Women's rights protection and "one-child policy" in China

Abstract

This thesis focuses on China’s women’s rights protection and analyzes China’s human rights practices in the past 30 years, especially family planning policy, which is the most controversial human rights issue of China. Why are the theories on this problem quite different between China and western world? The key task of this thesis is to answer this question. Also, this paper is to find out how the difference of human rights value and culture has influenced current human rights practices in different countries. Universal human rights have become the necessary foundation to make international and domestic affairs legal in politics, reasonable in law and correct in morality. The theories of universal human rights start with human basic dignity and value and can be divided into the universality of human rights value, universality of the object of human rights and the universality of human rights standard. Universal human rights should be based on the transcendental similarity of human nature and limited to the theory of rational cultural relativity. Human rights have taken up the heartland of international and domestic transactions but haven’t been defined by international and domestic human rights field in one unified way. In Chinese ancient mainstream and orthodox consciousness—Confucianism, there are many people-oriented principles. Chinese gorgeous ancient culture has its unique emphasis on human rights. In the humanitarianism tradition in Chinese Confucian culture represented by Confucius, the attitudes such as “treating people with kindheartedness”, “others first”, “if you want to stand stably, you must make others stand stably first; if you want to be best, you must make others best first”, “don’t impose your own personal views to others”. These all include unique attitudes of human rights. The core value in western culture is individualism and its view of human rights typically reflects this, but in China the value is collectivism, also this view reflects China’s current human rights practices. From the different views of human rights value, we can find out different results of the this problem. This thesis is try to utilize the comparative methodology to analyze China’s current human rights protection especially women’s rights protection, try to find out the gap between that of developed countries and China and try to give some advice for Chinese government on human rights protection.