And like “conventional wisdom”, received opinion often doesn’t hold a whole lot of water.
The received opinion about China, for example, is that the Chinese don’t care a whole lot about their individual human rights.
That is wrong. The Chinese do care about their individual rights. They just don’t always make a fuss, or scene, about it. That’s because, at least partially, they have other priorities to be occupied with. For the present, I know the Chinese people have at least three priorities put above concerns over human rights issues.
The first priority is money as they want to get rich first.
The second priority is, of course, still more money, because in spite of twenty five years of incredible economic growth, the general public find that they have not got as rich as we wanted to at all.
The third priority is, in short, money because when it comes to Chinese priorities, everything else just takes a back seat.
Nevertheless, the received opinion that the Chinese do not care so much about their individual human rights is wrong because it fails to notice the changes taking place. Received opinion, you see, speaks best about the past. In other words, if you said that the Chinese didn’t, or simply were not allowed to, care about human rights issues in the past, I would’ve readily agreed with you. In the Qing Dynasty and further back, for instance, the Emperor and authorities in general were the only ones that were treated as full humans. The people, being bundled together as the masses, did not have an individual identity to begin with, and hence therefore did not have individual human rights to speak of in the first place.
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