Will Hutton takes issue with Martin Jacques on China and the West:
I agree with Rousseau, Kant and Paine that all human beings have a sense of self and are thus worthy of equal respect as individuals, as I agree with Aristotle and Plato about the importance of due desert underpinning justice. There is a universal hunger for these values which does not stop at China's borders because of some mystical adherence to Asian values. We all want to live lives we have reason to value - whether we are Chinese or British.
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The great reforming revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen wanted them [checks and balances] for China; the Tiananmen protesters in Beijing and other cities across China risked their lives for them; Charter 08, instigated by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals last December, campaigns for them...
As former editor of the magazine Marxism Today, Jacques might have been expected to know something about universal values. But like too many others of similar intellectual formation, he appears to have lost sight of this lineage within Marxism while splashing about in the shallows of an anti-Western cultural relativism.