Abstract

During the 1940s, Zhang Junmai was a leader of the China Democratic Socialist Party and an important figure of the socalled third force in the struggle between the Chinese Communist Party and the GMD. Zhang kept himself informed about discussions on human rights in the West and the work in progress in the United Nations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. During the 1940s, Zhang discussed human rights in the magazines Zaisheng and Minxian. He introduced and translated discussions on human rights in the West, such as the declaration of human rights adopted by the French organization Ligue des Droits de l'homme in 1936, and a human rights manifesto written by H.G. Wells in 1939. Both these declarations were fairly radical in nature and called for economic rights, including the right to subsistence