ABSTRACT
Gao Yihan criticizes earlier human rights declarations for exclusively focusing on civil and political rights. Gao points out that since it was the bourgeoisie who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were responsible for these declarations, they failed to stipulate the economic rights needed by the proletariat. According to the right to the whole value of one's labor, the criterion for distribution of wealth is labor, whereas, according to the right to subsistence, it is needs. To put it in a nutshell, because people already exist (shengcun), they should have the rights to protect their existence. It should not be the case that one group of people cannot even protect their lives. By the early 1920s, the right to subsistence had entered the Chinese rights discourse; it was thereafter embraced by people of different political persuasions, ranging from social liberals to socialists.
