ABSTRACT
The Prison letter is one of a large number that Jingsheng Wei wrote to high government officials while serving his first prison term. Wei is sharply critical of the Chinese government's position on human rights, to be formalized, at the time Weiwrote this letter, in the first White Paper on Human Rights. He forcefully rebuts a number of arguments used by the government, including the views that human rights is an internal affair that different cultures and societies have different human rights conceptions, and that economic rights supersede all other rights. Human rights have become a popular topic of conversation lately and even the Party line on the human rights issue seems to have softened. Although the safeguarding of human rights and basic freedoms depends on legislation and policy enforcement on the part of sovereign states, human rights themselves have objective standards that cannot be modified by legislation and cannot be changed by the will of the government.
