Besides Chinese civilians and soldiers, non-Chinese characters are significant in the two novels, such as Minnie Vautrin and John Rabe in Nanjing Requiem and Dr.
Greene and Father Woodworth in War Trash. Most of them appear as altruistic
helpers, such as a doctor, a priest or a teacher. Some others have special identities; for example, Rabe is a businessman and a member of German Nazi, and Dr. Green and Father Woodworth are affiliated to the military faculty in American troops. In the early 20th century, non-Chinese figures are treated as the national and cultural Other in rather conservative Chinese society and easily blackened as accomplices of Western imperialism. However, in the two novels, non-Chinese characters save countless Chinese ones of bare life, and their humanitarian deeds transcend the prejudice against them. Zhang Guoling proposes that these non-Chinese characters reveal Ha Jin’s ideal value in humanity, and they stand on the opposite to the cruelty of war and collapsed morality (153). However, in Nanjing Requiem, these non-Chinese
characters encounter different plights and obstacles in their rescue missions, and their humanitarian aids to Chinese refugees does not not very smoothly. In War Trash, the humanitarian treatments that these POWs deserve seem full of political concerns and calculation from different sovereigns, which does not obviously improve the situation of the POWs. Chapter Two examines the humanitarian plights in Nanjing Requiem and War Trash.
In the thesis, the humanitarian issues in War Trash and Nanjing Requiem are initiated by the discussion on human rights. John Lechte and Saul Newman concisely clarify that the way of human rights, in practice, has largely been reduced to
humanitarianism (5). In other words, human rights are the theoretical guideline to humanitarian practices, so examining the fundamental elements of human rights is
necessary to the following discussion of humanitarian practices. Moreover, in Lechte and Newman’s opinion, “human rights, which in theory seek to call sovereignty to account, to make it answer to universal principle of justice, therefore invoking an alternative ontology of the human” (vii). Human rights, which appeals to universal value of humanity, should be worldwide respected and transcend the cultural and political boarders established by national sovereigns.
For Arendt, human rights are indistinguishable from the civil rights of political communities. Arendt states that:
Rights of Man…had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum right, no authority was left to protect them… (171-2) In Arendt’s opinion, human rights should be a widely recognizable and universal value, but after all, they still need political entities to enforce. Only through being included into political entities could a human really have human rights. Therefore, Arendt concludes that the “stateless” people who lose the citizenship of their countries (perhaps they are denationalized or their countries annex) naturally lose “a right to have rights,” and become “the rightless” (296). The tragedy of the rightless is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion,” but that “they no longer belong to any political community” (295). It is “not the loss of specific right, then, but a loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights” (297). Furthermore, Arendt highlights a tricky point that a human can “lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity” (297). This statement reveals a discrepancy between legal
humanity and natural humanity: whether one’s political rights guaranteed by the political community can be equivalent to his essence of humanity. Lechte and
Newman suggest that the solution be “not simply to argue for their integration into the national state order and established identities of citizenship,” but instead “to break down this very ontological distinction between political community and its other, between political life and bare life” (viii-ix). This statement indicates that when the indistinguishable relation between the human being and the sovereign deconstructs, the human being can be essentially liberated to be independent individuals and gain the universal human rights.
Agamben’s critique of human rights is slightly different from that of Arendt: the deprivation of human rights is not from the exclusion of political entities, but from the inclusion in the form of exclusion (Lechte and Newman ix). Thus, from Agamben’s perspective, “human rights cannot be detached from the nexus of biopolitical
sovereignty, from that infernal machine of modern and ancient power which holds life itself within the clasp” (Lechte and Newman ix). Moreover, Lechte and Newman point out the weakness of human rights developed under the national sovereignty:
it is precisely the fact of the human as essentially biological bodies…that qualifies it to be included in the civil sphere. Yet paradoxically, while it is through rights that we are included in the civil sphere as citizens, this inclusion coincides with the growing weakness of rights and the readiness on the part of the state to sacrifice them in the name of security. (7) This proposition means that even human rights are a kind of discourse produced by national sovereigns which can have reasons to retreat human rights if necessary, which resonates with Agamben’s idea of the state of exception: the sovereign is qualified to announce the state of exception to normalize emergent situation with the
name of security. Lechte and Newman briefly conclude that “at worse, we could say that the discourse of rights is used, or misused by the sovereign power in an
ideological way to legitimate itself, even as it goes about suspending and curtailing those very rights” (8). In Agamben’s critique, only the sovereigns have power to determine the application of human rights, but in reality, NGOs and humanitarian institutions worldwide urge nation states to account for implementing policies to improve human rights, such as improving the treatments to prisoners in jails, transitional justice for victims in wartime, and accepting refugees from other countries. These efforts of humanitarian institutions sometimes touch off tension between human rights and national security. Therefore, the national sovereign does not completely dominate the power of discourses of human right, but it has to compromise with these humanitarian institutions and implements human right policies.
Agamben exemplifies the situation of refugees and the stateless people to further examine the tension between human rights and national security. Agamben foresees that the refugee is “perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today” when “now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories”
(“Beyond” 90). The refugee has gradually become the “exception” for national and political systems, existing in the marginal place of their dominance. In Agamben’s analysis, the refugee and the stateless people have drastically appeared since World War One. The refugees, “who were not technically stateless, preferred to become such rather than return to their country” while the stateless is the refugees who were
“denationalized” by their own nations (“Beyond” 91). For Agamben, the status of refugees “has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either
to naturalization or repatriation” (“Beyond” 92). Agamben states that the current situation of refugees is unstable and hardly recognizable, so most of them have been included into the system of the sovereign of their origin (repatriation) or of their host country (naturalization, becoming the citizens in the host countries) in the end.
However, neither repatriation nor naturalization can change the crisis of human rights within national sovereignty. Agamben suggests a new route for refugees: “the concept of refugee must be resolutely separated from the concept of the “human rights,”” (93) and
the refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed. (94)
Based on Agamben’s point, it assumes that the refugee has been identified as a potential threat to national security and the unrecognizable Other to the existing composition of racial and cultural communities. The solution to the impediment of the refugee is to focus on the essential part of the refugee instead of its political status inscribed by the sovereign. Therefore, perhaps the concept of “refugee” also needs to be redefine because it conveys specific political ideology which worsens
misunderstanding toward them.
Agamben observes that many developed countries in the European Union today face “a permanently resident mass of noncitizens that do not want to be and cannot be either naturalized or repatriated,” and “these noncitizens often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as they prefer not to benefit from their own states’ protection, they find themselves, as refugees, in a condition of de facto statelessness” (2008: 94).
Agamben does not explain what has caused the complicated impediment of this case
of refugees, but their appearance somehow reflects the complex international situation and the national systems which make them the unrecognizable and non categorizable Other. Agamben adopts Thomas Hammar’s neologism of “denizens” to describe these noncitizen permanent residents, because “the concept of “citizen” is no longer
adequate for describing the social-political reality of modern states” (2008: 94). The concepts of “refugees,” “nation,” “citizens,” and “denizens” resonate Agamben’s idea of “the coming community,” foreseeing a new form of politics to those people without firm identities of nation, race and culture.
Generally, both Arendt and Agamben mention the crisis of human rights under the national sovereigns, and the tension between improving human rights and maintaining national security. In practice, improving and securing human rights for the stateless has often been carried out in the form of international humanitarian laws, such as the Geneva Conventions, and humanitarian aids launched by international NGOs, such as International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), Doctors without Borders (MSF), and UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Not only humanitarian organizations but also national sovereigns should follow the guidelines of the Geneva Conventions to protect the people in danger. J. Patrnogic states that
The Geneva Conventions should be considered as a specific kind of protest against war. The Conventions regulate the protection of some basic human rights. War is a negation of the rights of human beings, so fixing of
obligation contained in the Conventions, the detailed regulation of the protection of elementary human rights for such large categories of people, as it is done in the Conventions, representing something that stands against the conception of the annihilation of humans. (285)
The Geneva Conventions urge the protection of human rights during wartime. In War
Trash, Chinese POWs use the Geneva Conventions to demand appropriate treatments,
defending themselves from the prejudice and discrimination due to their national identities and political stance. However, the limited application of the Geneva Conventions for national security and political concerns causes the plight of humanitarianism.Launching humanitarian aids for the refugees is to rescue them out of severe environments, such as fierce battlefields and serious famines. However, humanitarian aids often encounter tensions with national security as well, and face moral dilemma between their responsibility for their missions and the moral principle of saving the people in emergency. Because the committee of Nanking Safety Zone, which is established as a neutral organization in the battlefield, performs its humanitarian aids in the name of Red Cross, this thesis exemplifies the case of ICRC to examine the plight of non-Chinese characters’ humanitarian aids in emergent battlefields. Ritu Mathur states that ICRC has been “severely critiqued for its silence in public with regard to the violence of the holocaust” (1), which indicates their silence to Nazi’s atrocities to the Jews in concentration camps during World War Two. Jean Claude Favez criticizes ICRC’s silence to atrocities as “a moral failure” as “it did not take the supreme risk of throwing the full weight of its moral authority into the scale on behalf of these particular victims….We have no choice but to recognize that it should have spoken out” (282). Ritu states that ICRC is now “faced with a recurrent moral
dilemma of speaking out or remaining silent in situations of armed conflicts,” and the question is “how we understand the ethics behind the ICRC’s decision to remain silent” in the face of atrocities (1). According to its own principles of impartiality and neutrality, ICRC should not speak or act for particular groups, especially in armed
conflicts which would possibly jeopardize their own humanitarian missions.
Therefore, ICRC insists that “it act in accordance with its legal mandate,” and its actions are “governed by international humanitarian laws” (Ritu 4). Another dilemma of ICRC is that it cannot accept “individual responsibility as an international actor which is more significant than the collective responsibility of all international actors”
(7). Their strictly impartial and neutral attitude inevitable has been condemned for indifference to injustice. Chapter Two intends to read the characters of bare life in
Nanjing Requiem and War Trash as the stateless, explores the non-Chinese characters’
plight of humanitarian treatments and aids for the stateless people, and it further meditates on the possible new route for the stateless beyond the borders of national sovereigns.