This in fact amounted to a "new path," different from that of the European colonial-imperialist system. This claim was particularly reflected in the anti-Federalist discourse represented by Jefferson. It was on the basis of this tradition that Woodrow Wilson in the 20th century proposed the idea of a "community of nations," a set of "international alliances" which eventually developed into the United Nations system. In the interwar periods, the United States was a "beacon of light to the world" because, compared to the European colonial system of world empire, the progressive forces of the United States the system of independent and equal alliances of sovereign states advocated by the American progressive forces represented the direction of human progress. 
 
While these two human rights theories and the world political philosophy behind them may seem to be "contradictory," they are precisely what the United States used to build a new world empire. On the one hand, the U.S. used second-generation human rights theory of free nation-building to promote its own westward expansion, and incorporated the newly opened West into the federal system by means of “alliances,” allowing the United States continue to grow and develop on the North American continent, eventually building a new "continental empire." This was why the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) worried that the American idea of the republic would decline with the end of frontier expansion.

At the same time, the United States also employed the commercial trade theory of first-generation human rights discourse, adopting a mercantilist strategy to accelerate the rise of commerce in the American economy. Especially after the Civil War, the United States formed a unified domestic market, and the "American system," as the government's industrial protection policy was known, was gradually completed and strengthened. The United States finally shook off its marginal position in the "cotton empire" constructed by Britain to become an industrial power and then a global power in trade and commerce.

Throughout the 19th century, the United States made full use of these two human rights theories to expand rapidly in the in the continental United States and across the oceans, absorbing new states and developing commerce and industry, and finally achieving its own rise and beginning to climb onto the world stage.
 
In the 20th century, the United States as a world power faced the colonial imperial tradition of the European "Old World," as represented by Britain and Russia. In this context, the two seemingly contradictory human rights theories went through a new round of intricate combinations. On the one hand, the United States made full use of the ideological legitimacy of second-generation human rights theory to promote democratic revolutions among peoples and countries under colonial oppression and to continuously dismantle the European colonial imperial system.

At this point in history, the United States played the same revolutionary and progressive role as did Russia after the October Revolution. If we disregard domestic politics and consider only their views of the international context, Wilson and Lenin were both heirs to the ideas of the French Revolution and both promoted national self-determination, national revolutions, and national liberation movements based on second-generation human rights theory. Although they thought differently about practical politics, ideologically they were both subverters of the European colonial imperial system and both advocated sovereign states’ taking the path toward the League of Nations on the basis of independence and equality.

It was due to the defense and promotion of second-generation human rights theory by Wilson's America and Lenin's Russia that the old European model of colonialism and imperialism lost its legitimacy in the global political notions of the era. In the postwar period, this model began to disintegrate and a series of colonial or semi-colonial states achieved independence or liberation. All of these countries joined either the capitalist bloc led by the United States or the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union, in accordance with the internationalist ideal of the union of republics.

At the same time, the United States did not require these newly independent countries to be democratic republics in the precise sense of second-generation human rights theory.  In fact, they could even be feudal emirates or authoritarian dictatorships, but in order to join the U.S.-led alliance system, these countries had to  accept the global system of trade and commerce erected by the United States according to first-generation human rights theory. In other words, the U.S. has a hidden condition for countries to join its alliance: they have to adopt the free market system emphasized by first-generation human rights theory, and in particular, they have to open their commercial markets to the U.S.

This is the "Open Door" policy that accompanied the concept of "national self-determination.” In this sense, socialist countries were considered "enemies" by the United States not because they claimed to want to overthrow the capitalist world, but because they had chosen a system of public ownership and a planned economy that prevented the penetration of American capital and the economic power of commerce and trade. It is clear that the United States has in fact always defined its political "enemies" in terms of the capitalist philosophy of first-generation human rights theory.
 
In sum, first-generation human rights theory and the world empire it promotes have always been the foundation of American politics, while second-generation human rights theory has often been a tool to combat external political opponents through "national self-determination" and, later on, "color revolutions.” Once national self-determination or regime change has succeeded, these countries must adopt a market economy in order to gain U.S. political approval.  It does not matter whether they build a liberal democracy on the economic basis of a market economy or fashion other political forms such as tribal chiefdoms, dictatorships, or religious regimes, as long as their markets are open to U.S. capital and commerce and they accept the global economic rules imposed by the United States, they can be integrated into the U.S.-dominated global commercial trade system and become quasi-colonies under American domination.

By way of contrast, countries with planned economies are easily regarded as "enemies" by the United States because they are not subject to the interference, penetration, and domination of U.S. economic forces. Thus, the real source of the "contradictory" logic of the U.S. political definition of the enemy is the U.S. attempt to construct a new and hidden world empire by using the two human rights theories interchangeably. This means that we have to go back to the internal logic of world empire to explore the roots of U.S. behavior.
 
In this regard, the Marxist economist Samir Amin (1931-2018) offers an insightful observation. He argues that the accumulation of wealth in antiquity depended primarily on the things that came from the land, and that in order to plunder the wealth of other lands, classical empires often established direct rule through military conquest, accomplishing profit extraction and wealth accumulation through tribute and taxation. To conceal the economic relations of extraction and to justify military conquest, classical empires developed complex monopolistic theories positing the values of certain civilizations and religions. However, the accumulation of wealth in the capitalist era is often accomplished through capital and trade, and the need for military conquest and direct rule has been greatly reduced, which means that there was no need for political or cultural monopolies.  What is needed instead is a similarly complex set of theories having to do with the global economy.

The complex and sophisticated science of economics, constructed out of concepts, mathematical formulas, and diagrams, is in fact equally designed to conceal a new type of imperialistic extraction.  In fact, the transition from the classical regional civilizational empires to the modern world empire was made possible precisely by the globalization of commercial trade, which made it possible to control the global world empire through capital and commerce. As the first world empire, the British Empire adopted the model of "formal empire" of colonialism only as a last resort, and otherwise adopted the model of "informal empire" as much as possible, in which benefits are obtained through the "invisible hand" of commercial trade. Thus, the history of the evolution of the art of empire-building is the history of the development of the classical imperial form of direct conquest, the intermediate form of colonial "indirect governance," and finally today’s form of "invisible empire."
 
After entering the 20th century, due to Wilson's advocacy of second-generation human rights theory and, more importantly, the competition of socialist ideas, in addition to America’s continental empire and the Monroe Doctrine, the United States could, on the premise of promoting the independence of nation states in accordance with second-generation human rights theory, follow the path of "invisible empire."  In other words, they could require all newly independent countries to adopt an "Open Door" policy and accept the market concept of free trade, thus integrating them into the U.S.-led capitalist world empire. It is in the process of constructing this new world empire that the two human rights theories came to be completely integrated with the two policies of "national self-determination" and the "Open Door."

Here the "Open Door" promoted by first-generation human rights theories is the "essence", while "national self-determination," part of second-generation of human rights theories functions as the "utility.”  This new type of world empire-building is well reflected in two seemingly contradictory aspects of the United States in the postwar era: politically, it fully accepts second-generation human rights theory and promotes the independent and equal participation of sovereign countries in the United Nations system of international alliances; but economically, the U.S. built the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and its control over the global economy through the Bretton Woods agreement. In the postwar world, while many European countries and Japan are independent sovereign states in legal terms, the United States can turn these allies into "vassal states" or "quasi-colonies" through economic, financial, technological and digital data. 
 
Thus we see that in the new world empire constructed by the United States, these two contradictory human rights theories have achieved a perfect fusion of "essence and utility."  On the one hand, the United States constantly raises the banner of "human rights" and wields the stick of "human rights" to interfere with other countries, advocating "human rights over sovereignty" and engaging in "humanitarian interventions" to destroy the sovereignty of other countries. On the other hand, through the global market system, the United States incorporates the market and labor released in the foregoing process into the division of labor established by its world empire..

​This strategy has become all the more obvious in the post-Cold War era, when the collapse of the socialist camp meant that the United States found itself without little external constraint, and was able to accelerate the process of world empire building with impunity. The two seemingly "contradictory" human rights theories thus fused into a perfect union of "essence and utility," which on the surface promotes the republican and internationalist ideals advocated by second-generation human rights theories, but at the heart of everything is the construction of a world empire supported by first-generation human rights theories.  Hence we understand the two structures of "outer human rights" and "inner empire," which jointly promote the construction and global expansion of a new type of world empire, which surely constitutes the "roots of American behavior."
 
Notes 

[1]强世功, “贸易与人权（上）:  世界帝国与美国行为的根源,” originally published in the Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横 2021:5, reprinted on the Observer/观察 website on December 6, 2021.

[2]Translator’s note:  Jiang is quoting the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, “各美其美，美人之美，美美与共，天下大同,” which might be translated as “Let everyone marvel in what is beautiful about themselves, and also to marvel in what is beautiful about others, and we will realize the beauty that is shared and the commonalities that bind the world.”