c. 1998 Religion News Service

PRAGUE, Czech Republic _ The notion of”Asian values,”used by countries such as China and Singapore to justify authoritarian regimes, is a modern blend of Marxism and fascist racism that defies Asia’s own traditions, said Chinese democracy activist Wei Jingsheng.

The idea of Asian values is”that certain human beings are able to live in democratic regimes, free from oppression, while others need repression and slavery,”said Wei, who spent 19 years in Chinese prisons. He spoke here Wednesday (Oct. 14) on the final day of Forum 2000, a blue-ribbon conference discussing the impact of globalization.

Wei disputed the notion that human rights represent a Western, imperialistic idea.”People in the East, in China, love freedom the same as people of other nations,”said Wei.”When the Western thinkers were establishing the concept of human rights, they borrowed from Eastern philosophy. Montesqieu used a great amount of Chinese philosophy.” He called Communist China’s hostility to European notions hypocritical:”Marxism is a Western concept,”he said.

Wei mostly drew agreement at this talking shop of political, religious and economic luminaries gathered under the auspices of Czech President Vaclav Havel, himself a former political prisoner of Communist rule.

But American sociologist Amitai Etzioni said Asian cultures have some reason to complain. Etzioni is a leader of the so-called”communitarian”movement in the United States which stresses that people must balance their rights with responsibility.”We are both learning from each other,”said Etzioni.”The West can take a lesson from the East’s stress on the individual’s obligations to society and their elders,”he said.

In Asian countries, he added, people”are beginning to say, `We can find in our own tradition a respect for individual dignity.'” Robert Bernstein, the founding chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said,”It never occurred to me that human rights are anything but universal. I am always somewhat surprised at the question.” Bernstein, a publisher who helped print works by Havel and other dissidents from the former Soviet bloc, noted that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was compiled by representatives of numerous religious, political and economic systems.

Russian parliamentarian and human-rights activist Serguey Kovalyov said he agreed human rights should be universal, in the sense that two teams playing soccer can’t play by different rules. But he said Bernstein dismissed too glibly the resistance to human rights in many parts of the world.

Kovalyov said many countries, for example, view the most important human right to be that of economic development.”This right means that developed countries that have for a long time exploited countries that they colonized now must provide money”for development, while refraining from criticizing how these developing countries treat their citizens, he said.

He also said some Western countries show their own hypocrisy over human rights, citing, for example, the fact that some Western election observers left the war-torn Russian region of Chechnya rather than report election fraud that would have damaged the credibility of President Yeltsin.”They didn’t want to evaluate what was happening in front of their eyes,”he said.

While the forum ranged across issues of rights and responsibilities around the world, it was Wei’s very presence at the forum that was most remarkable and poignantly underscored the day’s theme.

Bernstein noted that Wei spent many years of his imprisonment in solitary confinement, at one point in a glass cage in which the light was kept on 24 hours a day. He was released less than a year ago.

Yet Wei, a former nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, appeared gracious and healthy as he addressed the conference, gave interviews and greeted well-wishers.

As if to underscore the relevance of the session’s theme on human rights, one of its scheduled speakers could not attend. Cuban dissident Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz was barred from attending by the government of Fidel Castro, conference organizers said.

DEA END SMITH