ABSTRACT
Traditional Chinese society was humanist. There have been as many incidences of cruelty and man's inhumanity to man in China's recorded past as in Western history or for that matter in the history of any other civilization. Yet if civilizations are to be judged not pathologically, but by their value systems and goals, a study of China's history reveals a regard for humanity as profound as that of any other great culture. There was a short tumultuous attempt at nation-building and before the Sino-Japanese War in which modern concepts of rule by law and a free market economy were to be fused with the ethics and values of the past. The Confucian tradition is compatible with the modern notion of human rights as founded in the well-being of the people as individual moral beings. Other philosophical developments contributed further to the stream of Chinese intellectual tradition.
