I am delighted to announce the publication of Volume 15 Issue 1 of Emancipating the Mind: Bulletin of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics (2689-0283 (Print); 2689-0291 (Online); ISBN: 978-949943-02-3). The theme of this issue is "Evolutions Converging?: Human Rights Internationalism and the Chinese
Political-Economic Model from Reform and Opening Up to New Era Thought."
This issue includes a series of essays written by Flora Sapio and me examining the way in which human rights internationalism and the development of Chinese Marxist Leninist ideology may be converging as to form and emphasis. The first set of essays considers the evolution of human rights internationalism through the lens of the 8th U.N. Forum for Business and Human Rights (2019). The second set of essays examines the movement from the Reform and Opening Up Initiative to New Era Thought through the lens of speeches delivered in 1986 by Xi Zhongxun and then in 2018 by his son Xi Jinping.Both evidence the development of changing approaches to the organization and management of societal collectives which have been emerging at the margins of globalization. Both have been moving closer to center stage, and each, in its own way, challenges core premises around which the post-1945 world order was conceived (and partially constructed).
All of the essays are available free online. They may be accessed at the web page for the Bulletin HERE. The Table of Contents (with links to individual essays) and the Introduction follow below. The entire issue may be downloaded HERE. Comments, reactions, engagements always welcome.
Entire Issue may be accessed HERE
CONTENTS
Front Matter (View HERE)A. Introduction
- Larry Catá Backer and Flora Sapio, Introduction: Evolutions Converging? Human Rights Internationalism and the Chinese Political-Economic Model from Reform and Opening Up to New Era Thought 15(1):1-4 (View HERE)
- Flora Sapio, Reflections on the 8th U.N. Forum for Business and Human Rights 15(1):5-9 (View HERE)
- Larry Catá Backer, The Weak Underbelly of Business and Human Rights: Reflections on the 8th U.N. Forum on Business and Human Rights 15(1): 11-50 (View HERE)
- Larry Catá Backer, “ Peaches and Plums do not Speak, but they are so Attractive that a Path is Formed Below the trees” [桃李不言，下自成蹊]: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights; Remarks Delivered at the 8th United Nations Forum for Business and Human Rights (26 November 2019) 15(1):51-64 (View HERE)
C. From the “Song of the Young Phoenix on the Tong Tree” to “the Peng Bird Riding High and Flying for Nine Thousand Li”: Toward New Era Thought From Reform and Opening Up Through the Lens of Speeches by Xi Jinping (2018) and Xi Zhongxun (1986)
- Flora Sapio and Larry Catá Backer, Introduction : From the “Song of the Young Phoenix on the Tong Tree” to the “Peng Bird Riding High and Flying for Nine Thousand Li”: Toward New Era Thought From Reform and Opening Up 15(1):65-70 (View HERE)
- Xi Jinping, Speech at the Meeting Celebrating the Fortieth Anniversary of Reform and Opening Up (18 December 2018) Flora Sapio (translator and Annotator) 15(1):71-103 (View HERE)
- Xi Zhongxun, Speech at the Forum Commemorating the Sixty-Seventh Anniversary of the “May Fourth Movement” (3 May 1986) Flora Sapio (Translator) 15(1):105-111 (View HERE)
- Flora Sapio, Commentary on Xi Jinping, Speech at the Meeting Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Reform and Opening Up 15(1):113-120 (View HERE)
- Larry Catá Backer, Toward New Era Thought: Reflections on Xi Jinping, Speech at the Meeting Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Reform and Opening Up 15(1):121-144 (View HERE)
A. Introduction
CPE Volume
15(1) Editors (Flora Sapio and Larry Catá Backer)
This volume 15(1) of Emancipating the Mind focuses on two areas of
work of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics.
The first centers on the continuing development of frameworks for law
and policy around issues of business and human rights. The second focuses on
the continuing and vigorous development of Marxist-Leninist theory with Chinese
characteristics, now revolving around the development of the contributions of
New Era Thought to that larger project.
At first blush these appear to be two quite distinct legal-political
projects. On the one hand, Part B
focuses on the great project of human rights internationalism driven by the
U.N. human rights apparatus in Geneva and articulated in its most transparent
forms in the annual Forum for Business and Human Rights. On the other hand, Part C focuses on the
great project of constructing a Marxist-Leninist political-economic model with
Chinese characteristics and its possibly most successful expression as Deng
Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up Initiative.
The two do not appear connected.
And yet a closer look reveals potential linkages between these two significant
projects. The tie that binds is itself the overarching ideological framework
against which they both emerge—the post 1945-global economic order. For the
great project of business and human rights, the premises of economic
globalization represents the unfinished business of re-adjusting the allocation
of authority to manage economic functions among enterprises operating in
markets, the ideal forms of which are to be protected by states, and states
operating as both regulators constrained by their territorial borders, and as
private actors projecting state power through markets beyond their
borders. For both, the development of a
coherent set of rules respecting normative expectations tied to the great human
rights project of the United Nations system (itself born of the Zeitgeist
manifested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is meant to constrain
the discretion that can be exercised by states and private actors respecting
their management of or engagement in economic activity.
But that internationalization of constraints on the exercise of
discretion in economic behaviors directly and indirectly touches on the power
of states (and of private actors) to manage their own affairs within their
“jurisdictions.” For states the constraints touch on their exercise of sovereign
authority, and their freedom to develop and apply their own
political-economic model. For
enterprises, the constraints touch on their exercise of economic power that is not
otherwise within the reach of states and lawfully applicable law. In that
sense, the internationalization touches on the quasi sovereign authority of
enterprise to develop and apply their own internal orders subject only to the
applicable laws of the market and adjusted for the peculiarities of public law
in those spaces where they might apply.
Externally, the connection is embodied in the two great projects of the
post 2016 emerging economic order—the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and the
Western hub and spoke models built around either aggregated bilateral trade
agreements or (in the case of the United States) an ideological model that
centers the apex state around its vertical arranged public and private
partners. These, in turn, touch on both the development of two of the most
influential political-economic models, and their outward projection through
distinct projects of internationalization.
These are the themes that explode onto global discourse in the great
meetings of the Forum for Business and Human Rights in Geneva, as well as in
the Chinese Communist Party leader core’s work to advance and project a version
of Marxism-Leninism relevant to contemporary challenges. To discuss one is to necessary affect the
other. It is the object of the editors
to provide a space in this Volume 15(1) where such collisions may be usefully
examined for the light they may through on human progress in both areas.
To those ends, Volume 15(1) is organized around the two themes. It starts
with three distinct explorations of the foundational ramifications and
trajectories of the business and human rights project that can be gleaned from
the quite rich 8th Forum.
These though on the structures of business and human rights, its
contradictions, as well as its likely characteristics and aspirations in the
near term. The manifestations of these
objectives and their articulation as principle are also explored. It also
considers the bridging theme—connecting explicitly the work of human rights
internationalization with the economic internationalization framework of
China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
It ends with a consideration of the development of Chinese Leninism in
the ideologically potent New Era. It
does so through the lens of the theoretical advances undertaken through the
leadership core of the Chinese Communist Party as it reflects on and moves
forward from the great era of “Reform and Opening Up.” Here Volume 15(1) offers
English translations of two key speeches that help non-Chinese readers approach
the key primary sources of these projects.
It then examines these speeches in the Chinese and international
context.
The UN Forum provides the outward face of the external construction of an
ideal state of behaviors built around an evolving set of moral principles
expressed as specific behavior expectations of institutions (including states)
and individuals. It represents the
external forms of the ideal state, the ideal economic enterprise, and the ideal
individuals who populate both. The
movement from Reform and Opening Up to New Era Thought provides the inward
expression of the same impulse—of the internal construction of an ideal state
of behaviors built around moral principles against which the progress of
individual and institutional behaviors may be measured. To understand the
impulses of one it is necessary to understand the way these impulses are
expressed in the other.
We hope our readers find these of some use.
Flora Sapio
Larry Catá Backer
CPE 15(1) Editors
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