It may feel like a historical accident that the foremost revisionary challenge to these European promises [of universal human rights] in the last two decades comes from precisely that geographic region whose importance to the development of the concept of the human it is The Hypothetical Mandarin’s task to demonstrate. But it feels like less of one if one recognizes that the “Asian values” whose legitimacy is asserted in the human rights field gain almost all of their rhetorical force from the economic success of the East Asian countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The structure of the contemporary debate thus reproduces the one that allowed Europe to export its culture through cultural and military imperialism over the last few centuries, and not incidentally to place its values at the center of the 1948 Universal Declaration: the right to assert the potential universality of one’s cultural values derives almost directly from the perceived ability of those values to sustain economic development, and thus, given the history we have, on a relationship to capitalism. (This is why culturalist arguments against civil and political rights made by third-worldist movements in the 1960s, or three other recent declarations—the Cairo Declaration of 1990, the Tunis Declaration of 1991, and the San José Declaration of 1993—did not generate anything like the philosophical response that the Bangkok Declaration did.) Recognizing the degree to which the legitimacy of any given piece of state-generated human rights discourse relies on the success of its economy allows us to see that the entire question of universal rights cannot be thought outside the process of industrial and postindustrial modernization. From that larger perspective the apparent civilizational divide separating the two behemoths, East and West, facing each other across the Viennese tables of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, coalesces into a deeper affinity produced by the “subtending line of force of global capital” that joins them, as Pheng Cheah has argued, “against the possibility of other alternatives of development, feminist or ecological-subalternist.”
— Eric Hayot, “Introduction,” The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, & Chinese Pain (2009)
