A question that has recently attracted considerable attention is this:

What is the nature and significance of the normative relationship a person bears to herself (where the self is understood to include the whole embodied person)?

On one view, it is held that persons are self-owners: as Locke put it in one of the more famous passages in the Second Treatise:

[E]very man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.

Chinese liberals have been searching for a just society, one regulated by democratic institutions and rules—a society where the human potential for evil is properly controlled. It is in this context that Chinese liberal intellectuals such as Yan Jiaqi, Hu Ping, and Liao Xun, drawing on their respective experiences of the tragedies in China, have taken the idea that there is always a potential for evil in human nature as a starting-point for a just society and for designing democratic institutions.