OPINION:
The recent Trump-Xi summit has heightened curiosity over the United States’ commitment to human rights in China and to confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over abuses from forced organ harvesting to Uyghur genocide.
Beyond highlighting prisoners of conscience such as Pastor Ezra Jin a topic past presidents have downplayed a broader “Restoration Project” is now underway: Its goal is to reclaim a vision of rights that aligns with the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to quote the Declaration of Independence, America’s foundational document, and apply it universally and cross-culturally.
The genesis can be found in President Trump’s 2017 Warsaw speech, in which he declared that “Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend onbonds of history, culture and memory.” That appeal to civilizational confidence was echoed during his first term when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo convened the Commission on Unalienable Rights to offer fresh thinking on human rights and recenter U.S. policy in both the Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The concept of unalienable rights is straightforward: Rights grounded in the laws of Nature and Nature’s God cannot be taken away by the state because the state does not grant them. They are rights held against the state civil and political rights like freedom of speech and religion.
Likewise, the UDHR emerged from World War II and the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals. Faced with atrocities that cried out for justice, prosecutors appealed in part to natural law. The UDHR similarly incorporated natural rights, reflected in provisions such as Article 26(3): “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” A prior right preexists the state and cannot be taken away by it.
This understanding informs the Trump administration’s creation of an Office of Natural Rights within the State Department. As the Office explains, “Natural rights are unalienable rights that are not bestowed by governments but belong to all individuals by virtue of their being human.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio reinforced this vision at the Munich Security Conference, calling on Europeans to remember that it was “in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty were born.” His remarks were a call to civilizational seriousness: a renewal and restoration rooted in enduring moral foundations.
But what does this mean for China?
There will never be a renewal of the Chinese nation so long as the CCP retains power. The Party remains beholden to an ideology contrary to human flourishing an amalgamation of Leninism and Chinese Legalism, by which “rule of law” becomes “rule by law.”
Rejection of universal values is the CCP’s greatest vulnerability. A key document for understanding this mindset is Document Number 9. It identifies as a threat “universal values” that “transcend nation and class and apply to all humanity.” By rejecting such values as “Western,” the CCP seeks to evade accountability and to conflate itself with both the Chinese people and Chinese civilization.
But these values are not uniquely Western.
Chinese scholars and diplomats played a significant role in drafting the UDHR. P.C. Chang of the Republic of China the government that preceded Communist rule on the mainland and today governs democratic Taiwan incorporated Confucian concepts of rights and reciprocal duties into the final document. Article 29 reflects this influence: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.”
Indeed, Confucian thought contains principles remarkably consonant with natural rights traditions. Mencius taught that “The people are of supreme importancelast comes the ruler.” Government exists for the people, not the other way around. Moreover, Mencius argued that tyrants forfeit legitimacy, lacking Heaven’s mandate.
This reveals a profound confluence between the Western and Chinese traditions. Both recognize a law above the law a transcendent moral order by which rulers may be judged. In Confucian thought this is reflected in Heaven and the Tao; in the Western tradition, in natural law.
A civilizational rejuvenation is possible both in the West and China if there is a return to virtue-based ethics grounded in natural rights and reciprocal duties. It means holding Xi Jinping and the CCP accountable to a universal standard consonant with principles rooted in Chinese, Confucian thought.
With that accountability, we could see a restoration in both the West and China and a greater civilizational thriving built upon parallel “bonds of history, culture and memory.”
• Piero A. Tozzi is Senior Director for China Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
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