Constitutional Rights in Socialist East Asia

ABSTRACT China, North Korea, and Viet Nam are three essentially socialist countries that have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. A salient commonality among them is the homogeneity of their cultural roots and the socialist legal tradition, which have continued to influence every facet of government and society. These lingering cultural and legal affinities have generated a different understanding of constitutional rights in relation to liberal counterparts. For strategic purposes, China and Viet Nam have faced a pressing need to remodel their rights conceptions to a certain universalist degree, while North Korea has remained almost immune to the globalisation of constitutional rights. To overcome historical negligence and cultural insensitivity, this article seeks to probe the interplay of various strands of values in shaping constitutional rights of socialist East Asia. It also demonstrates various implications from the study of socialist constitutional rights that could contribute heuristically and practically to the rights discourse.