Restoring the Founders’ Vision and Promoting Civilizational Values Cross Culturally

Delivered May 18, 2026 in Washington, DC 

Two months ago I was asked to speak at a symposium held at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on the American Founders’ Natural Rights Vision and its Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy, specifically addressing how one could hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable not to Western standards of rights, but rather to standards akin to rights in the Chinese tradition, and how there is a confluence among these two traditions which enables us to speak of universal rights shared across cultures.

Today I will elaborate more on that theme, with today’s talk on “Restoring the Founders’ Vision and Promoting Civilizational Values Cross Culturally.”

I know that some who are concerned about human rights in China, especially those have been impacted by cuts to the budget, have questions about the direction the United States is headed with regards to rights, in particular with respect to confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over its abysmal inhumanity towards its fellow citizens, from forced organ harvesting to genocide committed against distinct groups such as the Uyghurs. Indeed, the President’s recent return from China has led to even greater curiosity about where America stands.

So I will try to provide some big picture perspective as to direction and depth of what I think is a Restoration Project, restoring 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.

One might even call this a Civilizational Restoration Project, an elaboration on the straight-forward call to Make America Great Again, as applied universally and cross-culturally.

The genesis of this Project, I think, can be found in a speech President Trump gave in Poland in July of 2017, during his first term. Note that the audience was not an American one, but a Polish one—the Poles being a proud people, who will point out their role in saving Western Civilization once upon a time, in 1683, when Vienna was being besieged by the Ottoman Turks, and Jan Sobieski and his winged hussars swept down to end the Ottoman threat to Europe definitively and emphatically.

So too the fall of the Soviet Union can be traced to a courageous Polish labor union, Solidarity, and a sainted Polish pope who said “Be not afraid!,” thereby answering a question attributed to Stalin several decades before, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” And, indeed, this example underscores the Confucian notion of the ultimate superiority of governance through moral force, or te.

It was in Krasinski Square in Warsaw that President Trump said that “Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture and memory.” (I note as an aside, this invocation of “history, culture and memory” brings to mind certain contemporary Chinese historians and documenters of atrocities that the Chinese Communist Party has afflicted upon the Chinese people, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen, such as Yang Jisheng and Rowena Xiaoqing He.)

It was also in President Trump’s first term that Secretary Mike Pompeo convened the Commission on Unalienable Rights, to (a) advise on international human right issues, (b) offer “fresh thinking” on human rights discourse, which had departed from foundational principles of rights grounded in the natural law and had come to resemble the progressive social agenda of the Democratic Party; and (c) recenter U.S. human rights policy in both the Declaration of Independence—which boldly states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

To unpack that idea, “unalienable rights” are those rights grounded in the laws of Nature and Nature’s God which cannot be taken away, or alienated, by the State, because neither the State, nor the Chinese government, nor Xi Jinping grants them. You can say they are “negative” rights held against the state, civil and political rights such as free speech and religious freedom, as opposed to positive rights, which are “rights” granted by the State, and accordingly, can be taken away by the State.

So too the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or UDHR, which was birthed from ashes of World War II and the Nuremburg and Tokyo War Crimes tribunals. When confronted by the problem of how, as a legal matter, one can prosecute for acts that were legal under the laws of Nazi Germany yet so heinous they cried out for justice, Nuremburg prosecutors like Robert Jackson (later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice) in part answered that by appealing to the natural law.

Likewise, the drafters of the UDHR, who (in part) incorporated natural rights grounded in natural law into its provisions. This can be seen in particular in provisions like Article 26(3), which states “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” A prior right is a right that exists in nature and preexists the State, and hence the State cannot take it away.

The desire to reassert an objective grounding to what constitutes a “human right” is behind Administration’s intent in restructuring the State Department by creating an Office of Natural Rights within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Indeed, the Office echoes the above understanding: “Natural rights are unalienable rights that are not bestowed by governments but belong to all individuals by virtue of their being human.”

The Office of Natural Rights goes on to specifically enumerate what it prioritizes in the context of the systemic challenge posed by Communist China: “We champion fundamental freedoms, uphold life and liberty, and work for a world free from repression and reprisal where technologies serve the common good. We engage globally in the context of our competition with China to defend these rights and freedoms.”

Does this mean that everyone in the Administration necessarily shares this perspective? No—and sometimes voices obfuscate rather than elucidate.

But a clear future indicator of intent and direction was Marco Rubio’s speech in February of this year at the Munich Security Conference when he implored our European allies to remember from whence they came and recall that it was “in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty were born.” (Reminding Europeans about the seeds of liberty follows up, albeit more gently, on a point Vice President J.D. Vance made a year previously at Munich regarding the tendency towards censorship of unpopular ideas in certain European circles.)

Secretary Rubio’s remarks can be seen as a call to Civilizational Seriousness: “Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past.  And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.”

So where then China amid this call for renewal and restoration, of a vision of natural rights grounded in an objective moral order based on the natural law, and hence, universal?

Xi Jinping has repeatedly called for a “great renewal of the Chinese nation, (zhōnghuá mínzú wěidà fùxīng). Rhetorical similarities notwithstanding, is what Xi Jinping desires for China something that can be achieved under his leadership?

Emphatically, no.

There will never be ever be a renewal of the Chinese nation, so long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in power, for they are beholden to an ideology that is so contrary to human flourishing and the development of civilization, an ideology which sees the human person as a means to an end—and that end is the maintenance of the Chinese Communist Party in power and the suppression of the Chinese people so that the Party can pursue its vision of global hegemony.

And what is that ideology that is so counter to human flourishing?

It is an amalgamation of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Xiism and—Chinese Legalism (fǎ jiā). Through this Leninist-Legalist looking glass, “rule of law” becomes twisted to “rule by law,” with the term fǎ zhì emptied of content and replaced with whatever the diktat of the Party may be of any particular time.

It is a regime whose founder declared that he was beyond either the positive law or the natural—wú fǎ, wú tiān.

Indeed, this present-day regime is probably the most Legalist since the Qin Dynasty, with Wang Huning serving in the role of Han Fei Tzu. And, like the Qin, this present regime will one day collapse because of its inherent inability to create the conditions necessary for national rejuvenation, imposing instead a tyranny.

But to go back to my remarks at the beginning, is there is a confluence among the Western tradition and the Chinese, which enables us to speak of universal rights shared across cultures?

Emphatically, yes—though it is a tradition that the Chinese Communist Party is at war with.

A key document to understanding what principles guide the CCP is Document Number 9, or, more formally, Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere. Its issuance corresponds roughly with the rise of Xi Jinping as General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Among the several ideological threats to the rule of the CCP it says emanate from the West is the notion of “universal values,” understood as something that “defies space and time, transcends nation and class, and applies to all humanity.”

By rejecting universal values as “Western”—and implicitly alien to the Chinese tradition—the CCP conflates, as it often does, itself with the Chinese people and Chinese tradition, and seeks to avoid accountability for its crimes and bad acts.

For such values threaten the legitimacy narrative by which the CCP claims a right to rule China, and provide a standard to which to judge a Party and its leadership which visited death upon tens of millions of Chinese people.

But are such values strictly “Western,” and therefore alien to the Chinese tradition?

On the contrary, they are fully consonant with norms drawn from the Chinese—specifically, Confucian—tradition, which in turn are reflected in that great mid-century human rights document, the UDHR.

When the UDHR was first conceived, a group of scholars from around the globe was convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to discern what values transcend cultural lines and thus could be deemed universal. Among its contributors was Lo Chung-shu, whose essay “Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition” delved into Confucian concepts of rights and reciprocal duties.

These ideas were incorporated into the UDHR by P.C. Chang, the representative of the Republic of China—the government which continues through the present day on Taiwan—and vice chair of the convening U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

Their contributions were grounded in Confucian thought: “rights” are understood to imply reciprocal duties, and are connected to the individual’s relationship with the community: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” UDHR art. 29.

But is Confucianism still relevant today?

The Communist Party still thinks so, which is they propound Confucius Institutes abroad, and television programs like When Marx Met Confucius at home.

But don’t be fooled into thinking Confucianism guides the thought governing China: because Confucian principles legitimize a government’s mandate to rule, i.e., the Mandate of Heaven (tiānmìng), regimes since the Han have often worn a Confucian garb to cover Legalist institutions—Confucian on the outside, Legalist on the inside (wàirú nèifǎ). (The Mandate notion predates even the Qin, dating back to the Zhou dynasty overthrowing the Shang in the mid-11th century B.C.)

Yet Confucianism ameliorated the unforgiving aspects of Legalism—compare the harsh strictures of the Qin with the legal codification of the Tang dynasty, which often prescribed leniency based on intent or mitigation based on overriding ethical principles (e.g., pregnant women could not be executed, based on the independent life interest of the unborn child). In that way, Confucianism can be seen akin to Christianity post-Constantine or post-Theodosius: legitimizing rule, while also ameliorating harshness.

One could say that there have been only two regimes in China that have been untouched by authentic, as opposed to ersatz, Confucianism: the Qin and the present one, both with Legalist DNA, though the latter also imported and incorporated Western theories of political power from Marx and Lenin. (Which is ironic, as Document Number 9 ostensibly and selectively criticizes ideologies imported from the West.)

And despite its ancient provenance, rather than being an antiquarian relic, Confucianism still serves as an arbiter of what government is legitimate.

In March 2023, a high ranking CCP official, past premier and member of Politburo Li Keqiang, gave a retirement speech in which he said “Men act, and Heaven watches” (“rén zài gàn, tiān zài kàn”)—which some have interpreted as a veiled challenge to Xi Jinping’s rule, leading to speculation that his audacity led to Li’s untimely death later that year.

It is a popular modern saying, but expresses deep-rooted Confucian concepts, echoing a well-known line from the Book of Documents (Shujing), compiled over the course of the first four-hundred years of the Zhou Dynasty, its oldest text dating to the 11th century B.C: “Heaven sees with the eyes of the people, and hears with the ears of the people.” (“tiān shì zìwǒ mín shì, tiān tīng zìwǒ mín tīng”)

It is a foundational concept, and is cited by the second greatest Confucian scholar, Mencius (c. 372-289 B.C.) Per Mencius, the interests of the people were paramount, ahead of those of the ruler: “The people are of supreme importance; the altars to the gods of earth and grain [i.e., the civic functions of the State that sustain the political order], come next; last comes the ruler.” His thought can be seen as a proto-democratic, and I have argued elsewhere, its influence can be seen in the Constitution of the Republic of China and the development of republican democracy that eventually flourished in Taiwan, though that should not overshadow the effort of the Taiwanese people themselves to overcome the authoritarianism of the martial law period in building the first democracy in the Chinese-speaking world.

The mandate to rule, however, was a qualified right, per Mencius: "If the prince made serious mistakes, they would remonstrate with him, but if repeated remonstrations fell on deaf ears, they would depose him…. the King [King Hsuan of Ch'i] blenched at this."

But what constituted “serious mistakes?” How serious is serious?

To Mencius, there is a line that is crossed when legitimate government devolves into tyranny, offending human dignity in violation of a transcendent moral order (Heaven), or a law above the law akin to the natural law (tao).

The overthrow of tyranny is not sedition, as the tyrant lacks legitimacy: “A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples rightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an 'outcast.' I have indeed heard of the punishment of the 'outcast Tchou,' but I have not heard of any regicide.”

St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa sets forth an analogous principle: “A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler .... Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind .... Indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition.”

This juxtaposition shows us that is a confluence among these two traditions which enables us to speak of universal rights shared across cultures, undergirded by a tao, a natural law, which is universal.

Indeed, if the natural law is what it purports to be, one should find evidence of it across cultures and across time; as Cicero posited, “There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now, and one later, but all Nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law.” 

What I would like to put forward to you is that a rejuvenation of civilization is possible both in the West and in China—and, together, moving in the direction a universal civilization marked by a common ethos—if there is a return in both cultures to virtue-based ethics based upon a notion of natural rights and concomitant reciprocal duties grounded in the natural law: a law above the law by which we can judge the actions of emperors.

It means holding Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party accountable to not a Western standard, but a universal standard consonant with that standard rooted in Chinese, Confucian thought.

With that accountability, we could see a rejuvenation and restoration in both the West and China, and a confluence leading to a greater civilizational thriving built upon parallel “bonds of history, culture and memory.”