Author: Man-kong Li
Source: Human Rights and East Asian Philosophy
Abstract
This chapter explores the Confucian elements in the political thought of Ho Kai and Hu Liyuan regarding the justification of liberty, the right of political participation, and the foundation of human rights. Ho and Hu had their upbringings in the late 19th-century Hong Kong, which was then a British colony. While in the standard histography Ho and Hu were credited as important yet minor thinkers of modernization and enlightenment of the late Imperial China, they were mostly viewed as apologists of the Western liberal capitalist ideas.
This chapter discusses their much-neglected views on how Confucianism might support liberty, or ‘the rights of the people’ (‘民權’), drawing on their rebuttal to the mainstream conservative and statist Confucian political theory expounded by Chang Chit-tung. I argue that Ho’s and Hu’s justification of the idea of liberty vindicates a right to political participation on Confucian grounds, which, in turn, laid the foundation of human rights.
Their view, I argue, also reflected influence from the English jurisprudence, due to their interest and knowledge in law acquired in Hong Kong. As such, Ho and Hu contributed to a distinctive strand of Chinese political thoughts that were indigenous in Hong Kong.