Legal Rights
Classical Chinese does not have a semantic equivalent to the concept of "rights". The idea of rights was introduced to China from the West. Its translation as quanli (权利) was coined by William Alexander Parsons Martin in 1864, in his translation of Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Law
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or rights:
“It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Democracy and Republicanism in their best partisan utterances alike declare for human rights. Jefferson, the father of Democracy, Lincoln, the embodiment of Republicanism, and the Divine author of the religion on which true civilization rests, all proclaim the equal rights of all men.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)