This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 4th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In the 20 years since the Chinese military crushed protests at Tiananmen Square as the conception of human rights in that

country change. Jim Dorne vice president for academic affairs at the Cato

Institute says many young people in China are coming around to the notion of human rights that simply exist, regardless

of the state.

Well in the liberal sense, in the West, human rights pre-exists the state and the function of the state is to protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property.

In China, they see rights as emerging from the state and as a function of development in a sense.

And they also conceive of rights as maybe welfare rights or rights to an education as opposed to private property rights and the right to be left alone.

So China had an ancient tradition of kind of non-intervention or what they called Wu Wei, the principle

of Wu Wei meant that the state would leave people

alone and people would prosper in and of themselves.

But that concept was lost, especially when the communists took over and basically abolished the concept of private property and the

You know human rights were basically put on the back burner. Now they started to

emerge a little bit before Tiananmen Square the press had some freedom

things were being liberalized, and Tenement Square set that back

substantially.

What was the impact of Tiananmen Square on China's recognition of human rights?

You know, Cato had a big conference in Shanghai in 1988, Milton Friedman was there, and he was treated like a rock star.

And the liberal press, and I call it liberal because they had quite a bit of freedom at that time to report on this.

They were there in large numbers and we had great coverage of the conference.

There's a lot of interesting questions. We went back a couple

...