Disrespect for Human Rights and Contentious Participation: Evidence from China

There are different views between China and the West on human rights. The Western society views human rights as universal. That is, all human beings possess certain rights that the state and government cannot violate despite different political, economic, social and cultural contexts. However, in China people have never understood human rights in this way. The Chinese government has advocated Asian values that emphasize the importance of equality, social harmony, civility, and collectivism. Instead of protecting individuals from state persecution, the purpose of rights is to realize the ideal of political order and social harmony. Therefore, Chinese society places more emphasis on individual duties towards society and the country compared to individual rights [34]. However, this does not mean that Chinese people forget their rights. Together with people all over the world, Chinese people have advocated and promoted human rights. Numerous human rights groups have publicized human rights issues in China and generated pressure on the Chinese government.

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We examine the correlation between all explanatory variables and find that almost all correlation coefficients are lower than 0.20 except for the correlation coefficient between economic satisfaction and income (i.e., 0.37). Overall, the explanatory variables are weakly correlated with each other. We also perform a diagnostic test for multicollinearity. The result shows that the values of variance inflation factor (VIF) for all variables in the models are smaller than 2, which implies no violation of multicollinearity. Therefore, multicollinearity does not pose a major threat to our analysis.

We also estimate a simple model that only includes individual perception of human rights as the explanatory variable and find that individual perception of human rights is positively significantly associated with all five types of contentious participation (see Appendix 2). Besides, we conduct additional analysis by simply including demographic variables (i.e., income, education, gender and age) as controls. Overall, the results reveal that individual perception of human rights is positively significantly associated with individual participation in five different types of contentious political activities. In other words, the selection of control variables does not influence our findings. To avoid biased estimation of the relationship between individual perception of human rights and contentious participation, we would focus our analysis on the full model specified for this study. Besides, to save space, we do not report the results for the model that only controls for demographic variables and the results are available upon request.

All other explanatory variables in the model are set as their means.

Although it might be helpful to break down individual answers to the five types of contentious participation into “have done,” “might do,” and “would never do,” very few respondents answer that they have participated in these contentious political activities, which makes further statistical analysis unfeasible. Specifically, 111 out of 2300 respondents have signed petitions, 62 respondents have joined in boycotts, 35 respondents have attended peaceful demonstrations, 33 respondents have joined in strikes and 29 respondents have participated in any other act of protest. To check the robustness of our findings, we also estimate the relationship between perception of disrespect for human rights and contentions participation by excluding respondents who have done contentious participation. The results (see Appendix 3) show that individual perception of disrespect for human rights remain significantly positively associated with all five types of contentious participation. Therefore, the classification of the dependent variable does not influence our results.