In Chinese terms

The question at the end of the last post looks innocent enough: Are there human rights in China? Given everything we discussed about how language works, though, it seems we're treading on very unsteady ground here: if we can't even say that cup and bēizi mean "the same thing," how can we begin to unravel the complexities of human rights and what a Chinese "equivalent" might be?

Just as with cup, with human rights we forget the separation between form and meaning. We forget that human rights is not some abstract, freely floating concept that applies identically the world over. Human rights, rather, is a pairing of form and meaning that is specific to the English language. The form is the sound string (represented in IPA as /hjuːmən ɹai̯ts/) and the meaning is the full set of concepts and images associated with the sound string.

The term human rights exists in the English language. And just as there is a rich set of meanings associated with the English sound string, there is also a rich set of meanings associated with its "nearest" Chinese "equivalent," rénquán (人权). What we have to keep reminding ourselves is that human rights and rénquán are not "the same thing." English has human rights; Chinese has rénquán. The two sets of concepts are related, but not identical.

Some have asked me: Does that mean that the Chinese don't have the concept of human rights? My answer is: Yes, only to the extent that Americans don't have the concept of rénquán.

So: Language is not just form (sound), and not just meaning (concepts), but the pairing of form and meaning. Because our native language is so natural to us we forget that the concepts in our native language are not universal. So we naturally assume that other languages encode the same concepts as our native language. And since culture consists of shared concepts, it follows that by default we expect that other cultures will be the same as ours.

What does this mean for you, for us? It means that, as Westerners engaged with China, we need as thorough an understanding as we can get of key Chinese concepts in the Chinese language. In English we have the word contract; in Chinese we have hétong (合同). You can throw out a lot of what you understand a contract to be, because the Chinese don't know contracts; they know hétong. If you want to succeed in China, you'd best know what the Chinese are thinking of when they use the word hétong, because that's what they're operating from in their negotiations with you.