ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the prospects and challenges for protecting human rights within the complex power play developing in China. On the one hand, the political elites attempt to legitimize their visible power by including other sources of authority in their rhetoric, such as human rights since the 1990s and the Confucian concept of harmony since the mid-2000s. After the 1989 Tiananmen democracy crackdown the Party-state has shifted from rejection of human rights to engagement with human rights in order to rebuild China’s image internationally. On the other hand, the formal embrace of human rights presented a window of opportunity for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concerned about the development of the rights of women, children and other vulnerable groups in China. Human rights advocates and organizations must navigate the spaces between the national and local power structures as well as capitalize on the authority within the official rhetoric to frame their strategies and actions. Their success in securing some measure of protection for the rights of women, rural migrant workers and other social groups is achieved, sometimes, at a risk to their own personal safety and, at other times, entails trade-offs with powerful collaborators and other actors. Their failures attest to the multiple and interwoven constraints posed by visible power structures and their relationship with hidden and invisible power in an authoritarian post-socialist state.
